Songs from a Lead-Lined Room: Notes-High and Low-from My Journey through Breast Cancer and Radiation - Softcover

Shea, Susan Strempek

Softcover

ISBN 10: 080707215X ISBN 13: 9780807072158

Publisher: Beacon Press, 2003

Synopsis

Songs from a Lead-Lined Room is a unique and remarkable book rooted in truth and raw experience, and the first memoir to focus on the personal experience of radiation treatment. As with Shea's best-selling fiction, her sharp and insightful wit and her reporter's eye for the most telling and sometimes quirky details inform every page. She shares what she learns about the process of her treatment, her bouts of despair, indignity, and fear, as well as the faux pas, the innocent blunders, and the compassion and caring of her family, friends, and fellow patients

About this title

About the Author

Suzanne Strempek Shea, winner of the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction, is the author of Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, and Around Again. She lives and writes in Bondsville, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Songs from a Lead-Lined Room

Notes--High and Low--From My Journey Through Breast Cancer and RadiationBy Suzanne Strempek Shea

Beacon Press

Copyright © 2003 Suzanne Strempek Shea
All right reserved.
ISBN: 080707215X
Chapter One

my new guru has an office on the deep-down floor of the big hospital.
The walls here are yards thick and they are lined fat with lead.
There is bad stuff being dealt with here, and it needs to be contained—not
just the danger that people who come here are carrying inside themselves,
but also the things that are aimed at them down here to try to kill that
danger. Everything here is bad. Even the radio reception. Only one station
can be caught through the fortress walls and it"s lousy. Lion King. Disco
revival.
The guru"s room is the size of a car. A budget rental. Two chairs,
and a shelf for a desk. Today she has offered me the option of having our
session observed by an intern. This hospital is a teaching place, so at least
one student in on an appointment or exam or procedure is not uncommon.
Since late winter, in the name of education, dozens of strange hands have
been placed on one of my more private areas. I"d get probed, and then
thanked, and then later they"d see me in the hall with my clothes on and they
wouldn"t even nod a greeting. Kind of like high school. The weird thing about
today is that it seems odder to have a stranger in on the listening than the
touching. But I don"t mind. I feel bad in my soul and at this point might even
say yes to a live telecast.
The intern"s name is Holly. It"s bright, and, of course, holidayish.
Holly wants to become a nurse and is attending Springfield College, so I
compliment her because that is a fine school. She smiles from a face that
belongs on a good-looking religious statue. Clear and open and ready for your
prayers, and I wonder, in years to come will she turn out to be the kind of
nurse who held my hand an hour past the end of her shift even though she
really needed to get to the grocery before it closed. Or will she get burned-out
and hateful like the one who shouted at me the time I asked again for a
painkiller. You can"t tell these things in advance, about how Holly, or
anybody, might act in time. But for now, she shows every sign of being the
type of nurse you"d want: interested, leaning in, but not getting in the way of
my guru, Wendy, who knows what to say and when to shut up.
Wendy has not had this. I know because I asked, the first time I
met with her as part of the package deal of radiation. If we have the
inclination and time, we patients down here can be connected to helpful
resources and activities that include a chaplain, massage therapists, reiki
practitioners, meditation sessions, writing groups and art workshops. Colorful
posters and leaflets hang in the waiting rooms and locker rooms, announcing
the next series of courses. I was more in the mood to complain about my
problems than to weave potholders. So I leaped at the chance for
psychotherapy, and in Wendy found one of those huge iron posts to which
they moor freighters at a dock. I was bobbing around, she was a possible line
to stability. I connected with her right off, and right off I asked her: "Did you
ever have this?" Knowing that was important to me. A lot of such things
were—and are—important: and, top of the list, am I going to die from this? I"d
asked that one three months earlier, of the nurse, on the phone the night I
received my diagnosis. Cindy later said, "Wow, you asked that? I never
thought to ask that." My bestfriend never thought to ask; even though her
diagnosis eight years before had been dire. For me, despite the blessing of
