What did she mean, I wondered? Was she going to use some kind of heavy ray gun on me?
She was trying to adjust my position and I was trying to be helpful and move where she seemed to want me. But she was frustrated and kept repeating her mantra, “Ray heavy.”
Finally I figured out it was a linguistic issue: She was saying “lay heavy” as in, I should turn myself into a lump of inert matter so she could move me around the way she wanted. Going limp turned out to be another one of my heretofore undiscovered skill sets.
Once I’d been prodded into position and scanned, it was time for my first-ever tattoos.
“We don’t take requests, no hearts or flowers or ‘I love Mom,’ ” the congenial radiation oncologist, Dr. CC had told me earlier, clearly a joke she’d delivered quite a few times. She’d shown me an example of the tattoo on the back of her hand – a simple black dot. I wondered if she knew that gang members tattoo similar dots on their hands.
Mine were on my chest and underarm – first Dr. CC scribbled on me with a medical Sharpie, then the technician used another kind of black ink to make dots and finally she pierced them with a needle to make them permanent. They’ll use the dots as an alignment guide to make sure I get zapped in the same place every time.
As directional tattoos go, it could be a lot worse.
Compared to chemo, radiation sounds like a cake walk. All I have to do is show up, take off my shirt and lie on a table for 10 minutes every weekday for six weeks while a bunch of white-coated folks in a control room packed with monitors and screens aim their heavy ray guns at me. But both Dr. CC and my regular oncologist, Dr. D, warned that I’d be amazed how much it would exhaust me. “Chemo already has me sleeping 11 hours a night,” I said. “How much more tired can I get?”
Dr. CC ran through the side effects. My breast is likely to emerge smaller, firmer and permanently tanned. Can’t you do the other one while you’re at it? I thought. And maybe my tummy?
Hey, I’m shallow and proud of it.
Then there were the usual array of downbeat ones: A 5 percent danger of zapping part of the lung which could cause trouble breathing and a persistent dry cough. A 1 percent chance of a future rib fracture. An under-1 percent chance of the radiation causing a new cancer.
Short-term, side effects are the aforementioned exhaustion and the breast skin getting inflamed, sore and swollen.
Dr. CC is so amiable that she actually giggled pleasantly at one of my especially dumb questions. “Isn’t there some extra-strong sunscreen that would block me from getting burned?”
“This is many times stronger than UV radiation,” she said. “There isn’t a cream that could block it.”
