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It has become my daily routine; I descend two floors beneath University Avenue in Toronto. I am led through a maze of corridors to a radiation suite. I undress and am bolted to a table beneath a massive linear accelerator. The heavy lead doors close and the lights dim. An electrical relay trips somewhere behind me and the hair on my arms and legs stands on end.
When I was first told I needed to have radiation treatment, I was apprehensive. I had been a cancer patient before and considered myself well-versed in different kinds of chemo protocols, knew their success and failure rates, side effects and how they worked on the body. Radiation was a whole new experience, something I knew little about. It was to be given in tiny daily doses over a period of five weeks, in fractions that add up to what I hope will be the dosage needed to kill any residual cancer cells.
A couple of days before beginning treatment, a mask is made of my head and chest. It will be placed over me to ensure that during treatment, I can be secured in an exact position. A sheet of wet plastic mesh is placed over my head and chest and adjusted so that it moulds to the exact form of my body. It quickly hardens and is removed, an exact duplicate of me.
On the first day of treatment, I have no idea what to expect. Once I am lying down, a technician brings in my mask, places it over me and clamps it to the table. Encapsulated, I can only move my eyes. The head of the machine gradually rises above the table, I strain my eyes to the right and see it stop just over my shoulder.
After a pause, it continues to another position. After several minutes, the head is directly over me and I am able to look into it. Deep inside I see a honeycomb of black cells, much like a giant insect's eye. In front of the eye is an ever-changing aperture that controls the projection of the beam.
I watch as the aperture first opens and then forms complex patterns, corresponding to the areas on my neck and shoulder that are being treated. As the head position changes, the aperture alters to conform to the new position.
The final position is just over my left shoulder. I hear the relay click off. I have a few moments to orient myself; I'm not sure how much time has passed. I have no reference, no way of knowing.
A technician opens the big door and comes in. She says, "It's all over." As the lights go on, I dress and look around the room. Lining the walls I see masks like mine in neat numbered rows. These are the masks, the images, of all the people currently undergoing treatment in this radiation unit. If I look closely I could probably recognize people I have passed in the corridors and sat next to in the hospital cafeteria.
Perfect faces, etched out in fine plastic mesh. They are all looking at me. Over time I develop a routine of driving into the city, parking and making my way to the radiation department. If I'm early, sometimes I sit in the waiting room.
Radiation treatment can make people tired and many are collapsed on chairs, sleeping until their treatment time comes. Others have radiation burns like my own, on the neck, face and shoulders. Others are in wheelchairs. Still, others use basic sign language to communicate with family, as cancer has taken their voices. We usually exchange glances or nods, silent veterans of a complex war, each with a story that brought them to this place. All hoping for a cure, a remission or just time.
After my treatment, I sometimes stop at the coffee shop in the lobby of the hospital to get coffee for the drive home. There is usually a lineup and I wait amongst doctors, nurses and visitors. I am the odd person out, a patient, but I somehow seem to fit into this lineup with no one noticing me.
It's winter and I pull my jacket up to cover my red, raw neck and pull my sleeves down to cover my hospital wristbands. I am just like all of the others.
My last day of radiation is on a Monday. I have noticed over the weeks that some patients bring their families along on their final day, needing to show them the room and the machine, as a way to have them share their fear, their experience.
As the technician comes in to unclamp me for the last time, she asks if I would like to keep my mask. This takes me by surprise and I ask her what others do. She tells me that some take them home as souvenirs, as physical reminders of their experience. Others never want to see them again. For me, I see my mask as an intimate partner, my plastic clone, something that has experienced this process with me for five weeks and for now, I am reluctant to let it go. I walk out into the sunny, early spring day of University Avenue, mask under my arm. To the casual passerby, I look like a middle-aged man carrying a dressmaker's mannequin. To the discerning eye, they would see that the mannequin is a perfect image of me.
Andrew Ruhl lives in Guelph, Ont.