#tbt. My radiation mask. Sheets of plastic are heated in boiling water and carefully molded around your face. They add the cleats later to use for leverage when they clamp your head down on the table. The machines are loud. Whining, whirring, grinding, clunking, metallic banging all around you as the table you're strapped to moves into position and adjusts over and over again. Then that god awful smell fills your head. That searing plastic bacon smell of bits of your brain burning away. 

8 weeks. 42 treatments. 78 grey. Each day when it's done the tech puts a large copper coin in your palm for the parking attendant, a dark skinned Indian man with soft eyes and a smile that says, 

"I know that you're dying and all I can do is lift this arm for the price of that coin". 

I gave him the pet name Charon but he didn't get the joke.