Escape Points (10 page)

The truth is, it is a lot of fun to stand in front of a group of students and talk about ideas and to get them to talk back, engage, and demonstrate what they learn. And to do it at a university you respect and feel loyalty to—real loyalty, not just
I am here for the time being
loyalty, but a place you care about deeply. And it is rewarding to feel for about ten seconds at a time that you are Julia Roberts, even if you have chunky bracelets some hate and age spots you yourself are not so particularly fond of, right there on your face for everyone to see.

“
Y
ou have beautiful hair,” she said when I took off my hat and placed my purse and briefcase on a couch near her in the waiting area. I hung up my coat and stuffed my hat and scarf in one sleeve. “I lost all my hair,” she explained and gestured to her paisley headscarf.

“I like your scarf,” I said.

“Today is my birthday. I’m seventy-six.”

“Happy birthday.”
I want to be seventy-six
. I didn’t know if I should keep talking or ask more questions. I wasn’t sure exactly what radiation treatment waiting room protocol was.

Should we all exchange cancer stories, prognoses, recurrence likelihood percentages? Are cancer jokes OK? Is this where we cheer each other loudly or silently pretend everyone in the room is not obsessed with measuring the odds?

This was my first time. But it already felt different than a regular doctor’s office; more like a block party without the cocktails and food. At the front desk the staff was remarkably effusive, as if they were greeters at a health club or Walmart, smiling as they checked
off your name and handed you a parking pass to put on your dashboard so you could park close to the automatic sliding door off the circular drive. No one was ever in a bad mood here; they were on the safe side of cancer.

A dozen or so other patients looked up from crossword puzzles or magazines and away from the morning show on the mounted television and wished her a happy birthday. A man in his sixties or seventies, neatly dressed in dark pants and a cardigan sweater, strolled in, stood in the center of the room with his back to the flat-screen TV, waved a broad sweep of hello, and boomed, “Good morning, how is everyone today?” as if he was Norm and this was the bar in
Cheers
.

“Good, great,” was the chorus’s response. No one replied, “OK, except for the cancer.”

He hung up his gray parka, poured black coffee into a Styrofoam cup, and helped himself to two of the sugar cookies in an open tin before sitting down with the newspaper he carried under his arm.

The waiting area was the size of a motel lobby, the sort of motel you stay in for just one night for a business meeting or a stopover on a long drive to somewhere else, a sixty-nine-dollar-a-night spot you see in the Midwest with the packaged dairy creamer and no wireless connections. The coffeemaker was always on and a microwave sat beside stacks of brochures for local water parks, ranches with hourly horseback riding lessons, antique shops, and wax museums.

I was the youngest person in the waiting room that morning, but still much older than the medical residents who walked briskly in and out of the room, their white lab coats crisp, their hands in their pockets, their expressions pensive.

“Jeez, some of these people look really sick,” Paul whispered to me. He had picked me up for my first morning radiation treatment. “You look pretty good in comparison.”

This building in the massive hospital complex was called the Woman’s Board Cancer Treatment Center and thankfully not Outpatient Center/Nuclear Medicine, where I had gone for an earlier test.
Nuclear
was not an adjective you want in any part of your medical treatment. I remembered the news stories in 1979 of Love
Canal and saw
Silkwood
twice, mostly because I couldn’t believe Cher could actually act. This radiation was serious business; only a week earlier news reports announced that Alexander Litvinenko, the former member of the Russian Federal Security Service, had died with the diagnosis of “acute radiation syndrome,” a deliberate poisoning from polonium-210. I was almost positive I was not getting polonium. Palladium was what I was getting; that was different.

At Dr. Dowlat’s suggestion, I would be having internal radiation at 9:50 in the morning and 4:30 in the afternoon every day for five days, compared to traditional external radiation therapy once daily for six to seven weeks; that burned your skin. Internal radiation treatments needed to be six to seven hours apart; staff gave those morning and late-afternoon times to accommodate patients who were working. That way we could work between treatments.

The senior director of the undergraduate program got me an office to work in at the university’s downtown law school and continuing studies campus in between treatments. That way I would not have to drive from treatment on the near South Side all the way up north and back—about fifteen miles each way.

