Segovia and Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS)
Posted by CecilieScott on 05/24/12, 9:11:48 AM

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I am immobilized, face masked with plastic mesh warmed yesterday enough to drape and shape over nose, mouth, chin, eyes, and throat, my shoulders strapped tight and rigid. The plastic tongue protruding from the mask into my mouth and over my tongue makes me want to swallow. My hands rest on my belly just south of my navel, my fingers barely touching beneath the warmed flannel reaching all the way to my toes.

Would you like music? Classical? Yes, how about Segovia? Perfect. So between the clicks and buzzes of the machine that towers above my head, the old master of the guitar serenades me while I edit the chapter I’ve been working on, the last one of Knowing Bodies. I believed, a superstition of course, that I’ll get through this radiation session without damage to my brain if, and only if, I’ve finished the book. And I’ve done that, well enough to send to my editor. But stretched out on the table I still edit this short chapter that hovers at 560 words despite cuts and additions, the length that it insists upon:

Frank and me at Salt Beach sixteen years ago, one year after Miriamma’s death, his prostate cancer background noise by then, me post-mastectomy and in my last year of five on tamoxifen——the odds of recurrence virtually the same as if I’d never had breast cancer. Tide pools flowering with sea anemones and littered with scraps of mussel shell. Five cormorants arrayed on a log beyond the surf. How will the reader see the cormorants? Black, or sooty, long necked? Frank perched on a sun-warmed log as he writes, his bare toes burrowing in the sand. Don’t linger, I tell myself. What isn’t said by now not needed.

—— How are you doing? We have time to go on to the second tumor.

—— Go for it! Not easy to say with the plastic against my tongue.

I straighten my arms along my sides, wriggling fingers and toes past tingles until the numbness passes. I wonder how Frank is doing in the waiting room, hope they’re taking care of him there. That’s when I realize I don’t understand the process. Why didn’t I ask? I long for that implant beloved of sci-fi writers, the promised direct access to an all-knowing information network. Clearly, this isn’t surgery. No hole in my skull, no way to directly remove these tumors. Are they shattered? Deconstructed? What happens to the debris? The next day a Google search reveals each med center site supplies the same vague information, probably supplied by the manufacturer. At last I hit the jackpot at Texas Oncology:

SRS is a non-surgical procedure that delivers precisely-targeted radiation at much higher doses than traditional radiation therapy with minimal damage to surrounding healthy tissue. [It works] in the same way as other forms of radiation treatment. The process does not actually remove the tumor, but the radiation causes it to shrink. By damaging the DNA of tumor cells, these cells cannot reproduce. Malignant and metastatic tumors may shrink more rapidly, even within a couple of months.

By the time I meet Frank in the waiting area, Radiation Oncology is deserted except for those who’ve been taking care of me. Dr. K is clearly pleased, reassuring for Frank who’d noticed him wringing his hands during our last meeting. No MRI needed for the next three months. I leave with instructions on how to taper off the steroids. My mind, my sleep, returned to me, I can forget about the oncologist for now—next week, next month, we’ll deal with that. Meanwhile, there’s Andrés Segovia playing Asturias on You Tube.

Tags: radiosurgery, Segovia, SRS, stereotaptic

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Recent Publications
Posted by CecilieScott on 02/22/10, 2:50:12 PM

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Monday morning, a good time to act as if I'm well organized.
When you live at the post office, each acceptance is a thrill.
Here's what and where I've published in the past 7 years:

As You Make Your Bed
StringTown, Issue #11, 2009

To Hold Infinity
VoiceCatcher 4, 2009

I Have Been to Jero Tapakan
Ink-Filled Page: Red Anthology, Vol. 3, 2009

Acceptable Risk
Crab Orchard Review, Vol. 13, 2008 Winter/Spring

Restoration
The Healing Muse, Vol. 7, 2007

Slowly, Slowly
Dos Passos Review, Vol.2.1, 2005

I Lift My Eyes
Raven Chronicles, This Neutral Air, Special 9/11 Issue, Vol. 10, No.4, 2003

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Do we need a Democrat who supported the nomination of Clarence Thomas?
Posted by CecilieScott on 04/28/09, 2:37:35 PM

