I’m wrapped up like a tootsie roll in a warm blanket. A fresh-faced Australasian doctor injects glucose into my veins. The sugar, or rather the reactive glucose makes its way down to my disease. I sleep, for an hour…Like a tasty treat my cancer is consuming my energy, and the one thing that has entered my body this morning.

 

I open my eyes to the doctor’s voice, I rise in my hospital gown. Everything is slow moving as we walk, down the long hall…A thirty-something Middle Eastern man in his gown, enters a patient room ahead and I think, oh no, not him too…

 

The PET (positron emission tomography) room is large and bare. I lay down on the long table with my head close to the O of the machine. I am sliding through the zero, back and forth and back, for an hour. It is painless and I imagine I am in a Sci-Fi film where a machine instantly rebuilds every single cell in my body.

A girl can dream, yes?

 

Instead, I am now radioactive and temporarily a danger to others, well, only to pregnant women and children.

 

Me, a danger?

 

I laugh.

 

I step out of the room, a lady worn by time walks past and her gown falls off her left shoulder, she mutters something in Chinese. My steps match hers. Slow. Drawn out. Every thought, every feeling elongated, stretched by time. Two souls on a journey so many have unwillingly taken before. All ages, sizes, races. All someone’s child, someone’s friend, someone’s lover, brother, sister, father, mother.

 

The nurse hands my bag of clothes along with a white cheese sandwich and apple juice. A satisfying feast, after fasting and waiting.

 

Now, I wait again…hoping no other cancerous mass is lurking in another hard to reach place. So I keep marching forward, or rather crawl a slow crawl. Left, right, left, right, left, right to my next destination.

 

My surgeon’s table. Seven days and counting…

 

Love, Kerry Doyle xx

Photo Credit: Me