Songs from a Lead Lined Room

Local novelist Suzanne Strempek Shea was 41 when doctors told her she had breast cancer and needed radiation treatments. After the shock of the diagnosis wore off, she did some research.

"All I found on radiation in books or online were things about Chernobyl and Three Mile Island," said Ms. Shea, who lives in Palmer. "Or they were very thick medical texts meant for health professionals." If there was little on the physical aspect, there was even less on the psychological effects of crawling into a tube-like machine each weekday morning for seven weeks and being bombarded with X-rays while everyone else left the room, proclaiming the treatment's safety as they closed the door tightly behind them.

There were about as many books on the subject as there were onlookers in that lead-lined room.

"Within breast cancer books, the mentions of radiation are scant and say roughly two things -- the treatments might make you tired, and they might damage your skin," she writes in her new book, "Songs From a Lead-Lined Room," (Beacon Press, $23). "What about the entire experience of having daily treatments for a month and a half? What was that like? Was it so easy that it wasn't worth mentioning? Or so difficult that no writer knew where to begin?"

Eventually, she found the answers through her own experience and wrote the book herself. "Songs From a Lead-Lined Room" charts Ms. Shea's journey, which began in March 2000 when she went for her annual mammogram. There was a small abnormality. More tests followed -- more mammograms in a single day than there are M's in the word, she says -- before a biopsy in June confirmed the diagnosis. Though doctors told her the cancer was at an early stage and highly treatable, her fears were not assuaged.

"I found it extremely jarring to be told I had cancer," she writes. "This thing with a reputation for killing people. And it was inside me. Me." In August, the lump was surgically removed. Radiation, to kill any cancer cells that might have been left behind, like sinister seeds, began in late September.

Ms. Shea didn't know what to expect. Beforehand, she had visions of being slipped beneath something like the orange-bulbed heat lamps that hang above the french fries in fast-food restaurants. Instead, she lies on a featureless machine and doesn't see anything happening. There is no sound, save for a gentle whooshing when the machine first comes on. It doesn't hurt. She doesn't feel a thing.

"It all must be taken on faith in invisible rays," she writes. After each treatment, she headed straight to the computer to write about her depression, anxiety and confusion as well as the insights, amusing moments and deeper realizations born of facing down a deadly disease. An award-winning author of four novels, including "Selling the Lite of Heaven" and "Hoopi Shoopi Donna," Ms. Shea nevertheless did not expect the journal would go public.

"I thought I would show my husband and some friends to sort of tell them my side of what was going on at the time," she said, in a recent interview. "When they saw it, they all encouraged me to show my agent."

Work on the new book replaced a novel she had lost enthusiasm for. "Fiction for a while to me seemed sort of frivolous," she said. "I felt like 'Oh, I'm living in such reality I just want to sort of deal with that.' "And there was a lot to deal with. From the book: "You get weekends off.. "You're supposed to relax and repair your body, which is working overtime to create more cells to replace what's been attacked. And your skin needs a break as well. In time, it will get burned worse than the skins of my sister and her gang who smeared themselves with Johnson's Baby Oil and fried on their sheets of tinfoil during our childhood summers at Hampton Beach. If you received too many treatments in a row, that would be detrimental inside and out. So radiation is like an office job. Monday through Friday. With Saturdays and Sundays as your own."

After the treatments, and on weekends, she could reflect, finding lessons in the pain and rain.

"When I was sick, it felt like people give you a bit of latitude," she said. "They'd say 'Oh, she doesn't want to go to that thing or do that' or whatever."

Did you indulge yourself?

"A little bit," she said. "I was always somebody who worried about what other people were going to think -- like 'I don't really want to go to that but, you know, I don't want them to get mad." Now I don't care if they're mad.

"You say 'What importance is that?' And if they're going to get mad over something like you not showing up at a picnic, then who needs them? You have to be polite and everything, but there are more things to get mad about in this world than silly little stuff like that."

Recently, she began writing fiction again, as the passage of time began to turn her struggle into a source of strength.

"I was talking to my agent about how I just felt different and how writing fiction wasn't having the same zing for me," she said. "And he said, 'Put the urgency of your new life into your writing.' " Her fiction publisher, Pocket Books, has given her a January deadline for the manuscript. Meanwhile, "Songs From a Lead-Lined Room" was published Wednesday. The occasion was, for the author, cause for both celebration and anxiety.

"I was wondering what it would be like to be going around with something that wasn't fiction," she said. "With fiction you can always say 'Oh, yeah. I made that up.' With this it's all true."

The first with feedback was her mentor, novelist Eleanor Lipman of Northampton.

"She was in New York for business and phoned me from the corner of some street on her cell phone and was just going on and on about it," she said.

"She said all these lovely things. They were so very heartfelt. It's one of those messages you keep on your machine and you play over about a million times."

Others have since echoed those sentiments, telling her that they've been moved by the book and expressing gratitude for a story written from a patient's point of view.

"This is a nice little boost, what's happening now -- the response to the book, the very dear things I have heard from people, so I think it's a nice gift, what's happening right now."