Radiation Diaries: Cancer, Memory and Fragments of a Life in Words

by Todd Janet

Overview

Radiation Diaries tells of a month of radiotherapy treatment undergone when Janet Todd was president of a Cambridge college and while her father, in his 100th year, was approaching death, with skin cancer. The day-by-day treatment brought into her mind flashes from her early life in Bermuda and Ceylon with her father, in Ghana and Puerto Rico, as a young woman, along with stored poems from childhood. Written each morning and night, it tells of the terror she induced in herself with insomniac nights on the web, searching out percentages of recoveries and death, of alternative treatments. Her reactions will be common to others who spend time in hospital-land. Todd’s experiences and writings will inspire and help others with these illness and treatments, and those who care for them.
Unflinching in detail, Radiation Diaries will strike chords for anyone who has suffered a life-threatening illness, but the book’s message is positive, for the author lives well and has a new career. Now 75, she completed her term as President of a Cambridge college, while ill, published further books and became a grandmother. Now she maintains her academic career with speeches and lectures, has become a novelist, and travelled to launch her fiction in US and the UK, while still recovering. Surrounded by family and friends, she continues her peripatetic existence, albeit more by creative work from her imagination and via computer than by frequent exotic travels to the places she has lived and taught.
“Janet Todd turns her renowned literary intelligence to her experience as a cancer patient. Original, forceful and often funny; there is no other cancer diary like it. The book’s clear-eyed detail is a reminder that indignity, pain and fear do not diminish memory, imagination or the self.” Terri Apter, psychologist and author of Passing Judgment: Praise and Blame in Everyday Life

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909572195
Publisher:	Fentum Press
Publication date:	11/13/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	589 KB

About the Author

Janet Todd, novelist (A Man of Genus, 2016) and internationally renowned scholar, was President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a Professor at Douglass College, Rutgers, NJ and at the University of Florida. An expert on women’s writing and feminism and founder of the journal, Women’s Writing, she has published biographies and critical work on many authors, including Jane Austen, the Shelley Circle, Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn (Aphra Behn: A Secret Life, 2017). Now an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and Professor Emerita at the University of Aberdeen, she lives in Cambridge and Venice, and is completing her third novel, Don’t You Know There’s a War On? (forthcoming, 2019).

Read an Excerpt

Time ‘held me green and dying’ atop Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill.
The machine room is cold, it needs to be kept like this --or what? Will it throw a tantrum and stop? No ‘decent drapery ‘ here, no soft, pastel- blue hospital things. Just the hard black top of the hard bed. I pull off the red-tent Laura Ashley skirt. The parts have been kept cool. The long black socks bring back school days, darned knee-highs, topped by navy blue bloomers under the green gymslips (weekdays) and check frocks (weekends). I try not to shiver. The 2 young women who attend the machine are pleasant, efficient. I call them 'girls' to myself, regressing from years of feminism—which, I now find, has not been quite transformative. 3 of us here. 'Three 'women and a goose make a market.' Why this silly jingle in my head? A thin sandbag against thought? A boy band pulsates. If I don’t have tinnitus now, I soon will. Beg it to stop? Best not. I ask who chooses this music. ‘Sometimes patients, sometimes us.’ The girls pull down my new baggy pants. They prod and pull the flesh. I sprawl. They manoeuvre me into maximum pain, tailbone pressing into hard metal. Is it metal? No, carbon fibre. Hard as nails anyway. They ratchet up the bed. They exit together, the green light becomes red, and I’m alone splayed out for the machine. No goose, no market. A woman alone. Corpse yoga pose without tight pants and Lycra blue bottoms. I haven’t lain so rudely since a hectic bout of malaria in Ghana and I was discovered—and covered—by a very gallant Fanti (Ghana being the politest society in all the world) 50 years ago. The hard surface is cold, cool air wafts round it. I expect a beam but there’s only the ghostly green laser seeking the purple marks. I’m too short-sighted to see much—I used to be told I had a lazy eye, then both eyes became ‘lazy’. Spectacles have moved up my nose, I look under them into a blur. The red words form a fiery unreadable blob. However, I do see close by a scrawny, flabby torso. What is toning? What I lack presumably. My feet are blocks of ice. The green beam isn’t the point I tell myself. It’s what comes out of the machine, invisibly. The machine is a hammer, an arm without a body. There’s a box one end, a round shape with a square eye on the other, above it two slit eyebrows of lit up wires. Darkness beyond. The square eye matters, the box is its moon that rises when it sets, passing round and under your backside. The eye goes behind too, right round. I didn’t expect that. (This is not the place for personification, I tell myself, but go on looking into the eye.) When it’s up, I stare into the machine’s big dark squareness, my impotent eyes wide open, then quickly blink. I’m in the Pit and the Pendulum with Father Time’s deep swinging sickle. I try not to breathe in case I move and upset the process: no rats and French army nearby to come to the rescue. The pain in my tailbone swirls up my back to my shoulders. Perhaps on later days I’ll close my eyes. The boy band plays on. The bright overhead light has dimmed a little—or am I dying? The machine –its (his?) name is LA8 --hisses, and peeps and shifts along like an old steam train in a branch line. I’m lost without words. Nothing to read. I have nothing to read. I feel withdrawal. What’s left of me if I’m not reading, talking or writing? Old memories bubble up. From the socks first. I’m sitting alone on the platform in Crewe on my way to school–very still like now, struggling against breath in the foul, black-speckled steam-train air, trying to take up less space, feeling the bristle of my long socks against the hair on my legs. The fog is deep. A national-service soldier comes by in his khaki uniform. He tries to talk to me and offers a cigarette. I’m frightened and 13, but want to be amiable. The tussle keeps me mum. He slouches off into the fog whistling ‘Mona Lisa’. Another man, older, with a British Rail cap, comes by and says there won’t be a train tonight and where was I going anyhow? I say the Welsh name. He can’t understand. I repeat it in mangled English: 'Doll jelley.' I say. He thinks me simple. I clutch my bag tightly. When he’s gone I eat my thin sandwich, a mush of white bread and sugar in grease-proof paper. Did the train ever come? It must have, for there were more years to get through in Dotheboys’ Hall. When it’s over the young women come in. They’re just a little impatient. Old hands know the ritual. I’m new. I take too long pulling up knickers, putting on boots and skirt. I ask too many questions, thinking to be agreeable. The next man enters and jokes with them about their evening. I’ve been holding my breath too long under the machine. I gulp. It’s over. The first session is over. On the way home in the car with D, I think of Father and regret my cowardice. Way over 90 he too went through this treatment. Alone but for his companion, a frail, elderly lady who loved him. Radiotherapy to the head requires the face to be masked. Each day he travelled in hospital transport there and back by himself. Sometimes the trip was interminable, he said, taking in every housing estate and village between his flat and the treatment centre; sometimes he held his aching head with both hands. Once the transport passed close to his home, but it couldn’t deviate from its route. But then, so he went on, how interesting to see roads not seen before and meet new people to talk to. The driver so polite and helpful. Was it painful? Being shut in the mask was hell, he said.