azurelunatic | Clang, clang, clang

Friday. After some discussion, I'd been found a 6:30 (pm, thankfully) appointment to make up for the missed appointment on the day of my port. Traffic was not, after all, a complete cluster, despite the First Lady visit.

It was weird being in the building so late after most parts of it are closed. It's too quiet.

When I was called back, I asked if Belovedest could walk back with me, and take a look at things. They could! I showed them the lasers, and then put on my safety goggles. I shucked off my shorts and unders and stuffed them in my bag, then hopped up on the platform, pulling up my skirts as the techs gave me a nice warm privacy blanket over my lower half. "But where would I put it?" I asked, when the techs told me that I could take the leg mold home with me if I wanted.

Belovedest got to watch while the techs positioned me just right and rolled out the KV head for the quick scan, and then left with them, going back out to the waiting room. The thick vault door closed behind them, quiet on its slow motor.

I waited up there on the platform as the machinery hummed around me. The great big vault door is inaudible from my place on the platform, but the tech came in to do last adjustments and draw the last dry-erase(?!) marks on my sides and front. The kilovolt head went back against the wall, and its sensor hummed back to origin as well.

They have music on, so the room's never silent, and there are cameras on me so I'm never quite alone. The main head rotated into position, then started making its crispy beeping hum, like a stepper motor that can sing two notes and two notes only. The clicks of the machinery that feeds the linac the awesome amount of electricity it uses to destroy and heal.

And soon enough it was over. The techs grounded the platform, helped me sit up. I made sure to put on my pants before my shoes. I made sure I had all my things before coming out into the quiet little circle. Belovedest. The other techs, including the one who'd been in the control room the whole time. Belovedest, holding their phone up.

I'd thought about what I might say. It's an occasion. An opportunity. A milestone. I read the little poem on the wall by the bell. A few couplets, not to my taste. Time for the prepared speech, then.

"Fuck cancer," I said. Loudly, clearly, enunciating as though I were a lady instead of just playing one ineptly around the gender-obtuse. I rang the bell the prescribed three times. Everyone clapped.

Belovedest and I headed for the exit, and the next nervous, medical gowned patient stepped through the invisible line of the circle and toward her own hopes and fears and future.