early detection and a classification of Stage One out of four, it was the first
thing I wanted to know. You hear the word "cancer" and your name in the
same sentence, and you can already see your name carved into the stone.
At least I could.
So I needed to know if Wendy had personal knowledge of what
she counseled people about while she sat all day in her tiny office on the
deep-down floor of the hospital, doing her social work. She told me no, she"d
never had it, but she went on to tell me she had known some of the forms of
hardship that befall anyone who"s alive, and I was all prepared to hear her go
on and tell me about her cesarean, thinking she might be another of the
surprising number of women who, when they learn about what"s happened to
me, scramble for a story to swap and start reciting, "Well, I went through fifty
hours of labor only to have a cesarean." They got a child for all their misery, a
bit more positive an experience than having mortality in your face, which is
how the guru put it the first time we met. In your face. That"s where it is with
cancer. Of the fingernail, or of the brain. That"s the thing. And even though
Wendy has not had this, or any cesarean that she cared to mention, I felt
she knew what she was talking about, and that she would help.
So I regularly will be going to see her in her office on the deep-
down floor, where the waiting room is packed with people wondering what do
you have and how bad is it? I should note, that is what I am wondering:
what"s he got? And what about her? A couple is sitting together, and you try
to guess which one of them is the patient. Most of the people I see there are
older. Some look terrible. But some look pretty good, and you have to remark
about that, if only to yourself. One elderly man was showing off a diploma
today. They actually give you a diploma when your treatments are over,
which I think is a ridiculous thing. But this man apparently didn"t. He
appeared to be very proud. And, I have to say, he looked great. He didn"t look
sick. But then, I don"t look sick. I don"t feel sick. Yet I"m to be coming here
five days a week for the next six and a half weeks, to get myself radiated
while the theme from The Lion King plays and the technicians answer my
fears by saying no, don"t worry, this is not a dangerous thing being done to
you here, and then they file from the room and shut the door and a red
warning light beams from the ceiling so nobody will come back in until it"s
safe again.
This machine on which I am to be radiated is so old the
technicians admit they don"t even know its age. It is the dull tan color of the
IBM Selectrics I used in the newsroom when I first worked as a reporter. Like
the Selectrics, it is worn and scratched. But unlike a typewriter, it takes up
an entire end of a room and has a moving arc-shaped part that curves around
your body to the sound of a compressor, and if you were claustrophobic you
might have trouble here. There is a new high-tech machine at the other end of
the hall and there is to be an open house next week to show it off to the
public. I have been given a laser-printed invitation to this event, which will
include refreshments, and I ask if this means I will be treated on the newer
model. No, I"m told, it is for dealing with parts found only in men. The cobalt
machine—mine—does what"s needed for me, I"m assured, has done the job
for women for who knows how many years, and certainly will for my six and a
half weeks. Maybe so, but to look at my machine, you"d think the power
source was a crank and a pair of hamsters on a treadmill. Somebody has
stuck pictures onto the part that encircles you. Transfers, the kind that
people once dipped in water and applied to their kitchen walls. Two cardinal
birds, both boldly red males, sit on a pine branch. A big pink flower blossoms
nearby. These are supposed to cheer you, I guess. They don"t work.
I feel rotten, I tell Wendy afterward, back in her little office with
Holly in a chair she"s jammed into the corner behind the door. I am worn out
and defeated and I don"t want to be coming to this hospital or anywhere near
this hospital and I"m not happy that it"s going to take no less than three
weeks for the country"s number-one antidepressant to kick in and give me a
leg up and over the wall. I don"t want to have cancer. I don"t like having
cancer. I turn to Holly even though the deal is I"m supposed to be pretending
she isn"t there. I tell her this has been going on for way too long, in my
opinion. Since March. Fucking March. And here it is, September. Annual
mammogram at the tail end of winter—what"s this here? Another appointment
to find out—no, that was nothing after all. But can you come back so we can
take a look at the other breast?

