Songs from a Lead-Lined Room: Notes-High and Low-From My Journey Through Breast Cancer and Radiation - Hardcover

Shea, Suzanne Strempek

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080707246X ISBN 13: 9780807072462

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2002

Synopsis

A moving and uplifting breast cancer journal from the beloved author of Hoopi Shoopi Donna and Selling the Lite of Heaven, Songs from a Lead-Lined Room is a memoir rooted in truth and raw experience with a sure and compelling woman's voice. The leadlined room is the radiation therapy unit where Suzanne was treated for breast cancer. Her diary of this time is powerful and illuminating. As with Shea's acclaimed fiction, her sharp and insightful wit, her reporter's eye for the most telling and sometimes quirky details, as well as her gift and grace with metaphor and image inform every page. Shea shares her despair, indignity, and fear as well as the compassion and caring of her friends, her husband, and fellow patients. For the 192,000 women who undergo radiation for breast cancer every year, for their extended families, friends, and therapists, Suzanne Shea offers important insights. As she explores the unthinkable-the sentence of life with an often fatal illness-she traces a parallel story, that of a sixteen-year-old life guard abducted from a neighborhood park and sharing a life in limbo. It's a book full of wisdom, humor, contradiction, and ultimately, solace.

About this title

About the Author:

Suzanne Strempek Shea, winner of the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction, is the author of five novels, Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, Around Again, and Becoming Finola, and the three memoirs Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, Shelf Life, and Sundays in America. She lives in Bondsville, Massachusetts, and sells books at Edwards Books in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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
hitche...

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 080707246X
• ISBN 13: 9780807072462
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 204