Hair lip

Several years ago, when my brother's boys were little, I was reading them a story as they sat at my feet. One of them stared cherubically up at my face, rapt by the tale -- or so I thought, until he wrinkled his nose and asked, "How come you've got fur on your lip?"

Well, the fur is returning, along with all my other body hair, slowly but surely. I've even had to dig out and dust off the tweezers. It's not all returning evenly, but rather in long, patchy strands. So far, I've got eyebrows where I don't like them but not where I do like them -- I'm still using the eyebrow liner. To my horror, I now have "fur" on my lower lip, in addition to the upper. Meanwhile, the hair on my head seems to be coming in much greyer than it was before. It's still very short, but at least it's covering my scalp.

I have two more radiation treatments to go and then I'm DONE. My skin has reacted much better than it did five years ago, but I'm still doing the saline compresses several times a day; I think they're helping keep the itch and burn to a dull roar. Today I had the technicians show me the complex diagram that illustrates what parts of me are being radiated, and I was surprised to find that they are doing my upper back -- the machine circles around and shoots me from under the table somehow. I panicked for a second because my orthopedic doctor said he wouldn't be able to fuse my spine if it were radiated, but the technician assured me that the beams are avoiding my spine. How that's possible, I don't understand. But now I know why my back feels so itchy.

I've been quite active recently, and walking is pretty easy, though the burning in my upper back is sometimes a bit much. And from time to time, I feel like I'm overdoing it and need to lie down for a while. I'm sleeping quite a lot.

Here's a photo of what I looked like getting radiated five years ago:



Pollyanna moments:

• Wonderful to see some friends from abroad: Joan from Australia and Neil from Vancouver and Manila.
• Took my 12-year-old nephew to the Art Gallery of Ontario; I hadn't been there since the renovation. I was heartbroken at what they've done to Walker Court -- a mishmash of styles -- but liked the wooden gallery overlooking Dundas Street. My nephew loved the chairs.
  
• Enjoyed the Taste of South Asia festival last weekend, which was handily less than a block away from my house, of course. Sugarcane juice looks like murky green swamp water but it's very tasty.
  
• Went to see District 9 -- great movie.

Green light

Re: yesterday's post. I finally found out that the green beams of light in the radiation room are laser beams intended for positioning. The beam runs up my body and the technicians line it up with the tattoos on my chest -- like drawing a line with a ruler.

Because I hate the idea of wearing a hospital gown for 10 or 15 minutes every day and then tossing it in the hospital laundry, halfway through my treatments one of the technicians said he could put one in a bag with my name on it so that I could reuse it each day. And I chose one that kinda fits. But one of the other technicians wouldn't believe me when I asked for it -- wouldn't even look for it. I persisted and found it the next day.

This is what "interesting" has come to mean in my day! Preserving hospital wash water.

But after my treatment I walked over to the weekly farmer's market outside the Hospital for Sick Children and bought some Ontario raspberries. And took a pile of magazines to Toronto General -- I've exhausted all the waiting-room coffee tables at Princess Margaret. I'm starting to see some shelf space in my house.

My upper back is burning, burning, burning.

Absolutely radiant

For those of you who've never had the pleasure, I'll describe what it's like to have radiation treatment. A typical course for breast cancer is 25 treatments, every weekday for five weeks (statutory holidays excluded). Sometime before the treatments begin, you have a planning session including a CT scan during which they position you on a table and take a bunch of measurements so that they can aim their radiotherapy beams at the right spots. Each treatment has to exactly duplicate the position in the plan.

When I had radiation five years ago, the positioning bit was time-consuming and even painful because my back problems got in the way; they wanted to radiate my breast without catching my armpit, but I'm so inflexible it was hard to do. Not only do they not want to radiate tissue that doesn't need it, but they don't want to preclude the opportunity to radiate it sometime in the future if it becomes necessary. I believe that's because they aren't supposed to radiate the same spot twice in one lifetime. This time around, it's going much more smoothly; when I mentioned this to my radiation oncologist and attributed it to the fact that this time they're radiating my armpit and not my breast, she said no, it was because they are better at it than they were five years ago. She told me with some excitement that my plan had been presented to a board or a committee or something, presumably as an example of something tricky.

They're not just radiating my armpit; they're also doing something called the supraclavicular area, which is between my breast and my neck, as well as a spot on my back. There are lymph nodes there that can develop cancer, which would not be good.

The setup at Princess Margaret Hospital is pretty smooth. I received a little card with a UPC label unique to me, and when I arrive in the department, I stick the card under a scanner until it beeps, which lets the technicians know I'm there -- I never have to speak to a receptionist. A computer screen tells me if my treatment unit is on time or running behind. The modern-looking reception area is equipped with comfy chairs (though they're arranged like an obstacle course), jigsaw puzzles in progress on coffee tables, as well as bins full of partly knitted scarves that knitters can pick up and continue. But the wait is never very long; I'm usually called in within five minutes, by a young technician proffering a robe that's large enough to fit three of me.

After I change, I enter the large radiation room when the "Beam Off" sign is lit up. A huge photo of a tropical beach hangs backlit on the wall. My plan states that I don't use the neck support, so they remove it from the table before I lie down, positioning my tailbone on a ridge in the table, almost the only uncomfortable part of the procedure. Every single day they ask me for my date of birth.

There's a CD player in the room, with a pile of CDs; most often they play some horrendous Muzak-y piano renditions of tunes such as "Babe" by Styx or Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You." Once in a while I complain and ask for something better and they put on a Motown CD, but I think some of the technicians prefer instrumental stuff so they can concentrate on what they're doing without distracting lyrics.