I"m forty-one and in the best physical shape of my life. Or so I thought. Go
down the waiting room–posted list of preventative measures, and I"ve met
them all. Because I thought my parents would kill me, I never once smoked.
Or inhaled. Anything. Because I love being outdoors, I walk daily, in all
weather. Because I woke up to the cruelty involved, I stopped eating meat
more than a decade ago. Because it doesn"t take much, I don"t drink much. I
was happy without having to force it. If this counts for anything, I went to
church, I gave to charities, I packed groceries at the local food pantry, I
recycled, I captured and released any bugs found in the house. I even bought
the postal service"s special breast cancer postage stamps, despite their
costing seven cents more than the regular kind. Nothing"s perfect, but I was
in a life that always had made me feel lottery-lucky. I didn"t squander that—I
took care. I have no family history of the disease, but since age thirty-three
faithfully have been going for mammograms due to a benign cyst discovered
the same exact month Cindy was diagnosed. And about which, due to my
guilt over escaping away free that time, I did not tell her until this year. Until
my own bad news. Eight years back, though, from the unscathed side of our
parallel universes, I watched her fight for her life. And I guess I have never
stopped fearing for my own.
So at end of this past winter, I went for my usual look-see and
was asked to return. And to come back again. There were more
examinations for me. More mammograms in a single day than there are m"s
in the word. An ultrasound in May. An extremely uncomfortable three-hour
stereotactic core biopsy in June, my left breast dangling through a hole in a
raised table while, seated below like a car mechanic working on a rattling
muffler, a radiologist drilled repeatedly for samples.
Then it"s the Fourth of July and we are visited by this blowhard
guy and his wife and his two little kids, all of them out from Ohio. They lived
here long ago, they knew my husband Tommy then, they always had meant
to visit on trips back. And finally here they are in my home and I don"t know
any of them and I don"t want to know any of them and I don"t want them to be
there and the night is dragging and the wife is nice enough but the guy won"t
shut up about downloading music from the Internet and when I finally find
something to insert into the conversation, the name of an album I"d been
listening to recently, he says, "Oh, you just heard of them?" The "just" is big,
the size of a movie screen on which can be shown a film of my general lack
of knowledge of what is hip. The kids don"t care who knows what. They are
restless and want to run in the rain that is pouring and when their parents say
they cannot, they shout how they hate them and even though I don"t know
them I hate them, too, and I"m just begging them in my head to get out my
house and leave me alone because tomorrow I"ll be told what I"ve got or not
got, growing in what the clinic"s paperwork maps out as the upper left
quadrant of my left breast.
The family eventually leaves, of course, and the next day arrives,
of course. And, of course, the call does not come anywhere as swiftly as I
would like. I"m waiting all the day and on the hour I"m pestering the nurse on
the line, she says the doctor"s in surgery and I"m thinking how it"s an awful
long operation already, taking this many hours—somebody must have
something really bad that needs repair. I pray for whoever it is. I"ve always
liked to pray for strangers. They"ll never know. It"s as if you"re sending
something out there, invisible, unexpected, the source unknown if the
beneficiary ever did stop to wonder why things maybe ended up the way they
were hoping. Powerful stuff it can be. But I don"t pray for myself on this day.
And I haven"t since, even though I have spent much of my life begging daily
for favors, most of them for me me me. The instinct to do that has vanished.
Lots of things have fallen away in these months and don"t seem to matter,
and I wonder if they ever will.
I have a basket of get-well cards, the wicker almost dissolving
from the sweetness of the messages. Everybody offers to take up the slack
of the praying for favors. I don"t even know some of these people. I am on
actual lists at local churches, my name typed under the heading of "sick" and
placed at the feet of the statues of saints known for their great batting
averages in interceding. I"ve not personally seen any of these lists, and I don"t
want to. I don"t look sick. I don"t feel sick. Why should my name be on a list
that says I am? I go to the CVS to pick up the country"s number-one
antidepressant and a stranger stops me to ask what"s wrong with me—her
whole entire church is praying for me and she wants to know: "What"s
wrong?" Other than "Who are you?"—which I do not reply—I don"t know what
to answer. I just shrug, "Oh, well, things. . . . " but I would like to add that
maybe the praying should have begun a little earlier. Like three months
before, on the fifth of July, when I was waiting for the doctor to phone me.
Tenth call to his office. Last few times, the nurse has been saying yes, yes,
she has the results now, but only the doctor can give them out. So I ask her
this: if it was good news, would I have to wait for the doctor to tell me? That
gets her thinking, and even though she prefaces how it is against the rules,
she reads me the results. I have Cindy"s medical book in front of me. I"m
looking up the words as the woman is giving them to me.

