Today I am headed down to the Juravinski Cancer Clinic in Hamilton for the LAST of my 35 radiation treatments.

In recognition of this momentous event, I present to you dear Reader a poem I have been working on for ahile now. I feel it only right to recognize the person responsible for my experience of the last 7 weeks.

Of course this will not be my last trip to Juravinski. I’ll be back for a check up in 4-5 weeks, and then a CT scan 4-5 weeks after that. But, as they say, the worst is over. Now I can start to heal.

Until next time, enjoy the poem… or not.

Shalom.

On Madame Marie Curie (by Dennis Gray)

Madame Marie Curie
It’s all her fault you know,
The pain I’m feeling now.
The constant scratching in my throat,
The taste buds that no longer work,
Spit glands producing at under 10%,
Energy levels of a man twice my age,
Leathery skin that flakes so easily.
It’s all part of her legacy.

She started it you know, she and her radium, polonium.
It didn’t take long for the crackpots to follow;
Radium water, The Cosmos Bag, Radithur
Fiesta Ware, eat your meals from uranium dishes
That will cure your ills.
All because of her and those Nobel prizes.
Cures worse than the disease.

But “time marches on” as the newsreels say
And soon the quackery falls by the wayside,
And Marie’s science remains still.
Isotopes collide, neoplasms fall,
30, 40, 60 Gy (gray) and counting,
The tumours can only take so much.
The Cancer succumbs to the onslaught.
Pain is temporary, moisture will return,
The colours in the CT scan will realign,
The “South” will rise again,
And there is new hope for tomorrow.

Yes, it’s her fault alright!
Marie Curie and her little glowing saucers.

Merci Madame. Merci.

Addendum: For those of you who may not know; Marie Curie and her husband were the first to experiment with radium and other radioactive materials (a term she coined).  Among those experiments was the use of radio isotopes to destroy neoplasms, that is, cancers.  She won Nobel prizes in both physics and chemistry for her ground breaking work.

Image courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

Marie Skłodowska–Curie