I woke up with my legs strapped into stirrups and two doctors trying to maneuver something in between them. I felt a strange twisting sensation and then a pain so intense I thought I was being stabbed through my cervix.
I yelled out. A nurse took my hand, while another increased my pain medication. The doctors kept working.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing myself to fall back to sleep. This is temporary, I reminded myself. I’ll get through this just like childbirth and all the hospital procedures I’ve endured during my treatment for cervical cancer.
My head was pounding and my hips were aching from being stuck in such an awkward position. I was nauseous, but also starving.
This wasn’t like the first round of brachytherapy (a type of internal radiation) I had four days ago. As with most things that terrify you, that one wasn’t as bad as I’d expected, though the four-hour procedure involved a lot of needles and doctors aiming high doses of radiation at my tumor.
When I got to the hospital this morning, all I could think about was getting through this session so I could officially be halfway through the treatment. But unlike that first round, today was excruciating.
The space reminded me of some kind of alien abduction site. It was star-shaped, with metallic furnishings. There was one giant, bright light in one section, a CT scan in another, and me lying on what the staff called a “hover bed”, in a third.
I counted six doctors, nurses and techs working around me. They hooked me up to oxygen, and gave me anti-nausea medication along with Ibuprofen. And then at some point, the Versed, a medication that would help put me in a type of twilight state, kicked in and I was asleep.
There is something very daunting about waking up to so much pain with the procedure still going on. I stared up at the image that was projected through a lightbox on the ceiling right above my head. It was a scene of a prairie covered with wheat and a lake that, with the light shining through it, seemed to glisten. Something about it reminded me of a scene from the 1973 dystopian thriller Soylent Green.
I love disaster movies, and for half a second I was amused by how fitting it was to be staring up at this scene, during this experience, in the middle of a pandemic.
“This really hurts,” I managed to say. They responded by once again upping the dosage of pain medication, telling me I was doing great and that we would all get through this together.
Somehow, lying in that room, I suddenly felt a little better. Being able to complain and have my complaints heard made me feel like I had power. I had a voice, and in that moment that’s all I needed.