My fifty minutes are up. Holly will be able to do an entire term paper now. I
repeat to her face that I don"t want this—what"s happened so far in these six
months and what is to come. The prognosis is good, I realize things could be
much worse, but it"s happening to me. And that makes it bad enough. I slide
from feeling as if I"m whining to feeling justified about the whining, then back
again, sometimes with Olympian luge speed. I whoosh unprotected down the
icy incline of helplessness and unknowing, no sled beneath me, no snowsuit
padding, no clothing at all, no cap or mittens or boots, no nothing, no skin
even, it"s like my bones are showing, I feel so down to the base of whoever I
am, more naked than the moment I was conceived, feeling everything. Same
time, feeling nothing.
"I just don"t want this," is how I condense all that. And however
Holly views this, she doesn"t let on. Wendy does, though, and she
asks, "Well, what do you want?" which is a good question, both right then or
anytime.
I tell her this:
"I just want my life back the way it was."

My life.
I liked it.
I liked it the way it was.
I had it good, and was smart enough to realize that. To be grateful.
Well into adulthood, I still held the practice of evening prayers, still
moving through a trio I"ve said in my family"s native Polish, long ago having
hitched a list on to the end of them. Last thing, in the silent dark, I"d name
three experiences, feelings, items, thoughts from my day, things that made
me grateful. And I would reflect on them. Watch them like a movie.
Remember the emotions they brought: a kindness shown to me. Unexpected
breaks. The solution to a trouble that had been hanging over me. Spotting a
face I love to see. Opening a check arriving from nowhere. Finding a full sack
of Cool Ranch Doritos unopened in the cabinet. Reaching the answering
machine, rather than the actual person, when I didn"t really want to have to
talk to that person in the first place. Often, one of the three things would
string into dozens of others. In January, I"d hear the rush of air from the
furnace and would be grateful to have a furnace. And money for the oil to fire
it—a tank full of that, and a basement to put the tank in and a house on top
of that basement, a house that was mine, filled with my immediate loves: the
man, the dog, the space in which to do my work. Outside my window, a roof
of trees, a carpet of grass and flowers, the smoothly paved road to fantastic
adventures yet unknown.
Throughout my early years my grandparents gave me the usual
grandchildren gifts of savings bonds and graduation watches, but they also
unknowingly handed me this capacity to realize my fortunate place in the
wild, capricious and enormous scheme of things. Many people do not have
the ability to pinpoint exactly who planted their families in this country. For
most of my first two decades on earth, I could look across a kitchen table
and see first generation Americans living and breathing and drinking a cup of
tea. One pair of my grandparents lived downstairs in our two-family house as
I was growing up. The other was half an hour west. For years they populated
birthdays and vacation trips, Easter mornings and Christmas Eves, and so
many of the regular days in between. One grandmother lived to see me into
college. The other, long enough to read my regular byline in her evening
paper.
Not once can I recall any of them hanging over my head the
weight of the smallest debt I owed them. No litanies of how they"d struggled
and sacrificed, working in mills, running a restaurant, all so their children, and
their children"s children—including me—could succeed. In fact, they made
little if any fuss about what they had done to get to this country, and to
prosper in comfortable middle-class status. Instead, it was their proximity,
their physical presence, that nurtured in me a recurring gratitude for the life
that, through them, I felt blessed to lead.
One grandparent was an infant when she arrived, but three others
were teens striking out alone. Imagine. My own teenage years contained no
concern larger than whether I was going to miss the school bus each
morning. My existence was carefree. I had friends, and we had fun. I made
Bs in school and, after dismissal, grinders at the Food Basket.
I rode my bike. I walked in the woods. I went on dates. I went to
the mall, to the beach. I had a mother and a father who loved me and who
