Radiation is daily for a month—I start after Thanksgiving and am supposed to be done by Christmas. Freddy—who loves to stay up late reading about atoms and quarks—has been unfortunately stuck on the notion of being a Billionaire Weapons Inventor for a while now. And Benny has an entire notebook of recipes he’s conjured for how to turn humans into different animal species (tail hair of a Welsh corgi, saliva of an ocelot, chocolate chips, sea salt). Nudging them away from the realm of evil science toward the realm of medical science seems like it can’t hurt, and might possibly be at least as lucrative someday in their future, so I decide to bring them to see the machine.
My radiation oncologist Dr. Rosenblum—who has a little boy—thinks it’s a great idea.
“Make sure to tell your boys the machine is called a ‘linear accelerator,’ ” she tells John and me at the appointment before I start radiation.
“Ooh—and wait—how old are they again? Eight and six? Yeah, tell them we’ll be using lasers to guide the photons and electrons to the right spot and that we will be using the exact same technology we use for radar. And that we will do it all from a remote command center with closed-circuit monitors! And that each machine costs millions of dollars!”
Her eyes are glowing maybe a little too brightly.
I mention all this at the dinner table that night as casually as possible.
“Hmmm,” says Freddy, a little interested. “What are the chances you’ll come away from this with mutant powers?”
“I imagine not infinitesimal,” I say, getting kind of worked up myself.
“I have two things,” says Benny. “Is radiation a kind of technology, and will you have hair?”
My having hair again has been a primary concern for Benny for months now. He climbs into our bed each morning and vigorously pats my sprouting head. “You rubby little fuzzball I’m going to rub you all up because you are the softest thing.”
“Yes!” I say. “Radiation is in fact ultra-high-tech technology! And doesn’t affect your hair at all!” I can hear all the exclamation marks in my voice.
A week later when Veterans Day rolls around and the kids have no school and John is off work and I have to be at Duke, I think: perfect. Let’s all drive over to Durham and we can eat a hip foodie lunch on Ninth Street and browse through actual paper books at The Regulator and we’ll take the kids to see the Duke campus and the impressive gothic hospital that is saving my life and where I—and their grandmother—have spent so many important hours. Plus: science!
My first Spidey sense that there might be some reason why teachers don’t regularly take their eager elementary schoolers to tour hospital radiation facilities comes just as we step foot off the elevator into the waiting room—the same waiting room where I wait every day, where I have my usual seat and say my usual hellos and chat with the usual suspects and settle in for the usual routine.
Radiation happens in the basement—Level 00. There is a grand piano in the foyer where a med student has dropped his backpack and is playing “Wind Beneath My Wings.”
Suddenly I am aware of so many wheelchairs. So many unsteady steppers. So many pale faces and thin wisps of hair and ghostly bodies slumped in chairs. Angry, papery skin. Half-healed wounds. Growths and disfigurements straight out of the Brothers Grimm. So many heads held up by hands.
These days, these are my people—the Feeling Pretty Poorlies—but I haven’t really seen us as we are in a long time—the (mostly) walking wounded of the cancer militia. We’re kind of disheveled. We’re often asymmetrical. We’re wearing comfortable pants and bright scarves. We tend to either smile too quickly or not at all.
I watch my kids taking it all in—seeing me among my other kind. They are not the only children in the waiting room—school is closed across the state—and I see them all scanning the room for each other with urgency, like we look for channel markers in the fog.
When I tell Marie, my radiation therapist, that Dr. Rosenblum had said it would be okay if my kids came and took a peek at the machine, I mistake her skeptical eyebrows for being inhospitable. “Sure, if that’s what you want.”
When we get back in the linear accelerator room, she starts to explain to the kids how everything works. “Your mom lies in there,” she is saying. “We keep the lights off so they don’t mess with the radiation.”
I notice Benny won’t stand all the way inside the room and that he keeps glancing at the oversize radiation symbol on the twelve-inch-thick door. Somehow I hadn’t noticed the sign or the thickness of the door before. It’s like the opposite of a nuclear fallout shelter, keeping the damage within.
Marie turns on the enormous machine to show how its monster arm can rotate to both take X-rays and deliver the radiation beams. The floor opens up beneath it to accommodate its massive orbit around the radiation board, and I see Freddy’s body visibly stiffen.
To be honest, I hadn’t realized that all this time during my treatments the floor had been opening beneath me like some Tony Stark–designed doorway to hell, and I sort of wish I’d kept it that way.
“I’m ready to go now,” says Freddy firmly. Fearless Freddy. Freddy who injects himself with his own insulin shots, Freddy who goes downstairs alone at night to get a glass of water, Freddy who marches into the bathroom when his brother spies a stink bug and dispatches it into the toilet with his bare hands, Freddy who sat for close to an hour on the corner of the bed where my mom’s body lay, stroking her legs the day after she died.
“I’m done, too,” said Benny.
In the hallway, we step aside as two techs angle a hospital bed around the corner. Under a mountain of white blankets, only a face showing. I cannot tell if the face is male or female, old or young. Only that the face is not well. Only tears leaking out of the closed eyes.
Neither of the kids have a single question for the techs. They usually live for the question portion of everything. Last summer when we visited Thomas Jefferson’s lesser-known house, Poplar Forest, the tour guide ran late fielding questions from my kids: Did Jefferson have a dog? Did he die of cancer? Did he like to go camping? Do people enjoy being president? Last year, at the open house for kindergarten, Benny raised his hand in front of the entire parent-student population when the principal asked if there were any questions and said into the microphone, “Um, so what are you supposed to do if you’re just really nervous about starting kindergarten?”
But here in the radiation chamber: silence.
That night at dinner my dad asks them what they thought of the trip to Duke.
“It was completely terrifying,” says Freddy matter-of-factly.
“I hated it,” says Benny. “I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
“It was pretty intimidating,” John admits. “I guess I just hadn’t realized.”
My dad and I look at each other. “Whoops! I guess I just damaged everyone for life a little,” I say.
“Yikes,” says my dad. “Sounds intense.”
But then the next morning: We are bumbling through our regular routine—me checking homework sheets while I drink coffee on the couch before getting myself dressed for radiation, John knotting his tie and packing lunch boxes, the kids shuffling into their shoes and coats—both boys come sit with me.
“Good luck at radiation today, Mom!” says Benny, rubbing my head. “I hope you’re not scared, but if you are you can hug MacDuff when you get home.”
Sometimes I think Benny conjured MacDuff from one of his recipes.
Freddy gives me a hug. “Guess what, Mom—I think I’ve finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. A writer!”