Songs from a Lead Lined Room

"I keep noticing that I am the youngest person I see in any of these rooms. Something about that bothers me, like, maybe there has been some kind of mistake-I'm not supposed to be here, really."

Thus begins 43-year-old novelist and former journalist Suzanne Strempek Shea's memoir of the period of her life spent, after a lumpectomy for stage I cancer, undergoing radiation treatments five days a week for six weeks in the lead lined sub-basement of the Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts.

The book, based on journal entries that Shea kept at the time, centers on her observations in the waiting and treatment rooms. But there are scenes from "the rest of life" as well, all tinged with her newly developed "cancer perspective."

This new perspective makes it hard for her to listen as her husband repeatedly shares with friends and family a rather macho account of his emergency kidney stone operation that year, a surgery in which the doctor claims to have removed the biggest stones he had ever seen in his career. But it is also a mind-set that motivates her to take time out despite fatigue to visit an apple orchard with her husband for the first time, savoring apple pie and fall foliage.

Perhaps because the book started as a journal, and certainly because the author is a good storyteller with a clean and honest style, I often felt as if I were reading the diary of a good friend. Of course, given that she has a thriving literary career, a flexible schedule, supportive friends and family, and health insurance-not to mention a primary care doc who puts other patients and the pharmacist on extended hold to chat with her during office visits-this is one friend who could make you really jealous.

Still, Shea is aware of her privileges and acknowledges the challenges faced by other women, including Luz, a Latina woman who sits opposite her in the waiting room each day and worries that by taking time off for treatment she could lose her job. Luz is 50 years old, with three kids and one grandchild, all of whom live with her. "It could be worse," Shea reassures herself, "and here it is in front of me in 3-D full-color Kleenex-plucking life."

There are some germinating kernels of activism in the text, enough to make Shea (like journalist Barbara Ehrenreich before her) one of BCA's honorary "bad girls" of breast cancer. Consider her take on Breast Cancer Awareness Month: she laments that most of the women's magazine coverage "was devoid of information or simply was feel-good material that skirted reality." More specifically, Shea writes, there were accomplishments including adopting a child, starting up an outdoor-adventure company, learning to speak French, and noticing the grass growing. All good and admirable, but I found it horribly off-putting. I searched the pages for the boxes that began with, "I had breast cancer and then I fell off the edge of the earth and was hanging on by, like, one hand, then four fingers, then three, then two, then one, having tons of people who wanted to help but still feeling that alone, that freaked out, that misunderstood, and then I had surgery and treatments and needed to think for a thousand days, but now..." Then-only then-could come the new career as a gluten-free restaurant chef or the life as a foster parent for at-risk teens from a dozen third-world countries. Let's have some acknowledgement of the middle part of the process. Please."

Shea also describes her mixed feelings about the abundance of fliers and pamphlets advertising self-help classes for breast cancer patients in everything from alternative medicine to exercise to cooking. Like a student reviewing extracurricular activities at college orientation, she is glad they are available but intimidated by their scope and variety.

Although here (as is often the case) suffering has led to great artistic expression, it is interesting to consider recent reports on brachytherapy, a prospective new form of radiation treatment in which a balloon catheter inserts radioactive "seeds" into the breast after a tumor is removed. The experimental treatment delivers a concentrated dose of radiation directly to the site where cancer is most likely to recur, a process lasting (gasp) only five days for women with early stage breast cancer.

Regardless of whether this new form of treatment proves successful, there are still many women who have experienced or will experience the six-week radiation process, and they are likely to find comfort and kinship in Shea's account. I would love to see groups of people discussing this book. I am not sure that there is broad enough appeal for a general book club, but certainly folks in breast cancer support groups could read and discuss it together.