provided my sister and me everything necessary, plus bonus stuff like
camping trips and pets and Earth Shoes. And higher education. Though I
went to art school and studied photography, I fell into writing and found work
that I not only could do, but liked to do and needed to do. Work that many
days was not work but something else—a rare, true enjoyment. I genuinely
looked forward to going into the newsroom during my fifteen years as a
reporter, always something new to learn, no two days the same. One beat
had me venturing into the locker rooms of sports teams, another had me
seated next to a small-town dog officer while he proffered photographic proof
of a canine"s regular soiling of town property. On yet another beat, I"d spend
a couple of weeks in New York City each spring and fall, once taking notes
next to a fidgety Andy Warhol, while models wearing the latest fashions
paraded down a design studio"s runway. Beginning a night shift at the end of
the eighties, I found my mornings suddenly free. I"m most creative at that
time and wondered what I would do during the hours in which I usually was
making stories for someone else. I decided to make some for myself. And to
make them up. To try writing fiction.
The experience of not having to quote people exactly, to throw
aside fact and play with scenarios, all of it was heady. And fun. I didn"t write
my first short story with the hope that I would get a huge contract and be
able to leave my job. I wrote it because it was a hoot. I sent a few short
stories to magazines, and I got a few rejections, which actually made me feel
more like a writer than the act of putting a story on a page. And then my third
story grew way beyond the dozen-page constraints the others had fit into,
and I saw no end in sight. Tommy saw something else: the start of a new
kind of writing for me.
We"d met when I was a hockey-loving high schooler and he was a
sportswriter who never once mentioned my team in his stories. I wrote him a
nasty note, he corrected his ways, I went to thank him and took note of the
fact he was cute. And when I leaned close to say something he couldn"t hear
over the crowd noise, I was struck by how he smelled like home to me. He
became the best friend I"d ever had, and ten years later we married. Seven
years after that, in 1991, I was writing a very long short story and Tommy
was a general assignment reporter who"d just interviewed Elinor Lipman, a
local author with a national reputation. He bragged about my sixty-
page "short" story; this stranger was kind enough to offer to read it, and
ended up sending it to an agent friend who sent it to an editor. Their
encouragement fueled the sixty pages to become a manuscript, the
manuscript became a book, the fiction writing became my new job.
Zooming in on my life from a satellite in 1999, the year before I
was diagnosed with breast cancer, you would have seen me snug in my own
little world, living in the town where I was raised, next to Tommy not only in
domestic life, but at a long white desk at which we wrote daily at our
respective computers, he now working on his thrice-weekly newspaper
column, me on my fourth novel. I was looking to the publication of the
paperback of my third, that one about an artist who collects the people
who"ve become family as true as the one into which she"d been born. The
concept was something I knew well, and was another thing I was grateful for,
the gemlike ring of sisters and brothers I"d been fortunate enough to draw into
my life story along the way. Though much of their presence was often
necessary and reassuring, I always had a level desire to be all I needed.
Comfortable with time alone, I even used it as a celebration. I"d turned forty
on my last birthday and, being an avid walker, gave myself an eight-day trek
in Ireland. Most of the route, I saw no other humans. Alone, solitary, I was
also content. It was all right with me.
Like most people, I carried my kit of challenges as I moved along
the path of life. Except for getting coughed on by a neighbor girl when I was
an infant just home from the hospital and, according to family lore,
contracting pneumonia in that way, and except for getting my face smashed
into the windshield when the family Plymouth Fury III ran into a tree a dozen
years later, the injuries I suffered were mainly to my soul. I did my share of
running headfirst into the universal brick walls of confusion, rejection,
