Finding My Happy Place!

December 7, 2007

Here we are in week 2 of what I call phase 2 of our breast cancer road trip: radiation therapy or glowing to the beat. It's a bit of a let down from the high drama of anesthesia, vomitacious pain meds, and green and yellow swollen boobs...still it's an adventure along the martini trail Princess Di and I are traversing together each day.

Naturally I've got a few thoughts from the tray, the gizmo I lie on, as the cancer killing rays shoot across my naked left gazunga. It really is sort of an anti-climax to the hyper-seri-osity of surgery. The build up to this radiation phase seems overly arduous in retrospect. Those tattoos have just faded into my own personal landscape of moles and freckles and are now unrecognizable, except to Kim & Ronda our Nuclear Hotties in Waltham whose ray guns shoot us each day.

And thus, the surprisingly surreal yet UN-invasive quality of getting nuked is really sort of a welcome slow down. No needles, no pills, no stitches, only the slathering of extra-rich Aquaphor or Eucerin lotions around my slightly pink lefty, post-nuking and pre-bedtime.

For me, the hardest thing is taking my head to my happy place. On the first day of nuking I realized, with horror and embarrassment, that I was bereft of a happy place. This was a real problem as it took the Radiation Therapists; Kim & Ronda way more time than it should have to compel my poor, lumpy, UN-still, UN-cooperative body to stay in one place for efficacious nuking.

I left there thinking I was flunking something as easy as radiation therapy for want of a happy place! Oh my god what to do? After a blueberry martini, much contemplation, rigorous review of prospective happy places and worry that I would not find just the right happy place, I finally found one! Any guesses as to where/what my happy place is?

Well, let me tell you I scored a terrific happy place resulting in a rapid, joyous, serene journey each one of the nuking days this week! My nuclear happy place is my dream home in the Berkshires, somewhere on a hill or higher up with long vistas toward a mountain and a bit of water in the distance. Last Friday when I came in full of happy place enthusiasm, I lay right down on the tray, immediately nestling into position thinking myself to my happy place where I envisioned the kitchen cabinets in white or maple, distressed Shaker, or with more turnings, and so on. Today I was envisioning the living room with a couple of big slip covered comfy sofas covered in two or three different slip covers depending on the time of year. I really like the deep red for winter and the royal blue canvas for fall/spring with yellow linen as the decidedly summer color. It was heaven and the treatment was over rapido!

I had just enough time today to put some of my paintings around my happy place house. Well hey it is MY happy place, right? So I had a couple of my gal pal Mary's large pastels (http://www.maryclose.com/figurative-pastel.html) and my boy Michael Parkes (http://www.theworldofmichaelparkes.com/Pages/DreamForRosa.html) magical realism pieces around the great room along with a water color or two by some local Belmont artists I adore. Princess Di has a horse in her happy place and she gallops and jumps and cantors him through the Berkshires rolling greenery. . .perhaps she'll drop by my dream house for a post ride martini sometime next week! So, happy place in hand or head I should say, Princess Di and I are radiating in dreams of martinis on the deck overlooking the long vistas of my Berkshires happy place. Stay tuned for an open happy-place-house soon!

XOXOX
Elaine