By Adam Lucas

 

ATLANTA—Linear accelerators are scary.

                  

You could probably guess that from the name. It sounds like something Darth Vader might use as a torture device. 

                  

It’s actually a very sophisticated cancer fighting apparatus, a machine that customizes high energy x-rays to conform to a tumor’s shape. 

                  

And as Heidi Nugent found out this February, it doesn’t come with a soundtrack.

                  

Heidi and her husband, Jeff, are hardcore Eric Church fans who attended their 16^th show on Friday night in Atlanta. They are the type of fans who might wake up in Chicago during the Outsiders Revival tour, realize Chief is just down the road in St. Louis (just down the road meaning over 300 miles in this case), and hop in the car while scouring the internet for tickets.

                  

But they paused their concert schedule this fall when Heidi received bad mammogram results on Nov. 17. She had a lumpectomy on Dec. 26 and was scheduled for five targeted treatments of 26 gray radiation in mid-February.

                  

Heidi was slated for a test run on Feb. 13; it’s simply an opportunity to experience the linear accelerator with no radiation given.

                  

“When I walked in and saw the machine, I couldn’t take that next step,” she says. “I started crying.”

                  

She sat down and explained her very simple plan for getting through five treatments of radiation.

                  

“I can do this if I can use my headphones,” she told them.

                  

“As long as you can hear us, you sure can,” she was told.

                  

The next day, Feb. 14, Heidi and Jeff went to see the IMAX film Evangeline vs. The Machine Comes Alive. It reinforced that she knew exactly what her radiation soundtrack would be.

                  

And so she walked in to the room for her first treatment on Feb. 16 clinching a wooden cross Jeff had given her in her hands and “Storm In Their Blood” in her headphones on repeat. 

                  

Because of the level of radiation, no one else is in the room. So at 3 p.m. every day that week, it was just Heidi, “Storm In Their Blood,” and a much needed thunder in her chest and a lightning in her eyes.

                  

“From the very beginning, I had said, ‘I am the storm,’” Heidi says. 

                  

You just never know what a song might do. This one helped a longtime fan all the way through the toughest time of her life. Heidi and Jeff are celebrating her clear report at the end of her radiation exactly the way you’d expect: they saw the Atlanta show and already have Greenville and Charlotte on the calendar.

                  

And what happens when Church plays the opening notes of “Storm In Their Blood”?

                  

“Both of us bawl,” Jeff says.

                  

The song was of course included on Friday’s set list, as Church played until midnight and featured several rarities, including closing with a duet version of “Like Jesus Does” for a very good reason: “Because Mama Cotten is in the house tonight!” Church said of Joanna Cotten’s mother being in attendance.

                  

He also included a solo version of “Round Here Buzz” which for the first time stumped him when he tried to do the traditional localized couplet:

                  

“I never had big city eyes/

I grew up in Georgia.”

                  

Which he then had to finish with, “It just occurred to me how hard it is to rhyme Georgia.”

                  

(I’ve been waiting for this all tour: he could’ve gone with, “We’ve got three hours of music comin’ toward ya.” No? Well, that’s why he’s the songwriting genius.)

                  

The set also featured a side stage appearance of the weekend’s tour dog, Ivy, a golden retriever whose human is production manager Chris “Foxer” Fox. Listening to “Springsteen” while watching Ivy serenely take in the performance from the side of the stage is better than dopamine. It was a good show, but she is the best girl.

                  

But it was “Storm in Their Blood” that the Nugents will remember the most. “I wasn’t sure how I would get through the first time hearing it live,” Heidi said after Friday’s show. “It turned out to be very emotional, but also healing.”

 

When Heidi finished the fifth day of radiation on Feb. 20, she rang the bell in the cancer center.

                  

That bell includes a plaque that reads:

                  

“Ring this bell

Three times well,

Its toll to clearly say:

My treatment here is done!

This course is run!

I’m on my way!”

                  

Which is a longer way of saying exactly what Heidi found out during her treatment, and what maybe you will need a reminder of at some point in the future, and what Church has belted out every single night of this tour:

                  

“I…am…the storm.”