disappointment, loss. I was called sensitive, and even being labeled that was
painful, despite being the truth. Though the nuns trooped us from the parish
school to the church next door to beef up attendance at more than a few
sparsely attended parish funerals over my eight years of education there, my
first meaningful introduction to mortality was at age nine, the loss of my
beloved downstairs grandfather, who fell to the green paisley living room
carpet in a sudden heart attack on a regular Friday night with all the family
over for dinner and me there complete with my sleepover guest. Determined
to be too impressionable to attend a funeral—a decision I did not fight—I
spent that day wearing my sister"s coveted red, white and blue tennis V-neck
as I minded a family friend"s toddler child who was a terror then and is now a
fashion model and sportscar salesman out in California.
My grandfather"s death coated me long after the actual incident;
for the endless months that followed, my aunts" and uncles" regular Sunday
visits downstairs included adults who actually wept at some point in the
afternoon, something I"d never before witnessed. I remember sitting on my
grandfather"s bed trying to console an uncle slumped there in his grief. I put
my hand on the shoulder of his white dress shirt and listened to him choking
out something about regret and I wondered what was happening to my happy
little world. Mine was not a touchy-feely family, and it was left up to me to
figure this out, to wade through and come to terms with my loss. For years
I"d covered my head with my bedpillow to escape the excruciating sound of
my grandfather"s asthmatic breathing from his room below mine. While I
matched my strong inhalations to his labored ones in an effort of support, I
told myself he was sounding better when I knew he was getting worse. What
I eventually gleaned from losing my grandfather was: even if you can see it
coming as clear as the Canadian National freight train that flew down the
tracks behind my neighborhood each morning at two, when old people die,
and if you happen to love them, it hurts.
Fourteen years later I was dressing for work when a woman from
up the street phoned to tell me that her niece—my best and oldest friend—
had been killed in a horrific auto accident. Rosemary had just begun her first
real job, just out of graduate school, just back from our shared three weeks of
joyous holiday roaming around California, and she was driving to buy herself
an iron, and there was a car then a truck then another truck and she was
gone.
In a way, I was gone as well. Jarred off the map of what I knew to
be my safe and cozy life. Rosemary was buried for eternity in the red and
blue floral dress she"d bought for job interviews, and I was shuffling around in
the same jeans and flannel shirt day after day because I couldn"t be bothered
to care about looking presentable. I was as much in shock as if I"d been next
to her in the front seat of her new gray Escort. I learned from this that you
can be young and die, too. You can be my same age, and be gone in a hair
of an instant. The thing people said about life being short—I suddenly saw it
imprinted upon every moment of the day. I took the legend seriously, and
soon I was unable to pass up the most last-minute social invitation from the
least-known acquaintance. Two of Rosemary"s other friends and I rented a
lakefront A-frame for the summer and rarely were just the three of us there,
its cavernous living room and the wraparound deck just begging to be the site
of continuous partying. By the end of that summer, I"d purchased my own
little A-frame in another set of woods on another lake, because that was the
type of place I"d always wanted to have, the kind of place I"d always wanted
to live in, and I"d better do it now because after all, really and truly, look at
what happened to Rosemary: I could be gone by the end of this very day.
I moved along, bearing that realization, seeing it constantly as if
written on a pane of glass behind which I walked. Life is short. Life is short. I
knew that. Oh, I was so smart, I knew what others, untouched by such an
experience, could not even imagine. Then, ten years later I"m on my driveway
and Cindy is moving toward me, her husband David behind her, both of them
walking in film slow-motion from their van to tell me the results of her doctor"s