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Reports today suggest that Democratic officials promised Specter that the party establishment would support him, rather than a real Democrat, in a primary. If true, few events more vividly illustrate the complete lack of core beliefs of Democratic leaders, as well as the rapidly diminishing differences between the parties. Why would Democrats want a full-blooded Republican representing them in the blue state of Pennsylvania? Specter is highly likely to reprise the Joe Lieberman role for Democrats: a "Democrat" who leads the way in criticizing and blocking Democratic initiatives, forcing the party still further towards Republican policies. --Glenn Greenwald in Salon

Arlen Specter is still linked in my memory to his image on the TV screen that hung above a reception desk at Virginia Mason Medical Center. I was checking in for my first appointment with a breast cancer surgeon, and there Specter was, all prosecutorial, questioning Anita Hill. The woman behind the desk paused as Hill answered him, and we nodded to each other, pleased to see her holding steady under fire.

The Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court had taken an unexpected detour with Anita Hill's testimony. Another woman had found herself where she did not want to be: "It would have been more comfortable to remain silent . . . I took no initiative to inform anyone . . . I could not keep silent."

And so it went with all my pre-op appointments that day. I traded reactions to the hearing with the women who poked, measured, and interviewed me. With the men I stuck to the business at hand, finding myself actively disliking them, willing to characterize all men, for those few hours, as either malevolent or inept. It probably would have been more fair to substitute "Democrats" for "men" in that characterization.

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Can regulation get AIG off the hook for criminal behavior?
Posted by CecilieScott on 03/27/09, 11:08:19 AM

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I'm surprised to find myself close to Ron Paul on the issue of regulation. But after following the story of AIG's Financial Products unit, their London-based division, I think an exclusive concern with regulation misses the point.

As I understand it, this division raked in profits for AIG by selling insurance without sufficient collateral to back it up. They did this by deliberately setting up a corporate structure for this division that would allow it to escape insurance regulations that would otherwise require this collateral. In other words, they slid out from existing regulations.

If a burglar enters my home because the door is unlocked, it's still a crime. If a corporation evades the barriers to a crime, is it just good business?

In the case of AIG, it looks like fraud, smells like fraud, and it seems as if criminal charges should have been considered as part of any bail-out discussion.

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Abroad Is Always Closed
Posted by CecilieScott on 03/11/09, 2:20:23 PM

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For some reason, these words of wisdom, a quote from Italian Days by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, are a catch phrase in my family.

I travel with peanuts, cashews, almonds, or Balance bars, Gold bars, 40-30-30 bars, with string cheese from supermarkets or rich local cheeses. My purse or backpack never lacks for protein. Fear drives my prudence.

Memories of family trips blur into a single bad trip, Frank behind the wheel as dusk turns to dark, pushing on to find the promised campground, motel, diner, our own stash of food inaccessible in the Volkswagen camper, the International TravelAll, the Nissan Sentra, packed away beneath children in the years they traveled with us, children asleep or sullen or querulous. Inevitably, I've doled out the last of the protein and we're left with brown bananas, softening plums, a bag of raisins, when my blood sugar drops, taking with it all good sense. I cling to the last shreds of maternal decency by shutting up and tuning out, incapable of reasoned discourse.

Later, children grown, Frank and I travel by station wagon or Toyota pickup, food still remote in the back, under the canopy, passing California freeway exits. Along with the shakes and bad temper comes my inability to make a decision. I'm convinced that all choices offered are bad and the situation hopeless. By the time Frank leaves the freeway we're in a small town—empty streets, all restaurant lights turned off, only a motel offering packets of coffee, sugar, non-dairy creamer in a rough-carpeted room. The headache will come, does come, and anger with my husband for whom hunger is an inconvenience, who remains his own good-natured self.

I hate who I become—and then there's the fear. I've blacked out before, briefly, regaining my balance when the darkness clears, able to find food, to eat slowly, gratefully. But I don't know what lies at the other side of that darkness. Would it last? Would it be like diving into deep water, my natural buoyancy bringing me back to the surface? Or not? A black hole sucking me in? Might I trust, turn to sleep, breathe slow and even, sleep until morning. I remind myself that when there's nothing to be done, it's better to do nothing.

