Living With Cancer: Hospital City
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When you travel to cancer central, you may find yourself more perplexed by the currency, language, customs, costumes, cuisine and time zone than you would have been if you had landed in Timbuktu. In Hospital City, you can lose your way as well as your confidence in everything you took for granted.
Neither passports nor tickets need to be found - just insurance cards - while lining up for registration, where it is impossible not to worry about incalculable costs. And what about those without cards? The spacious reception area, with its plants and paintings, seems deceptive after patients cross a portal into crowded passageways.
Newcomers immediately go astray searching through labyrinthine corridors for rooms in which they are inserted into claustrophobic funnels and thudded with machine-gun banging. Or they are strapped on tables with some body part clamped into a vise for an invasive needle.
At diagnosis, incomprehensible words resound - HER2-positive, stromal, non-small cell, BRAF, astrocytoma, myeloma, lymphoma, sarcoma - followed by equally baffling prescriptions of drugs that have two names. Hours are badly spent waiting in interior reception areas, near stunned people in wheelchairs and dazed fish aimlessly swimming in a tank beneath a television (perpetually tuned on to a dismal news channel).
After a bed is assigned for some necessary procedure, most slip on skimpy robes - the snap type impossible to snap, the tie type impossible to tie. Why are they constructed so as to gape and expose the naked front or back without providing warmth against the polar climate?
If there is an emergency intervention, it may be impossible to remember. Hooked up to machines that suffuse rays or tubes that infuse liquids into every conceivable cavity, monitored and drugged patients relinquish their professional status and personal identities. In windowless way stations, the so-called privacy curtain fails to protect neighbors who rehearse case histories replete with details meant only for their doctors' ears.
Should food be allowed, it arrives cold and tasteless at hours unrelated to breakfast, lunch or dinner. Why does the tray contain everything one is generally told not to eat: soggy meat, mashed potatoes with gravy, an overcooked vegetable, cake, chips and soda?
All the above seemed repugnant but doable, until an uncontrollable infection landed me in the hospital for several weeks a few years ago. It followed major surgery for ovarian cancer and two or three chemotherapy sessions.
Broken window blinds and 24-hour fluorescent lighting meant that I could not tell day from night. Both seemed interminable, given the drumming, thudding pain. Attached to blinking and beeping machines, I was NPO (nothing by mouth). TPN (or what the nurses called "steak in a bag") was the nutrient pumped into me, along with morphine, from pouches not far removed from the commode I was supposed to use by my bed.
Inside the domain of pain, I could barely tolerate a kind aide who would haul me out of bed for a sponge bath in a chair. More regularly, nurses would flush drains to try to lessen the misery of throbbing that obliterated everything from consciousness except dread of the impending operation that would render me dysfunctional, dependent (like all people with disabilities) on prosthetic devices to enable what used to be natural functions.
Quite common, in cancer literature, are descriptions of the initial treatments patients undergo. We are less informed about operations that must be undertaken after botched surgeries, infections, or metastases. Tracheostomy, nephrectomy, thoracotomy, colostomy, splenectomy, urostomy, craniotomy, embolectomy, ileostomy, cystostomy, cystectomy, gastrectomy, hepatectomy, prostatectomy, lobectomy, the list could go on.
You say hepat, I say trache; you say ostomy, I say ectomy: Let's call the whole thing off! For either way, the suffix means tubes, bulbs, stents, garden hoses, flaps, wounds, catheters, bags. Four years ago I could only escape the twilight zone of hospitalization by subjecting myself to a surgery that damaged my body. Probably the operation saved my life, for which I am grateful. Still, I deal with the consequences daily.
Mind you, this aging medical facility employs brilliant and courteous doctors and nurses to whom I remain indebted. However, its environment intensifies the indignities and terrors of treatment. The adjoined new building is more hospitable. Yet when I have to travel back to cancer central for a scan or blood test, I only breathe easy when my husband retrieves the car for our drive home.
With apologies to the (brilliant, courteous) staff (who saved my life), I can't help thinking it's a bad place to visit, a worse place to stay. I feel for the fish.