About a third of the way through your radiation treatment, you've gotten used to lying on the table with your hands stretched, bondage-style, over your head while technicians yell at you not to move and insist you play dead while they haul you around getting you into the right position. Once you're there, they whip out their Sharpies and draw in the most ticklish areas, all the while insisting that you not move a muscle.
Then you get to see the doctor. You're done with the five-minute tanning bit (it feels like that, as long as you can tune out the grunting and clicking of the huge mechanical arm over your head) and you dress and enter the office of Dr. I'm-in-a-hurry-I'm-so-cool. He fingers the underwire of your bra.
"Oh, this is no good! You shouldn't wear this! Metal on irradiated skin!"
"Oh, okay," I said, "I didn't know."
"Besides, you are small! You are about an A-cup, right?" He doesn't pause for a reply. Big grin. "So you don't need a bra. You can just wear an undershirt."
"Oh," I say, as he whirls out with a big smile, saying, "It's all normal! To be depressed is normal!"
"I'm no more depressed than usual," I say to his retreating figure, which is already halfway down the hall to inspect the next patient.
Except that actually, after that conversation, I'm not exactly cheered up.
Nine radiations down, twenty-one to go.
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