Songs from a Lead Lined Room

"More mammograms in a single day than there are M's in the word,'' is one way that Suzanne Strempek Shea describes the process that led to the discovery of her cancer. Happy with her life, married and a novelist at 40 years old, she suddenly finds herself inducted into a club that truly no one wants to join. Still, she manages to maintain her journal-keeping habits at the hospital. As chronicled in those pages, Shea finds it dismissive when well-wishers note that "only'' radiation is needed.

The tendency to make constant evaluations of one's relative lot is one of the sobering symptoms of cancer, and Shea finds herself making comparisons between the past, present and the never-again-innocent future; between herself and her fellow johnny-wearers in the clinic; between the (lucky) healthy and the (unlucky) fellow ill. She also shows how hard it is for cheering friends to hit the right note, cringing when people seem to start mourning her death upon hearing her news. She uses the tragedy of Molly Bish, the young teen lifeguard who disappeared from her post sometime during Shea's treatment, as a sympathetic distraction and a metaphor of uncertainty. The shadow of sickness falls on everything, but some things are made more precious because of it.