Zap, crackle, and pop

One of the crowning indignities of cancer treatment was having to get tattoos. When you're a bald, immunocompromised, vampirically skinny 14-year-old learning to live with a central line and your first surgical scar, let's just say that finding out that you’re also going to be carrying around tattoos for the rest of your life is not something you take particularly gracefully. At least I didn't.

I had been getting goodly doses of chemotherapy for a couple of months and was generally reacting well, which means that although I felt like crap from the hideous bouts of nausea and the occasional opportunistic infection, not to mention the waves of steroid-induced insanity, the cancer was in retreat. But one bit of it had holed up in the equivalent of Verdun and wasn't about to surrender. Medical solution: nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

So far so good. I knew that radiation wasn't exactly a health tonic, and I got lectures on the things that were likely to become problematic, although they were mainly phrased in the anodyne terms of hospital brochures: "discomfort while swallowing" instead of "radiation burns to the esophagus," stuff like that. Still, all fine. "Skilled technicians carefully mark the area and prevent damage to surrounding tissue." Why, how thoughtful. Except that what the brochures failed to mention was that the tools for doing this consisted of (a) sharpie pens and (b) permanent tattoos. I did not take this news well; if memory serves, I threw a fit to do a toddler proud. I was expletiving well going to live through cancer, I yowled, and then by God I was going to shake its dust from my feet and never be reminded of it ever again. Nope, said the skilled technicians. Yer gonna have blue dots.

Well, clearly I was outvoted on this one, so I cried a little and got my damn tattoos, eensy blue freckles on collarbone, sternum, and stomach. And for a few weeks, I'd go to the hospital every afternoon after school, lie on a table, let the STs line up a light screen with the dots (which were connected with streaks of marker, like a very irritating piece of abstract art), and feel forlorn as everyone scurried out of the room before switching on the reactor. I got a peculiar sunburn in sort of an hourglass pattern down my torso, and I got tired more easily as time went by, but I started to grow back a Sinead-like 'do and at least I wasn't spending hours in the hairball position.

A few weeks in, more scans, and success! The tumor fortress was crumbling! Aaaand then the STs told me that they were recalibrating the area of the radiation, and that I needed another set of tattoos. I threw another fit, but again was outvoted. Well, sez I to the doc in charge, if you're doing more needlework, then you're going to dope me up, because I do not approve of these connect-the-dots shenanigans. Sure, he said, and out came the dye. The Ativan kicked in, I swear, exactly half an hour after the last needle did.

All of this is by way of saying that although you'd have had to be well into my personal space and paying careful attention to notice that the dots were not actually freckles, I have always, always hated them. I learned to live with them, and nobody else has ever said anything about them (especially since most of them were covered about 95 percent of the time), but once in a while the stupid things would infuriate me all over again. I would visualize conversations with a removal tech—"Yes, they're tiny, yes, it's stupid, but I never wanted them, so how much to Buck Rogers them out of existence?"—and vow that one of these days I would give myself that gift.

And today was one of these days, which is why, this evening, I walked into Jinx Proof Tattoos, sat down in a back cubicle with a sweet-looking guy wearing full four-color sleeves and tattoos on all his fingers, and explained what I wanted. He peered at the dots, nodded, looked me in the eye as he went over the variables (unknown inks, variation in immune response, odds of needing more than one treatment), told me the cost and how long it would take, and explained what he would actually do. Most importantly, he neither made me feel silly for asking to get such bitty tattoos removed nor gave me any hint of sales pressure. Well, I didn't have plans for the next twenty minutes, nor would I need to go swimming for the next three weeks. Let's do this thing.

So he escorted me back to the check-in counter, where I filled out paperwork and paid (he vanished to warm up the machinery, and I wrote a tip, wondering whether anyone cheaps out on a guy who'll shortly be doodling on them with an actual laser), and then we trekked back to the small room with the examining table. Shirt off, lie down, put on protective yellow glasses, listen to the sound of the laser humming, oh my God I'm suddenly trying not to hyperventilate or bounce with anxiety. He looks closely at my ribcage dots. "Can't find one?" I joke nervously. "I know they're small." "Nah," he says mildly, "Just making sure I use the right power setting for each one." He sounds so calm that I want to hug him. I settle for exhaling and relaxing my hands. "Okay," he says, pointing, "I'll start with this one. It'll be about two seconds. Ready?" "Ready." "Here we go."

The sound of the laser is a crackling zapping sound, like live wires arcing, and the feeling is first a sharp stinging and then, disconcertingly, exactly what you would expect a laser to feel like as it burrows into your skin. By the time I realize it, though, the first shot's done and he's lining up the next. Getting all five done takes maybe two minutes, including sighting the laser. He peers carefully at his work, smears a bit of ointment on each burn, looks again. "This one's the one that might need another round," he says, pointing at my stomach, where the blue is now surrounded by a reddish splotch like a spider bite. "But let's give it three months; your white cells might clear it with just the single treatment." I put my shirt back on, and he gives me a handful of ointment packs and some last-minute reminders to put on salve, not to swim or take baths, not to scratch the healing areas no matter how itchy they get. I assure him that I'll bite my nails instead, shake his hand, stroll out into the street, and have to force down the urge to whoop with glee and relief.

I wore those tattoos for more than half my life, reminders not so much of illness as of powerlessness, and now they're going to melt, thaw, and resolve themselves into a dew. Nobody on the street knows why I'm smiling or would care at all. The world is good.