Good Guys

Yesterday was my second day to be radiated. It used to be we shot things into people to kill them: sticks, arrows, pellets, bullets. Now we shoot rays to kill parts of them. The rays shot into me damage the DNA in cells so that they don’t divide properly. Since the cancer cells are the ones most excited about dividing, they (theory goes) get killed off the fastest.  But everything in the path of the death ray gets affected: skin, bone, bone marrow, nerve, and tissue. There’s a 5% chance the radiation will affect my heart (at least it’s out of the way on the other side. But I have a lung under there getting radiated, and ribs). Apparently I turn brown and dry like fall leaves. I’m right in fashion. It’s a rayburn, like a sunburn. Because burning is what it is. I guess in this cold, fall weather with the sun covered up with white sky I should be glad that you can still get a (permanent) tan somewhere. My next appointment is today at 3:45 if anyone wants a turn. I have this spray you use to build up a film over your skin to protect it. It slowly wraps you in cellophane. You could borrow it.

Without the side effects you wouldn’t know anything was happening because everything goes so quickly and silently. You lie down, exposed, under a big machine which rotates around you, and everyone leaves you alone in the room, and you look up at the pretty picture they’ve built into the ceiling to tranquilize you, and you hear a dozen buzzes and see a flashing red light on the wall behind you warning a dozen times, “BEAM ON,” and then the youthful people dressed in purple come back into the room, cover you up and let you out, and you’re done. Maybe it’s been 15 minutes. But the rays aren’t done. They go on killing for hours, days, weeks, months. The cells just keep dying. You’re counting on the dead cells being the bad guys. They ask the first time, “Is there any chance you’re pregnant?” Because their rays never can tell the difference between the good guys and the bad.

There’s a parable about that. A farmer wakes up to find that there are weeds in his field. Unlike the weeds of today, which make it into fields on their own, these are intentional weeds, like death rays, that someone has actually shot into this guy’s field. I’m sure my farmer friends must feel that way about weeds sometimes—that someone put them there maliciously. We sure feel that way about cancer. I’m convinced that my cancer didn’t just arrive in my body but was planted there by Evil in some natural get-up, an Enemy in some familiar, neighborly guise like air, water, grain, soil or food. But the farmer doesn’t let his workers yank out the weeds. He lets them grow up with the grain, stealing nutrients and choking out the sunlight, because he doesn’t want to accidentally pull out a good guy. That farmer found it just as hard to separate out the bad guys as my radiologist does now. So they both make plans to keep the good seed going and bide their time, scheming. It’s a risk they take.

I’m glad neither throws out the baby with the bath water. At one time, that happened, only it was Flood water instead of bath. I’m glad we live in a different age. God always knew we’re all a mix of cancer and healthy tissue, and we’re all a mixture of good choices and bad. And all our creations are a mix of fine taste and lousy art. And sometimes we have to cut off the whole arm to avoid sin. But now is the age when we keep loving our kids and spouses and neighbors when they make bad choices (according to us), and we forgive ourselves when we fail because we’re forgiven already, and we keep looking for the good grain that is there, sprouting with the bad, sometimes almost impossible to distinguish, and we don’t give up, and we don’t go on the defensive, pulling everything up left and right. “Rejoice,” he says, and says again, “rejoice.” We  take heart and are glad because, whatever it looks like out there in the field today or under the death ray, the Good Guy is winning.