Radiation: Feeling the burn

Once in my hippie-dippie youth, I went on a kind of vision-quest retreat, spending a day or two in solitude in an expansive verdant meadow in the countryside. I romped, I frolicked, I slept under the stars, I sunbathed topless. I was one with nature.

When I returned to civilization, it soon became apparent -– painfully so -- that city goils need to watch their step around Mother Nature. I'd spent some of that time tumbling through fields of poison ivy. My poor breasts were covered with raised red welts that I desperately tried not to scratch.

Four weeks in, radiation produced a similar result. My right breast and the surrounding terrain – up past my collarbone and over to my underarm -- looked like those magazines ads about the heartbreak of psoriasis.

After everything she’s put me through, I just didn’t have it in me to be mad at poor Dolly, who was paying quite a price for the sins of having some cells run amok.

When the radiation burns started to emerge, the radiation techs said, “You aren’t still wearing a bra, are you?”

That sounded unthinkable. “I can’t go to work without a bra.”

By the next day, when I tried to put on a bra and cried out involuntarily, I was a convert. My new wardrobe: Black shirts with oversized jackets. And even putting on the shirts was wince-inducing.

My final two weeks of radiation were spent doing everything verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryy gingerly. I had a cupboard full of creams and salves that provided some temporary relief.

The treatments themselves were tedious but mercifully quick. The techs were all friendly and kind. The main thing they wanted was for me to be ultra passive, letting them arrange my body in the identical position every time. To make sure Dolly was positioned correctly, they devised a little sling made out of bubble wrap and tape. That sling was as key to the treatment as the linear accelerator, a super high tech machine that must cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

On the final day of radiation, the techs gave me a certificate they'd all signed, congratulating me on making it through with with my good cheer, if not my skin, intact. I hadn't felt so proud since my preschool graduation.