Inside the Radiation Chamber

 

Suzanne Strempek Shea, breast cancer

It’s in the quiet places that you can hear yourself breathe, places without time or expectations that hold you, where you feel the terror of cancer and find the resolve to live.

When Anne Pinkerton suggested I read Suzanne Shea’s book, Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, I thought it would be a short read because nothing much happened when I spent five weeks in the radiation chamber. You come in, lie down, try not to think about how much radiation is being beamed into your body, get radiated, and go home. Come back the next day, and do it again. Diagnosed at age 41 with breast cancer, Suzanne had surgery and radiation. I finally found a companion to my experience.

Suzanne brings her weeks of radiation to life by talking with other cancer patients in the waiting room. Her room seems twice as large as my waiting cubicle that had six chairs where I talked to the person who went in ahead of me and the one who followed. At times, it is so busy at her place that patients in hospital beds are lined up along the hallway. For Suzanne, the patients have interesting stories and backgrounds, at least among those who feel like talking. When a couple or a family shows up, she tries to guess which one has cancer and what kind. Seeing patients every day who are in worse shape reminds her of the somberness of her situation. One day, looking over the assembled individuals, she notices that “They are all tired, sick of it, waiting for the day when everything will be over and they can get on with their lives.” 

When she’s not being radiated, she works to hold herself and the rest of her life together, as well as push through her exhaustion to finish her next novel. She writes, “I sleep thirteen hours a night, plus an afternoon nap,” and tries not to let her thoughts of despair “get its claws in.”

When the nurse said she had cancer, she felt she was dumped out on a road and doesn’t know where she is or how to go on. Her husband Tommy was dumped on a different road, and while she appreciates Tommy trying to help her out, she realizes that he can’t fully understand what she’s going through. She wants to share everything she’s experiencing with him, but she also doesn’t want to complain all the time, and concludes that “We are both alone, together.” (86) She notices how little attention is given to the loved ones of women with breast cancer, the caregivers, and that Tommy has scars from her cancer, too.

If you’ve had cancer, you will resonate with her saying that her calendar pages are filled up doctors’ appointment, and that she scans the obits trying to find ages and causes of death, wary of one day become one of them. Suzanne has a cancer counselor she calls “the guru” who helps unravel her thoughts and feelings and keep her on an even keel. Before radiation begins, she voices her fears: “I don’t want this…. I whoosh unprotected down the icy incline of helplessness and unknowing.” (7) She describes being lined up in the radiation machine with the lasers that come from different directions, then “the red warning light starts up and the machine hisses and then falls silent as it does its work.” (23)

When you have cancer, you feel a “strange removal from regular life,” Suzanne says. I laughed when she writes, “If I have to have cancer … I want some kind of prize at the end.” Amen to that. Even though she knows it’s not true, she says, “I … still feel the guilt that I am responsible for this illness that has head-on-collisioned my life.” I don’t think this nagging doubt goes away for any of us.

Early in her book, she writes that on TV, patients who are afflicted by a serious illness, or falling off a mountain, are all photogenic, fight back against the adversity, and quickly recover. We know all too well that having cancer takes up a lot of time. 

She bemoans the expectations of our society that cancer patients should always be positive. On some days, it’s hard to be positive about anything. You physically feel horrible, you’re in pain, no food tastes good, you have no energy, and you don’t want to plaster on a happy face when you go shopping for groceries. On these days you don’t want to interact with anyone, and you want to say, “Get out of my way! Leave me alone, I’m trying to buy turnips!”

Being positive all the time is toxic because it blocks you from paying attention to what your emotions and your body are trying to tell you, and you lose touch with who you are and what you need. Left unacknowledged, these emotions fester and become chronic conditions. In addition, other people can’t help you if they don’t know where you are hurting, and they learn nothing about the unglamorous realities and fears of coping with cancer.

Her emotions droop as radiation goes on. She writes, “I wanted some writer, or reader, to mention the hopeless feeling. How the disease messes with not only your body but your mind and life…,” and brings back every unresolved problem you’ve ever had.

It’s not helpful when people tell her that she doesn’t really have cancer because she didn’t go through chemotherapy, as if throwing up is THE definition of being a cancer warrior. I struggle with feeling I have cancer-lite, too. Yet our cancers will kill us if nothing is done, and no treatment is easy. They are each traumatic. Everyone who has gone through cancer develops emotional and physical scars.

Except for a number of passages in this book, I’ve not found where Suzanne has written in detail about her diagnosis or surgery, but here she does let us know that her surgical procedures were not gentle: “my left breast dangling through a hole in the raised table while … a radiologist drilled repeatedly for samples,” (5) a “radiologist snaking a thin wire into her left breast to help the surgeon find his mark.” Radiation repeatedly burns her skin as she endures six weeks of cobalt radiation (gamma rays), and a week of a different kind of radiation. Each radiation session for breast cancer reburns the already tender area and turns the skin black.

Every time I open Suzanne’s book to check on a quote, I am drawn back into the cadence of her narrative, uncover more of Suzanne’s thoughts and insights, and end up reading long passages for the companionship. I am so appreciative of this book.

A friend advised her, “After cancer, everything you do will reflect back on the experience [of cancer].”

I like her note near the end where she writes, “There is a Native American belief about the soul having to catch up with the body after a long journey is made.” It takes time to find yourself after treatments are over, and accept how you have changed.

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Anne is the author of Were You Close?, a moving memoir of losing her brother. She says that Suzanne is doing well more than twenty years later. I am hoping that she seldom has had to think about cancer.

© 2026 Mark Liebenow