I Was Radioactive In A Padded Yellow Room

This post is part of a series on cancer. Here are the previous posts: Cancer-Free…But Maybe Not; My Cancer Story; “The Girl With Cancer.” More stories to come, throughout February and possibly into March.

A few years ago, I wrote a short story for a writing class where I described a character going through radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid cancer in the mid 1990s, just as I did. I wrote about her drinking the radioactive drink, then being separated from her family and brought into a private hospital room draped with yellow plastic tarps and filled with disposable clothes, books and technology. She stayed there for four days, all alone, with an orderly dressed in a radiation suit bringing in her meals, and a doctor measuring her radioactivity daily with a geiger counter. During the four days, the girl experienced the full gamut of emotions, from calm to fear to boredom to anger. In the end, the anger boils over until she’s running around the room, pulling the yellow tarps off the walls, tearing at the duct tape holding it all together. She collapses on the floor under a wall of fallen tarps and cries until she’s able to feel peace again.

When this story went through the class workshop, everyone had strong emotional reactions to it, but I got several comments- including from the teacher- that went something like: “You never described the actual cancer treatment.” In this class, I wasn’t allowed to respond to any of the comments made, so I never got the chance to tell them, “That WAS the treatment. Being radioactive for four days, being isolated so as not to radiate others, that was the treatment.”

It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but that’s what happened to me; that was the treatment for thyroid cancer in the late 1990s. It still is, though I’m sure the exact procedure has changed with further testing and innovation. The yellow-padded room was true, too. I did live in it for four days- I did it twice- and wasn’t allowed to bring out anything that I brought in. It wasn’t so bad, entertainment-wise- I did have a phone, a tape player, a pile of mix tapes, several secondhand books, even a TV. My parents (though not my sister; too much risk) could visit and sit out in the hall, behind a little half-door where the geiger counter was kept. My dad and I played games of gin rummy by stacking our decks exactly the same, then making each other’s moves, calling them out across the room. At night, the hospital was quiet; I couldn’t hear the other patients, and the nurses couldn’t visit me except in an emergency.

It did get lonely, and I missed real human contact. But strangely enough, unlike my character, I didn’t go crazy, because I never really felt alone. I’m not sure whether to call it God, or a sense of inner peace, or just the knowledge that so many people out in the world were thinking and praying for me. Whatever it was, I felt it, and it kept me sane, stable, even content, despite the isolating, other-worldly circumstances.

That was the experience that taught me that even though life might force you to face difficult challenges on your own, you can carry your support in your heart. You can take the love and encouragement of your supporters with you wherever you go, and it gives you peace.

Whatever you are going through in your life, remember this: someone out there is thinking of you. Someone out there is caring about you. Carry that with you in your heart, and you’ll never be alone.