Radiation Therapy

After we got home from the hospital, I spent the whole evening sprawled on the couch, aimlessly scrolling YouTube on my phone. I eventually landed on a documentary about Chernobyl. Through stilted translators and staticky early-2000s video quality, witnesses described how the sky lit up in flashes of red, violet, bright white. How they were told that the smoke was from a small fire at the plant, nothing to worry about. How they had only packed what they could carry, expecting to be allowed home in a few days.

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I learned about the aftermath: the herd of dead horses, the mutated DNA of the abandoned dogs, and the rates of cancer and birth defects that have followed the families of former residents to this day. How they would never know what was natural and what was caused by the radiation.

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My husband and I had never gotten around to having kids. The hospital made me take two pregnancy tests before treatment and sign a waiver that I understood the catastrophic risks of exposing a fetus to the radiation. Now, choking back a sob, I laid a hand on my stomach and wondered if it was like Chernobyl in there, my womb a miniature-scale nuclear disaster. In my few hours of sleep that night, I dreamt of a bruised sky lit up red-violet-white and of burnt, shrunken limbs tracing ghostly patterns in radioactive ash.

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I followed all the instructions. I recovered well enough. My doctor was pleased.

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I began to wonder about that smoky wasteland in my belly. Could it grow something healthy, one day? Something with the right number of fingers and toes? With my husband’s laugh and my mother’s eyes and that deep, urgent will to survive?

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I swallowed my pills one at a time.

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