For all you good folks suffering radiation depression, which happens to some of us after 150 blasts (my "protocol" totals 173 blasts, six per session plus five and I've done 169 of them), here are some antidepressants that have worked for me.

I might be poor company today, but I'm not totally useless: I did an entire painting--start to finish, including painting a frame to go with it--of one type of rainbow wrasse.

Okay, I did really well the first five and a half weeks, but this last week I'm hurting, burning in sensitive places, depressed, cranky, and eager for the end.

To celebrate Easter, I learned how to blow out an egg, after smashing three beyond rescue, and cover it with polymer clay.

For a long time now--years, actually--I've been trying to come up with an exciting new bag design. Today, after a couple weeks of de-bugging, I've finally got it!

Today I finished another portrait in my Bay City Friend series, based on a photograph which my subject took of himself. I wonder if there's a special word for a portrait of a self-portrait!

The first four weeks of radiation (20 treatments) were easy, but now I'm starting to hurt.

At seventeen blasts, I'm now medium rare and just over halfway through my radiation treatments. Apparently, according to a friend, I am now "half-baked." I'm keeping up my exercise program, walking forty minutes four days a week, lifting weights (only five pounds with my left arm and both legs, half that with my right arm) two days for forty minutes.

My art Mom, Ellen, has been urging me to paint simple objects, like the little watercolor of my favorite brushes in Lake Lover's Year. So I lined up my favorite kitchen knives.

Except for more lying around than I usually do and a bit of what the techs call "pinking up," I'm largely unaffected by my more than two weeks of radiation treatments. The atmosphere in the ladies waiting room, however, has warmed considerably.