Certificate X.
If you don't know what it is, it sounds
slightly ominous, right? It isn't really, but I lay my lack of
understanding about radiation right at the feet of said certificate.
When I was growing up in Scotland, the
cinema ratings carried certificates. If you watch some of the older
British movies on TV, you can sometimes see the certificate at the
beginning of the film. It is an actual certificate complete with
verifying testifying, mystifying... all your important -ings, plus a
letter. and X meant the movie could not be viewed by anyone under the
age of 16.
By the way, if you have the feeling,
way back in your brain, that you've heard of certificate X, and you
are of a certain age, it may be because you heard the song “Lady
Godiva,” by Peter and Gordon, waaaay too many times in the mid-60s.
The lady in question, after her famous ride, ends up in the movies
with her director: “He directs certificate X, people now are
craning their necks to see her.”
Anyway, seeing a film bearing a
certificate X, most of which were science fiction or horror, at my
age was out of the question. Imagine my surprise, then, when we came
to America and virtually all the films I remembered as certificate X
were now being shown on Monster Movie Matinee. Seriously. The
originals of “Frankenstein”, “Dracula” were X. But mostly X
was saved in Britain for any film that featured a giant anything,
usually exposed to... right, radiation.
What I can't figure out is why British
censors would try to protect Britain's youth from these decidedly
unscary films. For example, have you seen “The Killer Shrews”?
They're dogs with crazy-looking hair stuck on them!!!! “The Amazing
Colossal Man”? Hard to be scared by a grown man in a diaper, no
matter how big he is. “The Attack of the Puppet People”? They are
not puppets and they do not attack. They mostly just climb over
everyday items built really, really big to foster the illusion.
And then there's on of my personal
favorites: “Bride of the Monster,” directed by Edward D. Wood
Jr., once voted the worst director in movie history.
In “Bride” we get to see Bela
Lugosi, by this time addicted to morphine and methadone, just about
year before he died, match acting chops with the one-of-a-kind Tor
Johnson, a former professional wrestler with a huge gut, bald head,
and dialogue limited, usually, to variatons of the expression, “Ugh.”
As the movie climax nears (the heroes observing an atom bomb blast
from about 500 feet away; a blast that doesn't even muss their hair),
Lugosi straps Tor to a table and exposes him to massive doses of
radiation delivered by a colander hung upside down from the ceiling.
I don't mean something that look liked a colander. It was a colander!
To Tor's credit though, his “ugh” variations certainly made it
seem as though the colander was delivering serious pain.
Which, more or less, brings me back to
what I wanted to write about- radiation treatments. They were
something I knew about, of course. I even knew people who had them.
Other than those former certificate X films, my knowledge was
lacking. I didn't know what a treatment looked like for example. I
was fairly sure it didn't involve a colander hung upside down from
the ceiling, but that was about all I knew. Did you actually see rays
coming out of the radiation machine? Didn't think so, but I was less
sure of that than the colander thing.
Of course, the equipment turned out to
be the very latest in radiation technology managed by three
accomplished women; there were no kitchen utensils anywhere.
The radiation was to be of my fractured
clavicle and what I have come to call my “bee ribs,” which were
what got me to the doctor's in the first place. Radiation as I was
exposed (har har) to it, can now be pinpointed to an exact area, of
any given shape or size. Only the areas to be treated receive
radiation. That certainly seemed to lessen the chance of becoming the
Amazing Colossal Man. Whew.
Once the areas to be treated are
properly defined, the technicians then put tattoos at key points.
Now, I assumed “tattoos” was a casual term for one of those lick
and stick kind of tattoos, or a “tattoo” written with a Magic
Market, or something like that.
Surprising as it may be, I was wrong
again! Tattoo meant tattoo, which meant being stuck by a very, very
sharp, really, really pointy needle which had me using “Ugh” in
ways even the great Tor Johnson had never considered. And, oh yeah,
they're permanent. I considered being outraged at this defilement of
the temple that is my body, but... Since my body is more like a 7-11
than a temple, and the tattoos were so small I had trouble seeing
them even when they were pointed out to me, I decided to leave my
tongue in its sheath for once.
I guess I had always thought you would
feel the radiation somehow' just as I thought I'd feel cancer cells
eating through my body like Ms. Pacman, But that isn't the case. The
procedure was quiet and painless. I couldn't help but think of poor
Tor Johnson being blasted by the Cancer Care Colander.
One thing I did learn, though, that I
would like to pass on to you: watching science fiction movies from
the 1950s is no way to prepare yourself for radiation treatments in
2014. Seriously. Even a great one, like “Attack of the Giant
Leeches,” brings more confusion than clarity. I just thought you
should know that.
There are a variety of versions of
the story that gives this blog its name. The pony is the constant in
all of them. A man is on his way to a party when he comes across a
young boy shoveling ass over tea kettle at an enormous mountain of
manure. The man asks the child if he wouldn't rather go with him to
the party than shovel all that poop. The kid says, “No way man.
With all that poop... there must be a pony in there somewhere.”
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