Songs from a Lead Lined Room

Novelist Suzanne Strempek Shea likes inventing scenarios for her characters. The protagonists in her four novels have faced - with signature humor - hardships ranging from failed romances to lost dreams. But Shea's newest book is a departure from the novels. In Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, Shea plays the leading role, not in a novel but in a true-life account of her bout with breast cancer.

She was 41, in great physical shape, had a great marriage, and had made the jump from newspaper reporter to successful novelist. She was working on her fifth book and enjoying her self-described "good life, a life I was really grateful for," when the cancer diagnosis came in 1999.

Gone was the gratitude, replaced with fear and resentment. When doctors told her she wouldn't need chemotherapy after surgery, but would face seven weeks of daily radiation treatments, she went looking for information about radiation. And couldn't find much.

"Computer searches turned up things about Chernobyl," she said. After her first session in the lead-lined room, Shea went straight home to her computer. She couldn't even talk to her husband until she had written about the experience. It was the beginning of her journal entries written after each treatment.

"I didn't know this would be a book," said Shea, 43, who lives in the western Massachusetts town of Bondsville. "I wrote as a form of therapy for myself. I thought it would make a great bonfire after I was finished." But when she showed pieces of her work to her husband, Tommy Shea, and a few close friends, they encouraged her to find a publisher and share her journey with others.

But you'd be selling the book short if you stuck it under the "cancer" file. The book is a study in how a person responds to adversity and offers the same quirky humor found in her novels Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, and Around Again.

Shea writes that in the past she had thought that, if she were ever stricken with a dread disease, her general upbeat, faith-filled manner would have her not only looking good in her hospital bed, but feeling good, too.

"I'd try to make others feel positive as well, reassuring them that I'd be fine soon, quoting inspirational verses, setting records in learning how to talk or walk or whatever was my lost ability," she writes.

But when it actually happened, Shea reacted differently. "After she got bashed in the knee and lay crumpled there on the walkway just off the ice rink, crying 'Why me, Why me,' lots of people were making fun of Nancy Kerrigan. Now I know, you get bashed out of nowhere, that's what you wail."

The cancer diagnosis knocked her out of the loop for a year. Or, as Shea said, "I spent a year falling into a hole and another year climbing out of it."

She distanced herself from helpful friends and relatives, going so far as to put a "Go Away" mat at the door of her house. Even her husband got the cold treatment. She responded to his attack of kidney stones by having dinner while he underwent surgery.

The book chronicles her climb out and eventual return to the land of the living, with a renewed sense of life and all its sweetness and randomness. "I could have called this book Suzanne Gets Her Gratitude Back," Shea says, laughing. "I came to realize how lucky I am. That I had cancer and have endured the treatment and am still here. I hope the book encourages people to find their own way of coping."