She got me space in a lecturer’s office with a radiator that hissed aggressively and a view of the lake if you strained your neck. I drove there after the morning session, parked in the Neiman Marcus building, and walked through the first floor, spraying samples of delicious perfumes on my arms and neck.

I was thinking maybe it would be nice to go home and lie down in between treatments, but maybe the senior director was right—it was better to be busy. I did have to work on the curriculum.

The kind of radiation I was having, internal brachytherapy, had only been available after FDA approval for breast cancer treatment for four years. More than thirty thousand breast cancer patients had had this form of radiation, one of the pamphlets read, this one with a large pink tulip on the cover as if it was an ad for Miracle-Gro. The brochure resembled the flyer I got in middle school health class on menstruation, making the process seem so feminine and pretty and benign.

Thirty thousand people with this kind of radiation. Not so many when you consider that was about half of the number of fans who went to any single Chicago Bears football game in Soldier Field, the smallest stadium in the NFL. More than twice as many people lived in Oak Park.

The brochure did not mention that the total bill at the end of treatment would be more than $90,000 for radiation alone. Insurance covered most of the bill. Thank God and the university for good insurance. The brochure also did not mention what the radiologist told me in person.

“You should not be around pets or small children during the days of treatment,” said Dr. Adam Dickler, my radiation oncologist.

What?

“Just a precaution,” he said.

“How small of children?” I asked, knowing my boys at ages twelve, fifteen, and seventeen were probably in the “big” category.

“Newborns or infants, babies,” he answered. “Your boys are OK.”

Did the radioactive material seep out of me after the treatment?

I remembered the first
X-Men
movie where Anna Paquin played a superheroine named Rogue whose mere touch killed people. And then there was
The China Syndrome
with Faye Dunaway, back when Jack Nicholson was not so old and creepy—oh, so many movies where people died from the radioactive material. So what would happen in five, ten, fifteen years to us, the ones who opted for this kind of radiation? I didn’t want to dwell on the possibility that this treatment was experimental. I read
Flowers for Algernon
as a kid and saw the movie
Charly
. He was part of an experiment and he died. The
New York Times
later ran a front-page story on the experimental treatment. It sat on my desk for days until I had the nerve to read it all the way through.

Dr. Dowlat endorsed this course of treatment emphatically. On my next visit I asked him about the article.

“It is not experimental,” he said. “It is effective.”

I trusted him, I had to.

Down one hallway, nurses escorted patients who were receiving traditional radiation, the external X-rays, to an area where patients changed into hospital gowns and radiation was aimed at their cancer site, a spot tattooed in their skin. Everyone else in the waiting room was getting this kind; their names were called every few minutes. For the internal radiation, I went down another hallway and I was the only patient there.

Isn’t anyone else having this kind? Hello?

A nurse about my age, with a round, pleasant face and reddish-blonde hair to her shoulders, called my name. We went into a patient room where she checked my vital signs and the wound site. She asked me questions and made small talk; we both had sons named Brendan, the same age. She had a daughter, younger than her son. Next I would be going to another area for the radiation.

“Can I read a book?” I asked her.

“It’s only ten minutes. Why not just relax?”

Sure, I can relax while the deadly radiation is inside my body. Sure. Might as well knit a sweater.

Dr. Dickler directed me to still another room where he told me to lie down on the metal table. I did not need a hospital gown. I wore a shirt that could be lifted up easily. He would insert the tube to deliver the radiation into the catheter that was sticking out of my body like a throwaway pen. I liked Dr. Dickler; he was very friendly, personable. He looked way younger than me. Everyone on this side of the cancer was way younger than me. Except Dr. Dowlat.

Signs on the door, in the hallway, and on the walls were in bold black letters: D
ANGER
. R
ADIOACTIVE
. D
ANGER
. The round sign had the three-winged symbol for radiation that looked like a kitchen fan. D
ANGER
. I get it: radioactive.

The flat table had a foam pillow for my head. Dr. Dickler connected my catheter to the machine that would deliver the radioactive pellet, the size of a grain of rice, he explained. The pellet was smaller than the cancer Dr. Dowlat excised. I would be alone in the room while the radioactive seed was inside my body. Dr. Dickler would watch me from another room and he could hear me at any time, he
said. I could ask questions, I could speak to him and the technicians monitoring the treatment.

