Follow the yellow brick road
The first day of radiation is over. As I suspected, the anticipation was far worse than the actual appointment itself. I suppose that’s true of almost anything the first time, yeah?
For me, the first time I do anything or go anywhere is full of worry and anxiety. I don’t like not knowing what to expect. I want to know what the place looks like. I want to know what people I’ll see there. I want to know what I should say to them when I get there. I want to know what the RULES are…you know? The unspoken ones. The ones you can’t know until you go and do the thing. The best description of this I’ve ever seen came from Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl.
“In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can’t google.) Like, where does the line start? What food can you take? Where are you supposed to stand, then where are you supposed to sit? Where do you go when you’re done, why is everyone watching you?”
Maybe (probably) not everyone worries about these things. If that’s the case, please tell me what it’s like to go through life without anxiety, it sounds nice.
Today, I really appreciated the tech who led me through the first radiation treatment, for alleviating my worries about future appointments. Not only did she lead me through how the first visit would work, but she physically walked me through the area I’d be coming to on my own next time, even giving me landmarks to follow along the way. She pointed out the fish sculptures hanging on the wall and said I could use those to guide me. But then she pointed out that the floor below us was yellow, and that if I stayed on the yellow floor, it would lead me to where I needed to go.
“Follow the yellow brick road?” I joked, but I’m not sure she understood what I was saying because, though I can speak a bit now, I’m only understandable about 50% of the time.
When I was a kid, The Wizard of Oz was one of my favorite movies (tied with ET and Lady & the Tramp). I watched it over and over and over. I regularly tried to click my heels together three times in case it would transport me to Oz (it never did). In 2nd grade, we got to dress up as our favorite fictional characters and I, of course, chose Dorothy Gale. My Pound Puppy stood in for Toto, and my dad even red-glitter-spray-painted a pair of shoes so I had my very own ruby slippers.
I know that the surgery I went through and my current recovery from it sound horrible and unimaginable to most people. That’s how it felt when I found out what it would all entail. It sounded unreal, impossible to get through. But to be honest, the thing that freaks me out the most about this entire process is radiation. The fact that poison is being shot into my body, and it will likely cause side effects that will make my life fairly miserable for a period of time.
Luckily, the radiation process itself is short. It took them longer to situate me in the machine than it did for the actual treatment, which lasted approximately three songs on Pandora. I had worried that I’d feel claustrophobic, with the close-fitting mask literally strapped to my face, but the machine wasn’t enclosed like an MRI. Instead, the arms of the machine rotated around me, beeping when they were administering the radiation.
At one point, I opened my eyes and could see myself reflected in the machine. I quickly closed my eyes again and tried, really hard, to visualize that I was somewhere else. First I tried to pretend I was on a quiet beach, but the machine’s beeping was too distracting. Then I tried to pretend I was on a ferry (I LOVE FERRIES). I pictured myself standing on the top level, leaning over the railing to see the sun reflecting off of the water, the waves breaking on the side of the boat. The beeps were just the ferry’s horn, that was all.
It didn’t really work. I’m hoping tomorrow I’m calmer and able to visualize myself somewhere else. Clearly I need to pretend that yellow brick road is really leading me to Oz (and out of this mess). If only I still had those ruby slippers...