More than halfway through the course of radiation treatments, I hadn’t experienced any of the fatigue or skin problems touted in the literature. My schedule accommodated the morning radiation appointments while still leaving plenty of time to workout at the Y every evening before stopping in Lucky Lee’s for my dinner. This bout with cancer felt like nothing more than an icy patch in the road of life. Scary for a moment, yet easily forgotten.
In the middle of the second week of treatments, the ice broke beneath my feet and plunged me into the cold, cruel world of unintended side effects. As soon as my rear end hit the toilet seat that morning, I knew something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong. My urine had been replaced with lye. I gasped in pain and clenched to stop the burning stream.
No! It’s too soon! The books said I might have “pain on urination,” but later. Not like this!
I couldn’t clench my muscles against the pain any longer. I was forced to let go. Flashes of light and color turned my tiny white bathroom into a psychedelic blur. It had only lasted a second, maybe two, however the effort left me wasted. I toppled off the toilet and lay with my hip against the cool side of the tub until the room stopped spinning. I tried to twist my body into a sitting position. The bathroom was small. I jostled the vanity in the process, sending my leather bound copy of Nicholas Nickleby toppling to the ground. It narrowly missed falling into the toilet. “Smike!” I caught the precious volume and hugged it to my chest as I banged the back of my head again and again against the edge of the tub. Oh my God, blood! And that didn’t come out of my vagina either. My bladder is bleeding.
As the enormity of what was happening rose up within me, I vomited into the toilet. The room reeked with the stench of fear. No amount of bleach could get rid of that smell. A memory of it would always linger in the grout and behind the fixtures.
Eventually I pulled myself together enough to dress and get to the hospital in time to receive my treatment. I was worried the radiation would burn me even more, yet I wasn’t about to mention the pain. I would tough it out in silence. Alone.
***
Even though I’d read about radiation fatigue, I was as completely unprepared for it as I was the bleeding and pain. At lunchtime I was nibbling at my peanut butter and jelly sandwich when it hit me. One minute I was a little tired. The next, my neck muscles could no longer hold up my head. I was a lone swimmer standing up to my neck in the ocean watching a tidal wave of exhaustion looming on the horizon.
Two hours later, I vaguely registered scarlet fingernails waving in front of my face. I fully opened my eyes to see Letitia poised over me like a watchful spider. “Are we keeping you up?”
“What? No. I’m awake!”
“You were snoring,” Letitia snickered. She leaned across the desk and pincered the report I had been working on before lunch. “What is with you lately? First you’re here at all hours of the night like you don’t sleep at all. Now your co-workers find you snoozing at your desk. I thought you were getting some help.”
She dropped the report, apparently satisfied with it. “And, you didn’t come in until almost ten again this morning. That woman in HR said to give you a break, but this is unacceptable. People are beginning to talk.”
I avoided Letitia’s eye and straightened the papers on my desk. “I go to meetings in the mornings.”
Letitia stepped back and straightened her fashionably cropped suit jacket. “Well, I didn’t like compiling everyone’s weekly reports myself this morning.”
It is your job.
“I sent you all my stuff days ago. If you ask people to email me their stuff a day or so before your meetings, I can aggregate them for you like I usually do.”
“That’s true.” Letitia scrutinized my face. I hoped I didn’t have drool on my cheek. “I might could do that… You look like hell.”
“I’m tired,” I snapped. It wouldn’t be giving too much away to admit that. “I didn’t sleep very well.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Letitia anxiously clicked her long red nails on the top of her Starbucks cup. “I noticed you spent an awful long time in the bathroom earlier.”
Talk about an understatement. I had briefly fainted in the stall from the sheer pain of using the bathroom. Before this ordeal, I never would have believed that soggy Rice Crispies could go through my body like shards of glass. “I think I picked up a stomach virus. The meetings are held in a church basement. Those places are cesspools.”
“Really?” Letitia sighed.
“Oh yeah, lots of people die every year from viruses they pick up in church.” I expounded on flesh eating viruses until Letitia went back to her office in disgust. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep up the charade much longer. Letitia wasn’t going to tolerate my sleeping at my desk. My head felt like it was filled with cotton. I pulled my foot up under my sore bottom and hunched over the desk. If I could pretend to be studying the report on the desk, I could close my eyes again—for just a second. As I drifted off again I thought of Dante’s Inferno and wondered exactly which circle of Hell I was currently in.