One of the technicians looked like a character in a Dr. Seuss book with a gentle face and a white bushy mustache. Posters of forest scenes were taped to one wall of the laboratory, which was about the size of my living room. My dentist has posters taped to the ceiling as well, but he also has a chair with a remote that controls heat and massage, really just a vibrating bump that moves from shoulder to knees. And your mouth still hurts.

Dr. Dickler flipped on the machine, left quickly, and the door clicked shut. The machine that delivered the radiation looked like R2-D2 in
Star Wars
; it was the size of a shop vac. Looked harmless enough, except it wasn’t. D
ANGER
. R
ADIOACTIVE
. D
ANGER
. It was like a scene in an early Woody Allen movie. Prime time for a panic attack, and I was trying not to have one.

“We can hear you in the observation room if you need us,” Dr. Dickler said.

Don’t worry, you’ll be just dandy here with the deadly radioactive material in your chest. No, you stay, just let me get the hell out of here.

Alone on the table, I couldn’t feel anything going into my body, but I could hear the clicking and whirring of the machine like an electric toothbrush. I tried to relax, picturing the radioactive pellet sitting inside my chest obliterating the cancer site.

Was it glowing? Was this my kryptonite? If this is so fine, why did all the doctors and technicians run away as soon as they connected the catheter and flipped the switch? Breathe. Stop thinking. Relax. I’ll pretend I’m getting a pedicure, or a massage. That’s it, I’m at the spa. I could pretend I’m at Miraval and waiting for the masseuse to find the hot oil to rub on my legs. This isn’t so bad. But it is quiet, completely quiet, deathly quiet except for the whirring. They should have music piped in, not the wind chiming, wave-rushing relaxation soundtrack played in every spa in every hotel I have ever visited, but maybe a little Motown, some Sheryl Crow, what the heck, Melissa Etheridge—the Cancer Singers. What’s that smell? Is that burning? Did they give me too much? Am I on fire?

“Something smells burning,” I said out loud, motionless on the table. “Is that me?”

“Nothing is burning, it’s fine, you are not burning,” Dr. Dickler answered from behind a glass wall, just as he said he would be able to. “Just a few more minutes.”

I pictured myself cooking from the inside out, like one of those soy burgers in the microwave that did not taste at all like real meat but were only 120 calories. For ten minutes, ten long minutes, this was good. I would do whatever they said. I would take whatever form of therapy they suggested. I would eat it, I would drink it, I would let it sit in my body, I would wear it. I would agree to it all, I would not fight, I would not argue, I would do it. Because the alternative was far worse. My friend Lisa lost a close friend to breast cancer when we first met. Her friend decided she did not want to do the radiation and the chemotherapy. She did not want to go through it all; instead she chose alternative approaches, herbals and teas and acupuncture. She died and she had children.

Yes, I was scared to die. For the record? I was afraid to die because of my sons.

When I thought about dying, I really did not think about me. No really, I did not. I was not scared for me, not that I was ready for it or anything. I was scared for my boys. Probably since my thirties, after my father died in 1988, I began to feel this low-pitched drumbeat urgency that this was all there was and I was close to the halfway mark. When my mother died in 2002 she was graceful, had dignity, was unafraid. And it secured my feeling that this was finite, but that it was OK. All of my mother’s children were grown—we were fine, taken care of, on our own. She seemed at peace.

Because of all of that, I have felt as if I was renting space in the world, had squatter’s rights. I knew none of this here was permanent, knew I wasn’t permanent, knew there was no overtime. I absolutely had better give this my all. Work hard, do all I can, love my children as much as I can, give back to the world. Don’t relax. Work, accomplish, keep going, say what you mean. Mean what you say. Push for the next project, try to write another book as soon as possible. Be
heard. Be good to my family. Be kind to my friends and plenty of strangers. Make a difference somewhere that adds to the cumulative joy of someone. Try. I didn’t own the place, no guarantees. But I didn’t want it to be my time to go just yet.

Time was up. It did go quickly; it was only ten minutes. Twenty minutes a day, one hundred minutes total. Not bad if one hundred minutes can add years to your life, and that was what they promised. That was what I banked on. I said thank you to Dr. Dickler after he removed the long tube from my catheter. I went back into the patient room, and the nurse with the son named Brendan changed my bandage and told me she would see me later in the afternoon.