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        “To the left, to the left. All of your belongings are in a box to the left…” Ahh. You gotta love the mom-wrong lyrics. Mom used to sing Beyonce’s song with all the wrong lyrics, but she knew what she meant. She had the idea. Now whenever someone tells me “To the left,” I have to (sometimes unsuccessfully) stop myself from getting the Polish warble and singing her version right out loud. Now I’m realizing how much of a problem to the left, to the left really is. 

        At radiation, because our appointments are pretty much the exact same time every single day, you start to learn who the other patients are and you awkwardly run into them. Every day. In the parking lot, the waiting room, the hallway, waiting for the bathroom. So you have to talk to them. Because ignoring them would be even more weird. There’s one lady scheduled at my same time, different doctor, so we end up sitting next to each other in matching robes on most days. She made a comment on how fast the radiation treatment is. “Yes,” I respond. “It really is fast,” but I notice she doesn’t say anything about holding her breath. 

        “Breast cancer?” she asks.

        “Yes. You, too?” I respond.

        “Yes,” she responds. 

        “Do you have to hold your breath?” I ask.

        “No!” she responds, crinkling her makeuped nose.

        “I have to hold my breath. Is yours on the right?” I say.

        “Yep, on the right,” she says.

        “Mine’s on the left. So I have to hold my breath to pull my heart and my lung away from the area they’re radiating,” I explain. Lucky me. That’s when I realize how much of a bitch having left-sided breast cancer really can be.

        The worst parts about radiation (so far) are the positioning and the breath-holding. I Googled how long you have to hold your breath to have radiation on the chest wall, and the results said 20 seconds. 20 seconds, my ass! I asked the tech how long the “arcs” are. 49 seconds. FORTY-NINE seconds of holding my breath! Forty-nine seconds of feeling my cells fight for oxygen, drowning in carbon dioxide. Forty-nine seconds of holding as still as possible, trying not to make your heart race because that makes the clawing for oxygen even worse. No wonder I begin to panic. Probably around the 35-second mark is when the panic really sets in. They do one CT scan and four arcs, so each of those is almost a full minute of my breath holding. Talk about torture. Five forty-nine second snippets of torture.

        Now let’s talk about the positioning. I’m lying on my back, topless, with my arms above my head holding onto bars. Think, tied-to-the-railroad-tracks style. Kidnapped and tied to the headboard style.  It took me MONTHS of physical therapy to be able to raise my left arm, let alone ALL THE WAY above my head while lying down, holding onto bars. My arm begins to fall asleep in a really painful-I-wanna-move type of way. But I have to hold incredibly still. 

        I’m put in place by lasers. Not that the lasers actually hold me in place, but the techs align my body with the lasers. The very first appointment, they tattooed me! They tattooed tiny dots in each armpit and the middle of my chest, and that’s how they line my body up, one sheet-drag at a time, to be sure they’re radiating the right parts. So I can’t move.

        I’ve tried different things to prevent panicking, to be able to hold my breath longer, to hold still better. Thinking about the lack of oxygen in your cells apparently isn’t very helpful at all. Neither is trying to relax and thinking of a peaceful place. What I’ve found to be the most effective is to pretend like I’m hiding from my killer. I mean, I’m already tied to the railroad track/headboard. So I hold my breath and act like my life depends on it. Because it does.