But the quieter I grow the greater Frank's concern, as irritating as the scratchy underside of the quilted motel bedspread. I don't want sympathy. I turn away, thinking but not saying, Don't remind me that you're here. I'll only blame you. It's all your fault. You were driving. You wouldn't stop. You'd point out diners only after we passed the exit. Never go back—some principal! I hug my anger to me, pressing it to me until the hard stone against my belly feels like peace.

God bless the child that's got her own—at night in California on Highway 101, at noon in Rome when every store is closed till four, outside the train station in Firenze with only a gellateria open, or on Bali's north coast when the small warung offers only salty peanuts, shrimp crackers, or sweetened, tepid tea.

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Publishing in the Shadows
Posted by CecilieScott on 03/01/09, 1:57:27 PM

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I've just finished reading a self-published book, Kay Newell Plumb's Using Beauty and her Beast to Introduce the Human Shadow. Well worth the time and the $25 spent, but still an illustration of the benefits and drawbacks of self-publishing.

• Lots of illustrations by a professional artist and integral to the text.
• Horrendous struggle by the author to detach it from a printer who promised more than he could deliver.
• Muddy cover, which will be replaced in the next printing.
• Complete authorial control of text, design, and artwork.

The resulting book is a labor of love by a writer clearly knowledgeable and dedicated to presenting a clear, nontechnical introduction to Jung's concept of the shadow with the goal of providing the reader with a clear enough understanding to recognize personal and social projections of the shadow and to "minimize the negative and maximize the positive in your own shadow."

Plumb uses the fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast, to show the shadow, in all its shifting shapes, at work. She writes of the power of naming our own shadows, introducing us to two of her own, the Preacher and the Princess. And she uses both of them in shaping her book. The Princess, with her insistence on the importance of detail, got her way with the illustrations. And the Preacher lets loose with a major section, The National Shadow.

I'm grateful to Plumb for creating this book. It was a refresher for me, and a needed one. (It's the nature of the shadow to stay out of plain sight.) But I'd love to see the next edition available in a trade paperback from a national publisher at a lower price. It would be more enticing that way, and therefore more widely recommended, given, and read.

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Restoration
Posted by CecilieScott on 02/15/08, 10:38:24 AM

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I'm delighted to place my story, "Restoration," in Volume 7, 2007, of The Healing Muse because it's a great fit.

The Healing Muse is the annual journal of literary and visual art published by SUNY Upstate Medical University's Center for Bioethics & Humanities. This journal welcomes fiction, poetry, narratives, essays, memoirs and visual art, particularly but not exclusively focusing on themes of medicine, illness, disability and healing. I'm in distinguished company, for it's a thick journal filled with fine explorations and examples of the ways we live in and with our bodies.

Written as a section of my book, Knowing Bodies, a memoir of travel in Bali and through cancer, the opening paragraphs of Restoration follow.

RESTORATION
by Cecilie Scott

Eleventh floor: etched glass doors, art deco lounge, all quite tasteful. Magazines on the blond Parsons table, Vogue, Elle, New Yorker, an upscale selection replacing the non-selection of the lower level waiting rooms (Cancer Society brochures in Radiation in the basement, various Medical Center brochures in Oncology on two, outdated People magazines in Short Stay on five). And, wonder of wonders, windows through which we who wait can watch Seattle's pale November sun warm the gray buildings stepping down the hill to Elliott Bay. I assumed a wait and settled in, pulling a yellow pad from my backpack to note these distinctions and add this snarky comment to my journal, 'Clearly I have arrived.' (Like most patients, I tried to show a proper attitude.)

Such elegance held more promise than actuality for the two of us in the waiting room. A frail woman in her mid-sixties had been wheeled in and parked in her chair. Neatly dressed, but definitely not Vogue, not Elle, she wore a shoe on one foot and a pink slipper on the other, and above the slipper I could see her ankle and lower leg, splotched red and cruelly scarred by burns. And me? No visible scars, but neither Vogue nor Elle, a candidate for a breast that was not a breast but a mound of silicone sheathed in muscle.

Reconstruction, like Vogue, deals with image. Substance--delicious nerve endings, breast as organ of perception--was no longer an issue. We wouldn't talk of such things there. Although cancer treatment redefined my body as object, artifact, and construct, I resisted as identity splintered and new patterns coalesced, for even a cyborg may feel nostalgia for a lost unity, however illusory. And yes, I knew I'd always been a part of a complex human system--never a pure child of nature.

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