Two young and friendly technicians spend about five minutes getting me in the right position, measured down to the millimetre, literally. I remove my left arm from my robe and raise it so that it lies in an arm support and my breast is exposed. During my first appointment, I was tattooed with minuscule black dots on my chest -- so minuscule I had assumed the ones I got five years ago were gone, but apparently they could still see them. They make some more spots on my skin with a Magic Marker. One technician reads out measurements in centimetres and millimetres and the other adjusts me, the table, and other doodads. "Eighty-nine point five," says one; "I agree," says the other. In the dim room, narrow beams of green light crisscross my body -- I don't know what they are. But there's a sign on the wall that warns against looking at the sources of the beams, so I mostly keep my eyes shut. So that the radiation doesn't hit my chin, I have to keep it tilted up, which is the other mildly uncomfortable part.

When they're assured I'm in the right position, the technicians cover me up with my robe or a piece of paper, and say brightly, "Here we go." They leave the room to go to their posts at the computers that direct the beams, where they can see me on a monitor. There's a big round machine above me, and it starts to make whirring noises, moving around me in a circle. A high-pitched whine sounds when the radiation pierces my body, but I feel nothing at all. It takes about five minutes, and then the technicians re-enter the room and help me off the table. That's it. It's about as simple as a normal X-ray, though it's really a kind of particle accelerator, with much, much more power than an X-ray.

There's an easy-to-follow explanation of all this at a U.K. website called Cancerbackup, which I find amusing because in one spot, where they explain that certain types of cancer require the insertion of an internal probe, they use the term "back passage" presumably to mean "anus." Yikes. Anyway, luckily none of my passages, back or front, are being invaded.

Yesterday I was hit with serious fatigue, but it might just be the heat. My skin is starting to get a little rough and sore, but it's not too bad so far. I have 10 treatments left.

Pollyanna moments:

• It's like an oven outside, but I've been able to keep my non-air-conditioned house relatively cool by keeping all the doors and windows shut and judiciously using fans.
• I had a birthday cake at my brother Paul's last weekend.
• I was able to spend a long while with my dad on Saturday, and we bopped around his room to Oliver Schroer's fiddle and a bunch of tunes by the Mamas and the Papas.

Old is the new old

When I was about 17, I worked in a drugstore as a clerk. One day a little girl bought a chocolate bar or something, and her mother said to her, "Pay the lady." I looked around, wondering who she was talking about, and then realized the lady was me. It was a shock to be referred to with a distinctly adult term (disregarding the connotations of the word "lady" for a young feminist, which was a whole other story). A few years later, when I was about 20, a friend my age told me that an older friend of his had referred to me as "an interesting woman," and the putative compliment went unnoticed as I contemplated the fact that I was now a "woman" and not a girl. I think I squirmed a little, but also felt a tad proud, if a bit of an impostor. I may have been all grown up, but I didn't feel it.

Miraculously, I seem to have made it to the age of 52, but in the past few months strangers have taken me to be the mother of three different friends of mine, two of them older than I. And last weekend, someone assumed I was my mother's sister (not a rare occurrence, actually). The next day, I was walking in a park holding my father's hand when a small child on a small bicycle veered toward us, out of control. "Watch out for the old people!" shouted his dad.

I always knew that my mature appearance as a teenager, then an advantage, would eventually turn into a nuisance. In fact, I remember a nurse assuming I was my sister's mother when I wasn't more than 30 and she 25.

But I know that illness has aged me a great deal in the past year. (Please, no reassuring comments: I'm not fishing, just musing about the fascinating, if disheartening or at least bewildering, changes we all go through). And it's not just sagging eyelids and the usual wrinkles, and the middle-aged weight gain (I've actually lost 10 pounds since last year); my missing eyebrows contribute to the senior-citizen look. (At least the whiskers on my chin have disappeared for the time being.) Worse, I think, is the dowager's hump. Which leaves me with the question: should I have the spinal surgery if the pain is not debilitating? Will I be doing it mostly for cosmetic reasons? I have always had a superstitious conviction that any surgery I have in order to look better will lead to some catastrophe.

In the meantime, I have felt better in the past week than I have in a long time. The effects of the chemo have finally left my body (with the exception that my fingernails are looking weirder and weirder), and the effects of the radiation have yet to begin. I'm not out of breath, and my back feels much better again, and I'm able to get around the city independently in a way that makes me rejoice -- haven't taken any codeine in over a week. And the weather continues to be cool and relatively dry.

Pollyanna moments:

• I got to meet oncologist, comedian, writer and famous atheist Dr. Robert Buckman, who leads a cancer support group discussion on Thursday afternoons at Princess Margaret Hospital -- he's a funny and funny-looking man with a real gift for supportive honesty. Though I did feel a chill as I stepped off the elevator to attend the group and realized I was in the palliative care unit where my dear friend Adele stayed for a while toward the end of her life. Surely I was not headed in this direction anytime soon, I thought; I feel so well! But I'm doing a good job of not looking toward the future anymore. It's like a blank to me.
• I attended the final presentation of the weeklong children's circus camp at the Centre of Gravity circus training studio around the corner from my house. It was a hoot to see little kids on the trapeze, etc., including a certain young Natalie.
• Stratford was a wonderful break, especially the Shakespeare Gardens, a picnic with friends and my mom on the Avon River, Colm Feore's wonderful Cyrano, and the muscular dancing in West Side Story. Also had a great picnic with my mom and dad in Waterloo Park in Waterloo, a lovely place I hadn't visited before.
• Yesterday I got a huge laugh watching a squirrel running up a tree with a whole slice of pizza in his mouth.

Just now my neighbours and I all just stuck our heads out our front doors, mystified by the tremendous crash we just heard -- it sounded like someone's house had collapsed. But it was thunder, louder than any of us had ever heard, all the louder because it was preceded by not a single preliminary rumble.