"To the God of Radiation."
And I think even if there's one more after this,
we'll just stop with this one.
"To the God of Radiation."
So my treatment chemo, mastectomy,
PET scan which came back with what they call NED.
In breast cancer, you never are in remission, you're NED.
Hi, I'm NED.
It means No Evident Disease.
And so at this point, I'm in radiation.
And it was the final--
It was like, I don't know, two or three days from the final day
of radiation.
And I had gotten it down.
Radiation, you go in every day for 30 days
except for the weekends.
So there's a system.
And in this particular place you walked in,
you whipped your shirt off in front of god and everybody.
Whoever was in the room, there were three people,
eight people, two people, no people, didn't matter.
Rip your shirt off, lay down, and then they line everything up
for you.
So I walked into the room already like this.
And then my oncologist was in there, [CHUCKLES]
which is never a good sign.
Also, she had no reason to see any of this.
At that moment, I was like, oh, hi.
[CHUCKLES] Sorry, I didn't know you were going to be in here.
And she said, all right, well, we
did a scan during your last radiation appointment.
And there's a thing in there.
There's a bit of mustard.
We don't know what it is.
It could be cancer.
It looks like an inflamed lymph node.
Or it might just be a bit of inflammation generally.
It might not be cancerous.
But because of where it is, we can't actually
do a biopsy on it.
It's too deep into--
it was almost on my shoulder blade,
if you can imagine, going all the way back.
And I said, well, OK.
Well, what can we do about it?
And she said, well, we can give it an extra blast of radiation,
a booster is what they call it.
Some people do them, some people don't.
But basically they go over and above your lifetime allotment
of radiation that you're supposed
to get in order to hopefully fry it,
I guess is the best way to think about it.
And she said the problem is because of where it is,
it's going to go through this portion of your shoulder
basically where all of your muscles and nerves
kind of pass through that.
And she said because I had had nerve damage from my mastectomy,
she said, chances are you won't be
able to recover from that fully as a result of this treatment.
Also, we don't know but you could end up
with nerve damage in the future.
And I was like, what could that look like?
And she was like, well, it might just be some stiffness
or you could feel like your arm's on fire
for the rest of your life.
I was like, oh, great.
And she said, and it could happen in two days
and it could happen in 20 years.
And we don't really understand why this happens.
And we don't really understand the mechanisms of it.
We don't really understand.
I said, OK.
Well, what would you do?
And I love this radiation oncologist.
She said, I have honestly been up all night
thinking about what I would tell my daughter, or my mother,
or what choice I would make myself.
And she said, for me, it's as close to 50/50 as anything
I've experienced in my career.
And I don't feel like it's really right for me to tell you
what to do.
But I can be honest that I don't know what to do.
And that's a hard thing for a doctor to say,
I have discovered, among my many,
many encounters with doctors.
And I appreciate her a great deal for that.
And that's what this poem is about,
is about trying to make that decision.
"To the God of Radiation."
Given the unexpected choice between
uncertain death--
Oh, I forgot the punchline.
I said, what if we don't radiate it?
And she said, well, [CHUCKLES] if it is cancer,
if it does turn out to be cancer,
we can't perform any more radiation
because you have had more than your lifetime's worth.
Chemotherapy was unfortunately completely
useless against my cancer.
It didn't shrink it at all.
And they couldn't perform another surgery
both because of where it was and because my skin has already
been so damaged by radiation.
So basically, it would be untreatable
and would eventually kill me.
[CHUCKLES WRYLY] So sorry, that was an important part
of the story.
Back to the poem.
"To the God of Radiation."
Given the unexpected choice between
uncertain death and certain damage,
I find in the mirror a woman--
breastless, burned-- who,
in an advisory capacity,
asks, how much do you
want to live?
Enough.
O God of Radiation,
let your light
like a ship pass through me,
Your radiance exposing,
exposing what's inside me
like film a God takes--
but must you clatter the eaves
of my scapula, scurry
the grasshopper nest of my heart, scythe my nerves
and cobweb my muscles
to the rungs
of my ribs?
How much more can one body take?
Enough.
Light every deadly cell like a wick
burning in the paper lantern of my chest--
My chest, a thing
so ephemeral
yet held so firmly in your fist.
Thank you so much.
[APPLAUSE]