Songs from a Lead Lined Room

All of us live with cancer: our own, a loved one's, a neighbor's. Those of us lucky enough not yet to have discovered the lump, faced the shadowy blotch on an X-ray, spoken the language ruled by regimens, stages, and protocols-- those of us not yet engaged in this technological and spiritual battle for our lives depend on missives from the battlefield. We need them to understand our fellow humans who are already fighting, as well as to prepare ourselves for what we fear lies in wait for us.

This is why even the title of former Providence Journal reporter Suzanne Strempek Shea's cancer memoir, Songs From a Lead-Lined Room, appealed to me. I picked up the book hoping this journalist-turned-novelist would be the war correspondent I needed.

I wanted to follow Shea into the real lead-lined room -- a Massachusetts hospital's subterranean radiation oncology department, in this case -- where she spent five days a week, for six weeks, receiving pinpoint blasts of radiation in her left breast. I wanted her to tell me all about it -- about her breast cancer diagnosis after decades of spiffy-clean living, about her lumpectomy, her therapy, and about how the hell she got through it.

And so she does. The bulk of the book deals with those six weeks of therapy. Shea wrote it largely because when diagnosed, she went looking for some guidance on what to expect, and found nothing. She began keeping a diary during radiation and eventually turned the inner project outward into book form.

But she opens with the grim days of fear and uncertainty that spiraled suddenly from what she expected to be a normal breast exam:

"I went for my usual look-see and was asked to return. And to come back again. There were more examinations for me. More mammograms in a single day than there are m's in the word. An ultrasound in May. An extremely uncomfortable three-hour stereotactic core biopsy in June, my left breast dangling through a hole in a raised table while, seated below like a car mechanic working on a rattling muffler, a radiologist drilled repeatedly for samples."

Shea's tone -- slightly macho, with the conversational brio of newsroom reporters -- puts the hard details in my face, but this is what I want from the wars. I am grateful for knowing that on the radiation table, she set her head in a "hard little dish, the size in which you would serve fruit salad," that a crimson light targeted the invisible radiation's entry into her breast, and that the whole thing took 10 minutes. I believe her when she says it didn't hurt.

But hurt it did, in other ways. Despite a not-terribly invasive surgery, a protocol without the devastation of chemotherapy, and a promising prognosis (at the book's conclusion, she leaves the lead-lined room with a clean bill of health and ponders her return to a world without the immediate companionship of cancer), Shea is wrecked.

To her credit, she is as blunt about her emotional damage as she is about her medical travails. Still, after a while, the whining wears a little thin. Shea confesses that she thought she would have been that perfect, optimistic patient, but that's the last thing she is. She even conjures up the pop icon of whining, figure skater Nancy Kerrigan:

"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."

Who am I to argue? Maybe we all will cry, rant, torment our helpful partners, and retreat into our personal lead-lined rooms when cancer comes for us. Maybe I am uncomfortable with Shea's complaints because I don't want to hear how awful cancer -- even "lighter" cases -- can be.

In any case, I am indeed grateful for this very human voice, brave enough to call out from a dark and distant, insulated room of disease.

(Tracey Minkin is a freelance writer living in Providence.)