Drawing 1 of LOVE POEM to RADIATION 2025

Last December of 2024, as I was writing the introduction to my book of drawings, I AM ALIVE - Creating Resilience and Healing Trauma through Art, I found that I finally had enough distance to revisit the experience that had been my worst nightmare: 8 days and nights of brachytherapy radiation. The radiation had devastated me, but it had also saved my life.

I wanted to reflect on this complex relationship to the treatment. The machine had simultaneously hurt me but also cured me by completing burning out the deadly tumour that was in my cervix. I wanted to imagine a return back to the night before treatment, to that moment where I found myself alone, in my room with the radiation machine. But this time, it would be different. I would bring with it, the wisdom I had accumulated in my own healing and the experience of my own recovery. The most important aspect of this exercise, is that, this time, I was going to feel safe.

In 2009, the evening before I commenced radiation, I was filled with horror. I did not know how to contain the experience of knowing that I was going to be burnt alive, around the clock. To help me process this fear, I began a monologue with my soul, wanting to see the entire experience as that of oneness. I wanted to see the radiation machine, the radiation, my tumor, the window, the tree outside my window, every nurse or doctor who came into my room as one. All was interconnected. All was one. This was my way of coping.

As I burned in radiation, the experience was extremely painful and my body felt trapped. I maintained the interconnected experience through constant prayer but I also felt rage as the machine burned me each hour.

Here is the love poem. I imagine writing it as I sit next to the radiation machine, the night before treatment in my little room of the Institut Marie Curie in Paris which had one small window overlooking a tree… while holding the insight, the experience of healing that I hold within me after, 15 years of healing and life.

Drawing 2 of LOVE POEM TO RADIATION 2025

To my persecutor, the silent unwelcome guest, the radiation machine.

You are my greatest terror and nightmare.

Yet I have no choice but to befriend you as your radiation burning will heal me.

For the duration of the treatment, I will take you on as a spiritual being. I will see you as Divine.

It will feel like you are torturing me, every hour, 24 hours a day.

I shall not sleep.

I shall not eat.

You will burn me alive.

I will feel the insides of my body cook.

My mother will tell my brother that when she visits me, my room smells of burnt flesh.

Then when the week is over, your radiation/burning will devastate me completely.

I will lose my mind, my peace, my vitality and my joy.

It will take me years to recover.

However, ultimately, you will save my life.

You will burn away this deadly tumor.

And you will also burn my entire pelvis area and the organs within.

It is because of you that I will have an extension of this life.

For a year after your radiation, I will not be able to fall asleep peacefully.

In the dark of the night, my body will feel that you are there, beside me.

My body will wait for that dreaded « click».

The click that begins the internal burning.

It will take five years for the sense of a looming death sentence over me, to lift.

Seven years later, I will see a drawing of Sita sitting on a pyre, being burnt alive and I will confidently say that I know that very experience.

For the next 14 years, every time I return to Paris, (a city I once so loved ) will be in dread and fear because the city will be the reminder of my place of torture with you.

Yet in this room, the night before radiation begins. It is ever so quiet. Just you and I. A vigil for us both, before the reckoning.

I will need to see you as the Divine, I will need to see this all playing out as the Divine otherwise I simply won’t get through this.

I will want to run

I will be pinned down

There will be no escape

This is it.

You will be my torturer, my grace, my saviour.

We will be one. We are Divine.

I will come out of this alive.

This is my process of surrender