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The Final Time

Sat, 6 Feb 2016, 05:54 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

I walked into that room with the piped in music and the big gun hanging over the gurney where they put my personal form-fitted cage over my face and clamped me down one last time.

The staff calibrated the big gun from behind the thick walls and a bank-vault door, taking some X-rays first to make sure that I was properly aligned. It rotated into its starting position, adjusting and whining and clicking and blocking out the light from the ceiling as it came briefly to a stop above my face at which point the usual alarm rang while the radiation poured down onto my throat.

It was wild music Friday, so I tapped my fingers to the beat of some Pandora stream that I never will recognize (although it was a great beat). The gun came to a stop and then started its second pass as the alarm rang out again and another stream of radiation poured down on me. The buzzing stopped. And then the gun came a stop again.

It was the 30th and final time. Six weeks come to an end.

The machine retracted and locked into a safe position. Laney and Tutu and Sarah and Sonya came into the room, cheering for me before I could cheer, because I was still strapped to the gurney with the cage holding me down and a stent in my mouth holding my jaw open. For the final time.

And by way of celebration, they let my local companions and caretakers come into the room, and we posed for a photo with that big gun.

And then we went out into the waiting area, where a brass bell hangs in wait on the wall for everyone’s last day of treatment.

“Pull it three times,” Tutu said.

I pulled on the rope. Gave it a good yank three times, celebrating that this was indeed my final time and I shouldn’t be returning.

“That’s the loudest I’ve ever heard!” Tutu said. The staff and I gathered together for a group hug. And we posed for one last picture beside the bell.

And it was good.

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License