appointment. That thing she thought was swelling after all her yardwork?
Breast cancer. At age thirty-four. She would undergo a mastectomy. What
were they going to tell their three kids? Could they sit in my house while they
figured that out?
I needed to sit, too. Cindy long ago had slipped into the tender
heartspot that Rosemary had occupied. It was Rosemary who introduced me
to Cindy, who lived on her street, was a year older than we were, went to
public school while most of the kids in Rosemary"s and my world were
ensconsed in our parish one. Cindy was twelve or so when I first met her, a
tiny thing with long straight white-blonde hair and wire-rimmed glasses, a
perfect Jan Brady stand-in. She had her own bedroom and a big family and
an Eskimo dog. She got me my first summer job, in eighth grade, following a
mentally challenged kid through his day of swimming and making soda-bottle
bird feeders at the local Y camp until I caught mononucleosis (despite not
yet having been kissed) and then slept until September. Her parents let
Cindy have parties and she hosted a surprise one for my sixteenth, shoving
Tommy in through the kitchen door as the biggest surprise. She and
Rosemary and I rode our bikes to watch her brother"s cross country team
charge from the starting line and sweatily return an hour or so later; we
walked endless miles up and down our do-nothing Main Street, slept at the
beach in a little red pop-up tent, but only after she"d gone in to scout for the
spiders I abhorred. Cindy married early on and I didn"t see her much for a
couple years after that, but she was the first person I phoned when I was told
about Rosemary. Instinctively I went to Cindy, and had grown closer than
ever in the ten years that led up to that day in August when she came to me
with her news of cancer. Sure, my house was on the way home from the
hospital. But, still, she came to me.
Three months later, I"m on the couch sketching camels for that
year"s Christmas card. Three of them doing their slow metronome plodding
toward a star. I like to make my own cards, was thinking I"d print these with a
potato so I was keeping the details to a minimum as potatoes aren"t good for
capturing fine lines. Phone rings and it is the hospital. The woman wants to
know, was I Edward"s daughter? She says there"s been an emergency. That I
should come right over.
My father went as my grandfather had. Heart attack. Two months
after retirement, with all those plans for all that free time. Stricken while he
was in my old bedroom recuperating from a stubborn ankle sprain. I was
Edward"s daughter. And also his biggest fan. And someone suddenly
crushed flat.
The words that had been dangling in front of me for a decade now
suddenly had an addendum: you can be older but in relative good health, and
still die. I picked myself up again, this time with a new hard-earned
enlightenment: don"t wait until retirement. Be here now.
At my father"s wake and funeral, Cindy wore a black velvet
chapeau that would have seemed the height of fashion if you didn"t know that
she was using it to keep her chemotherapy-balded head warm in the early
winter. She was tinier than ever, but she held me up. Tommy on one side,
she on the other.
I know well that everybody loses somebody; some people even
lose a whole lot of somebodies. I line up mine only to underscore that a good
portion of my life has been spent trying to make the most of my time—
because I long have known what it was like to have death somewhere close
enough to hear it breathing and shifting in its chair, and once in a while it
would stand up and show off its muscles. But after I was diagnosed with a
disease that correctly wears the banner of "killer," I felt that I"d only been
playing at knowing that. It"s one thing to feel increasing depths of concern
when you hear that cancer has hit a public figure, the woman down the
street, your best friend. I"ve received and reacted to all of the above news. But
I found it"s another thing entirely to have the diagnosed person be yourself. Of
all the things that have happened in my life, good and bad, nothing has held
this much power over me.
Early detection, a slow-growing tumor, otherwise fine health,
highly recommended physicians and up-to-date health facilities—all those
were on my side. Yet I found extremely jarring simply being told I had cancer.
This is a thing with a reputation for killing people. And it was inside me.
Me.

