Journalist Erna Straatsma writes a column about her illness cancer© Photo Hielco Kuipers
Erna Straatsma
The radiotherapy waiting room is full of freaks. For weeks I am one of them.
With a bald head and a face without eyebrows, I am waiting for a first dose of radiation on a Monday morning. Next to me sits a woman with no nose. A little further on: a man with a missing jaw part.
There are patients with impressive head bandages and/or IV poles with dripping bags of chemo poison. They are in a wheelchair, lying in a hospital bed or limping inside. Older people and young people find each other here in their physical decay. The radiotherapy department is the clubhouse of cancer sufferers.
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The week before I follow a short course, because my radiation spot is in a difficult place, right next to my heart. Can you hold your breath for more than a minute? That’s really important. We don’t want your heart to be damaged.”
I have to practice on a simulation irradiation machine. Lying as still as a mouse for more than a minute, with lungs full of suction. To protect my heart muscle from cell-destroying radioactivity. The radiotherapist is therefore already mapping the upper left side of my torso. With a waterproof marker he draws lines and dots on and around the spot where the surgeon put his knife a few weeks earlier. Large chunks of tissue have been cut away, the plastic surgeon had a tough job turning the remains into something breast-like. The bandage is still in place where two surgeons did their work. All those preparations are not reassuring.
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“You can undress here,” says the woman who takes me out of the waiting room this morning. A cheerful, tidy type. She does everything she can to make me feel comfortable. It helps something. She takes me to a changing cubicle where there is a small mirror. I turn around quickly, sparing myself the humiliation of my reflection.
Half naked I then walk into a kind of bunker. I think of the phrase American death row inmates hear when they go to the execution site: “Dead man walking’. Moments later, the woman straps me onto a metal thing. “I’ll give you a signal if you have to hold your breath,” says the cheerful woman from another room, while I lie fixated on my electric chair. “No, nothing terrible is happening. If you move, the device switches off automatically.”
The session does not last very long, which makes a difference. Half an hour at the most, then you can go home. Tomorrow again. And the day after tomorrow too. Until the counter reaches thirty. Simple right?
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Reporter Erna Straatsma (1963), who works for this newspaper, has metastatic breast cancer. She talks about her life as a patient in the cancer circuit, or Vak K.