What's that smell?

“Beth, you can come one back.” My radiation tech is ready. We usually sit in the back away from everyone to breathe for a bit until they call me back. As I walk through the lobby and hit the large metal button for the door to open, I walk through towards the dressing room.

I can smell it as I turn the corner. I can smell radiation.

Maybe it is a combination of the hospital type environment, the air filtration system and the laser beam, along with 100 other smells.

Maybe it’s not.

But radiation has a smell.

Maybe it is a tangible smell of what this process represents.

As I lay on the table and hear the 1st in a series of long beeps, I smell the treatment. It is a smell I won’t forget. For a split second I am overwhelmed with the smell, the pain and weariness of it all. By what me being on the table represents. What I have endured.

Very quickly, I am reminded that I am the boss of how I respond. I have a choice in the lens I look through, in what my perspective will be.

My eyes were already closed, so I begin to think about the sweet smell of a field of flowers. For a moment, I can smell the flowers as strongly as radiation, as they war one another.

I can’t smell the flowers in the tangible, only in my heart and mind, but I know what that experience is like. A smile forms on my face.

I am still laying on the table. I still smell radiation as I smile. I smile for what it means to be laying on that table. The victory that smells so sweet like flowers… The victory that I am walking out as the double cancer diagnosis can actually be treated. I smile as I count down the days in the last leg of my treatment. I smile as I recognize that the time on the table, the pain and the trials are such a small investment in the rest of my life.

Stop and smell the flowers even when there aren’t any.

~Perspective is Powerful!