Lesions in my parietal lobe, which Dr. Atkins pointed out to us during our last visit, may be giving rise to other problems I’m experiencing. The parietal lobe has a role in processing topographic memory, the ability to recall the shape and structure of a previously experienced place or to hold in one’s mind the map of a place. It’s also involved in motor planning, the ability to plot and execute skilled tasks that aren’t habitual. And it’s involved in the ability to have insight into one’s illness, which I clearly lack. For me, all of these functions are now impaired.
Incredibly, though, my writing ability is not deteriorating at all; if anything, it’s getting stronger despite my short-term memory problems. Not only are my language skills still intact, they are also surprisingly robust. Perhaps fueled by the steroids, my creativity is on fire. I awaken at four or five o’clock each morning and prop myself up in bed, my laptop on my knees. My mind is swirling with ideas on how to describe what I feel. My emotions and memories are so intense, and sometimes so bizarre, that I have to turn them into words, both to unload the burden and to share these vivid recollections with others before they fade. It’s as if I’m compensating for the shortfalls of real life by transferring them onto virtual paper: a computer screen.
I write about my childhood in Poland, about my beloved grandma taking us into the primitive, remote villages of the Beskid Mountains on our summer vacations. With an overpowering delight, I retrieve long-forgotten memories of the smell of sweet hay and cow manure. I gather mushrooms in the woods, cross icy streams, and pick wild blackberries with my grandma and my little sister. These memories from more than fifty years ago are so vivid and pleasurable that I don’t want them to disappear. I type pages and pages recalling when my sister and I were little girls living in a world far away. I remember it as clearly as if it happened yesterday.
When Maria comes to visit in July, I share these memories with her. She’s amazed and delighted at the incredible details I can recall from our earliest years. But I also detect that reminiscing about our childhood makes her sad, although I don’t know why. Only later will I realize that she, like everyone in my family, is traumatized by the prospect that soon I will cease to exist, and memories of me will be all that will remain.
Throughout July, family members take turns visiting me: my sister and her husband, then Kasia, then my son and Cheyenne, then Kasia again. They keep me company, and I like it. It’s flattering that they pay so much attention to me but they’re all anxious and somber. I sense that something is horribly wrong and that’s why they’re rotating through here so often, but I can’t figure out what they’re worried about. Since I began taking high doses of steroids I don’t have headaches anymore, which is a great relief. I am upbeat, unmoved by the latest news of the multiple new metastases in my brain.
Tumors. More tumors. Oh, well. What I should make for lunch today?
I’m feeling almost happy. And I would feel even better were it not for the uneasy sense that my family knows something I don’t—some kind of a tragic secret that I don’t fully comprehend.
8
Chanterelles
A week after being released from Georgetown University Hospital, I return as an outpatient to undergo radiation treatment to most of the fifteen or so new tumors in my brain, including the ones that weren’t radiated before I started the clinical trial. For the time being, only the two smallest—tumors too tiny to target—will be left untreated.
This is the first time I will undergo the CyberKnife procedure. As opposed to the stereotactic radiosurgery that I received in March after neurosurgery at the Brigham, the CyberKnife Robotic Radiosurgery system is almost fully automated. Now, as I did in March, I lie strapped to a gurney with a plastic mask tightly covering my face to hold my head still, a mask that was, in both cases, custom-made for me from plastic mesh. With the CyberKnife, sophisticated software is aided by ongoing CT scanning that tracks the tumors’ positions and reacts to even the tiniest movements of my head. The CyberKnife shoots beams of high-dose radiation into the tumors from multiple directions using a high-energy x-ray machine mounted on a robotic arm. Painless and noninvasive, there’s no cutting involved despite its name. But extreme accuracy is essential so that healthy tissue is spared while the tumors are destroyed. Relying on precise calculations and a great deal of planning, any targeted radiation procedure (either CyberKnife or SRS) involves an impressive team: physicists (like my sister, Maria Czerminska, an oncology physicist in Boston), radiation oncologists (like Dr. Collins at Georgetown and Dr. Aizer at the Brigham), and dosimetrists, who calculate the doses of radiation and determine the optimal beam trajectories to minimize damage to the healthy brain tissue.
As the CyberKnife zaps my tumors, I lie as still as possible and gaze at the ceiling in the darkened room. My mind wanders into meadows and woods; I visualize a brightly shining sun and follow imaginary kites that float in a blue sky. In my head, I rhyme verses in Polish about the wounds in my brain becoming filled with green grass and blooming violets while the sadness of these many days of stress slips slowly out into the woods.
BRAIN RADIATION
U naszej mamy glowa dziurawa,
W dziurach wyrasta zielona trawa
Przez dziury smutek splywa do lasu,
Na smutki szkoda jest glowie czasu.
W zielonej trawie fiolki, dmuchawce
I porzucone stare latawce.
W dziurawej glowie figle, chichotki.
Lekka jest glowa zielonej trzpiotki.
Holes like winter potholes dot my broken head,
They quickly fill with mud and make
