Tomo Therapy: Hi Art

 

A group of market specialists and scientists gathered around a long conference table and decided upon a logo for their machine, "Tomo Therapy: Hi Art." It was developed in the early 1990s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by Professor Thomas Rockwell Mackie and Paul Reckwerdt.

"Tomotherapy or helical tomotherapy" [HT],  according to Wikipedia, "is a type of radiation therapy in which the radiation is delivered slice-by-slice." As for "Hi Art," either the assembled group had pretensions about their mission or there were art historians invited to the event.  Being one, I conjured up Claes Oldenberg's "Soft Toilet" (1966), a whimsical reflection on that everyday porcelain fixture. I wondered if that is what the art historians brought to the table.

 When I first saw the machine, I thought of  the Holland Tunnel. Then I thought about the "Fleshlight," but don't get me started, because it didn't feel very good when I was inserted. Soft Toilet it would be. Afterall, I was feeling like shit when they slid me into the hole and felt a little better once I got out of there.

In truth, as they lined me up and slid me into the orifice, my arms closely crossed on my chest, I imagined that I was a torpedo being slid nearly flush into its tube on a submarine.

From transportation, sex, and bathroom metaphors, I finally settled on a military one. With laser precision, they wanted to shoot me out the back of the mechanism right at the cancer. Cancer is pretty tough and resilient, and metastasizes at will, just like ISIS. So they have to shoot at it a lot, like five days a week for nine weeks. What keeps us going is this determination to "battle" our cancer, just as the War on Terrorism has taken such a long time. The military metaphor is common, but not everyone thinks about it the same way.

For instance, my mother was diagnosed with Melanoma in 2008 and spent over two years "battling" it. That's a long time. In her mind, when they slid her into the machine--her torpedo tube--she imagined that she was "fighting the terrorist," which was her cancer. She was so spirited and so positive in her anti-terrorist campaign until they told her in the Spring of the third year that they could no longer continue her in the clinical trial. ISIS is pretty much decimated after four years, but my mother didn't win her battle. Very quickly, she got very depressed, withdrew from the world, and died on May 30, 2011, eighteen days after Mothers' Day and two days before my birthday. I always looked forward to my birthday, because it fell just after Memorial Day and augured the summer, when I could swim in the ocean on the Second Avenue Beach in Bradley or at the Deal Casino. We spent fourteen years (1959-1973) baking in that glorious oven, most of it without sunscreen. That must have been how my mother got that Melanoma on her forearm.
 

Silvia Cohen Brown, January 28, 1932-May 30, 2011