Jaci Dawn

The room is sterile. You are guided to a gurney and instructed to lay down on your back, hands over your head. There are pegs there for you to hold onto, but not because this will be painful: it is only to keep you from fidgeting. Look to the right and keep your head turned, you can see countless cupboards on the wall. A blue light comes on as the interns adjust your body to line up with the tattoos. Above, there is a skylight, except you know it is not real: the buds on the trees are out of season, the clouds don’t move, and birds don’t flit around. Also, you are in deep space and there is no sky.

The interns leave and a machine begins to whirl around you: a large disk with a square screen looms over you, then a rectangle with a screen, and last, a dull gray arm of the AI machine. It is working on you now. Healing your wounds from the inter-galactic war; healing the wounds from the inside-out so there will be no scar. OR it is working on the wiring in your body: you are an Android and have malfunctioned during the night. The latter is most likely: why else would they need your tattoos?

The machine reverses and you notice your skin looks like blue scales under the light. Perhaps it has turned blue, with scales, and you have not been warned. This repeats, slowly. Remember to breathe normally.

Then it is over. Ten minutes in, not long enough to create a story line as to why you are here in this science fiction tale. The techs return on silent feet and help you sit back up. The drive to get there takes longer than the actual radiation treatment.

Radiation is painless, for the most part. Today, I noticed a small spot of burn on my left breast where the radiation has been concentrated. It will get worse before it gets better, but it is tiny, like the cancer we are committed to destroying (we: all the staff at oncology and myself). The radiation has been concentrated on the spot where the cancer was. The only other treatment is using a prescribed lotion to keep the skin supple and healing.

I understand now why my friend, Diane, mentioned the “special” cream her other friend had to use. It’s not particularly “special” but there are a limited number of over-the-counter choices you are given to use. Unscented and manufactured without certain ingredients: a list is handed out before radiation, and they encourage you to apply it two to three times daily.

The scenario(s) in my first three paragraphs are fictionalized, of course. You are not in deep space, and you already knew it was a fake skylight: the same mural is in many exam rooms in hospitals. The interns are trained technicians. You do appear to have blue mottled skin, but that is the lighting from the machine. It’s not AI, but a complicated piece of hulking machinery that can shoot radiation precisely at a small spot inside your body, cooking and killing any stray cancer cells that may have been left behind in surgery. In my case, it is unlikely anything was left behind, but I have opted for the radiation to lower my chances of a recurrence to 4% over an 8-year period.

Today is my fifth and final round of radiation. I hop off the gurney (slight exaggeration there: I lower my aging body off. I say good-bye to the techs and exit the science fiction room. On my way past the nurse’s station to the changing rooms, I am presented with a Certificate of Completion. This is perhaps the most humorous part of this: a Gold Star for completing what I hope is my final round with breast (or any) cancer.

If you followed the story this far, congrats. And get the damn smoosh-smoosh-squash-squash done. I hate them, too.