That"s me sitting next to Cindy on Sharon"s couch in the early summer of
2000. That"s Sharon on the other side of her. Sharon was Rosemary"s lifelong
neighbor, their ranchhouses next door to each other on Edgewood Street,
around the corner from Cindy"s on Barker. As was the case with Cindy, it
was through Rosemary that I met Sharon, and she became another of the
sisters I"ve collected, the first one with a wildfire of red hair and a similar
incendiary spirit. This is a long-overdue get-together. Sharon and her Gary
have a hot tub on their deck and we all were to have a soak, but rain forced
us indoors. After wet pizza at the kitchen table, we moved to the living room
and to some real talk. Sharon"s brother had died the winter before, and in an
attempt to be helpful I asked, "How are you doing about Scott?" Sharon
shrugged, said she was keeping busy and how that was a good thing. I
offered, "Why don"t you write about how you"re feeling now?" Her
answer: "Why don"t you?"
Right then, a few weeks after diagnosis, a couple before surgery, I
couldn"t. Maybe it was the thing about seeing the words on the screen in
front of me, which would make my problem realer than it already was.
Whatever was stopping me, it did. So rather than writing, I"d been reading.
Books, pamphlets, magazine pieces, on-line information. Reading the binder
full of cancer-related material I received like some kind of "welcome to the
club" gift upon my first visit to the surgical oncologist, I"d consumed a big
basket of information so I could know as much as possible about this sudden
and shocking enemy.
When surgery found no involvement of lymph nodes, which meant
chemotherapy wouldn"t be necessary and a huge Hollywood-style party could
have been thrown for that fact alone, I learned I would be facing radiation
treatments. At the hospital I was given a small booklet on the subject, but
wanted more information. Searching bookstores, the Web, my local library, I
found little to nothing about radiation. Call up the words in a database, and
you get titles on Hiroshima and Chernobyl. Change your search to "radiation
for cancer," and your options mostly are medical texts that, even if you
wanted to read them, are priced at hundreds of dollars. Within breast cancer
books the mentions of radiation are scant, and say roughly two things—the
treatments might make you tired, and they might damage your skin. What
about the entire experience of having daily treatments for a month and a half?
What was that like? Was it so easy that it wasn"t worth mentioning? Or so
difficult that no writer knew where to begin?
Eventually I found out the answer. And wrote it myself, daily, in
the entries that opened this book and in all those that follow. But I was
unable to write a word until the first day I went to the radiation oncology
department. The radiation oncologist—named Mary Ann just like my sister,
and the doctor specializing in this treatment—likes you to "meet" the
machine and wants to walk you through your visit before things actually
begin. The technicians draw lines on your chest and also actually inject a
dye that makes up the tattoo dots at the treatment field"s borders. The
September afternoon on which this took place, I returned home and took the
advice Sharon had given three months before. I went straight to the computer.
The words fell from me. I couldn"t even tell Tommy about my first visit until I
felt I"d written what I needed to. What follows here are diary entries centering
around the radiation treatments I received at 3:30 p.m. every Monday through
Friday for seven consecutive weeks from late September to early November
in the year 2000.
I wrote them for myself. As therapy. I"m not a journal devotee. The
only diary I ever regularly kept was back in 1967, and it chronicles only about
seventeen days in the January following the Christmas I"d found it in my
stocking. The four allotted lines per day kept reports brief, the only notable
one being January 10th"s "Uncle Mitzi came over and we watched the beetles
at Shay Statium." Obviously, I"d hung onto that little blue diary with the lock
that never worked. As for the computer pages that contained what I wrote
thirty-three years later, they initially were destined for the fire. I considered
burning the pages when I was done writing, some effort toward whatever is
that thing called closure. But first, I wanted Tommy to read them, in the hope
they would help him better understand what my side of the experience had
been like. I made a copy for Cindy as well, as she"d once again been
propping me up from the other side. And I made one for my friend Padraig,
who"d lent me a home in Ireland to which I went off to write once the
treatments were through, the thought of such a trip being a carrot on the end
of the stick throughout the seven weeks. All three encouraged me to share
the pages with others, thinking this might help someone who"d been in my
boots. I knew that reading another"s experience in radiation would have
assisted me with mine. And it is in that spirit that I write to patients, to their
loved ones, to their health professionals, about my journey into, and out of,
the lead-lined room.

Continues...

Continues...

Excerpted from Songs from a Lead-Lined Roomby Suzanne Strempek Shea Copyright © 2003 by Suzanne Strempek Shea. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080707215X
• ISBN 13: 9780807072158
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216