Radiation

It’s mathematics. Angles, coefficients, line integrals. Algorithms. Formulas. Infinite numbers and inversions and rotations around an axis. Like last night, when walking down the hill toward home, you swung yourself around the signpost pole and twirled. It looked something like this:


You grabbed my arm, laughing at the dizziness. The autobiography of a day is told in the grey light of dusk. You tilted your head back and fixed your eyes on the sky, walking that way for three straight blocks while I steered, pulling your arm if you veered too close to the parking strip, and warning of upcoming curbs. You said you were watching the day disappear, you didn’t want to miss a thing.

Quantifying light. Rotation around an axis. Parallel beam geometry. I have a decision to make. I have a manila folder jammed with articles, abstracts, definitions, research study data, mathematical equations, charts, graphs, print outs from the Food and Drug Administration and the National Cancer Institute. They are smathered with highlighter pen markings and notes in the margins.

I work in photography. I arrange photos in a particular order to tell stories on walls, in books. I pull together exhibitions and write about such imagery, for cover jackets, for the interior essays. In one book about war and its aftermath, there is a picture of turkeys and geese in a foot-worn yard. In front of the house on a patch of grass is a table where three women sit on milk crates, breaking off chunks of bread, dipping in tins of soup. We are somewhere in eastern Europe. In another image, broken power lines reach down to earth like arms, the poles, straight like spines facing off with the sky. Lines run over faces, and across tilled, careful rows of soil; clothes wires divide the sky like a horizon, and serpents of pipes stretch out to the picture’s edge.

So what, really, is relevant about images? In photography, there is aesthetic, and then there is just truth. Staring you straight in the eye: a burned-out building, ships moored by the circumstance of land, a spigot, a window, a door, chickenwire, clapboard, home, the inside of my son’s head viewed from every angle. I have a decision to make.

There are patterns to how we survive. To how we fight wars, to how we contain our lives. Etched in the geography of memory is gesture. And it is within these gestures, and their repetition, that the stories are told. On whatever square of earth, we stand holding together all our parts: the threads of our history, the way our bodies merge with the landscape. We are pieces. We are broken. We are composites of the parts that stay hinged, stuck, wrapped in the arms of grey light, found.

I write about holding that light and the pictures of life it carries on its rays, placed on a piece of paper, and called a photograph. Alpha particles can be stopped with a sheet of paper. Beta particles, with a strip of aluminum foil.

Clarke’s headaches are worse. His hearing is at an all-time low. There is 10% of a pearlescent orb still in his mastoid, the part they couldn’t remove two and a half years ago. In the photograph the doctor took during the surgery, the mass is nestled in red, wedged in the bones. There is aesthetic, and then there is truth.

Radiation. Sunlight. Sky. The Rocky Mountains emit 40 millirems (mrem) per year. Three Mile Island, dose at plant site during the accident on March 28, 1979: 80 mrem. CT scans: 2,500 mrem.

It all begins a long time ago. Clarke has just had his first CT scan. He is 18 months old. He reacts to the anesthesia. His torso is burning and fever spiking a degree a minute, while his extremities are ice cold and turning brownish blue. I sit in ER on top of a bed encircled by a plastic curtain while, for six hours, they try to stabilize my boy. After, they send us upstairs to the pediatric ward to stay overnight for observation. All the beds are taken by other sick children and scared parents. I curl around him on a mat on the floor. He sleeps. I listen to the children in our room breathe, I listen to the mother in the bed above me murmur to her daughter. I listen to the footsteps in the corridor.

Radiation. From sunlight.

It is 104 months past that night. Clarke’s headaches are worse. I have one ally: an internationally-recognized otolaryngologist and neurological surgeon, also a professor and Associate Dean at one of the country’s most prominent medical schools. I have fought with and dismissed over 30 doctors. He is the one willing to continue investigating. He orders another MRI, a new hearing evaluation. And another, 5th, CT scan. Then Clarke and I are to get on a plane and go see him. I cry rain because I have made a decision. I have to say no, to another doctor for another reason, again. One CT scan equals 312 X-rays. Clarke has had four CT scans, 1,248 X-rays. Clarke will have no more CT scans. And I am scared because it has been 10 years and I am rather out of doctors.

Clarke is rocking in his bed, holding his head, sobbing. It is night. And then it is morning. And it is the same.

CT stands for “computed tomography.” A tomograph rotates around the axis of the patient, scanning, capturing cross-sectional images, pictures in parts, to create a tomogram, and the pieces become the whole.

The etymology of tomography is derived from the Greek tomos, part, and graphein, to write.

I write my way backwards. A pocketwatch with a radium dial emits 6 mrem per year. Naturally-occurring radiation exposure is called “background” radiation–it comes from the earth, from water, cosmic rays from space, airborne dust and particulates in the atmosphere. The time period for equivalent dose from natural background radiation: 8 months per CT scan.

In 2008, researchers reported findings that 25,000 Japanese post-atomic bomb survivors were exposed to roughly the same amount of radiation of two CT scans.

One of those CT scan looks something like this:



An Austrian mathematician designed a mathematical basis for tomography called the Radon Transform–integral geometry, hyperplanes, equations, letters, numbers, symbols, mastoid, 10%, measure, image, logic, sky, logic, earth, pieces, logic, irrelevance.

Light.

Visible light is electromagnetic radiation. With it, I can see my son’s face. Without it, I can see his shadow on the sidewalk under the streetlamp while he swings his body in a circle around the axis of the pole. A spiral scanner rotated around his head in one continuous motion in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2007. Shooting in light, targeting X-ray sensors, in a perfect, algebraically-configured circle.

I let this happen.

At dusk, each evening of each day when you and I walk the dog up the hill and back again, the light, it is grey. It could be a photo.