John Smith (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dreamtofbeing) wrote2011-10-21 04:56 am
dreamtofbeing) wrote2011-10-21 04:56 am
Entry tags:
For notjackkerouac
The Royal Marsden hospital with its tasteful interiors and its panoramic views of central London tries visibly hard to make its patients feel cared for by the best specialists in the country. It's what all the brochures said, a stack of leaflets insisting that if you wanted to breeze through your treatment like you would through a holiday cruise in the Caribbean, all you had to do was check yourself into the oncology department of London's finest cancer hospital.
Sitting in a chair in the fourth floor patient common room of this posh establishment, the Doctor can't help but find the upscale sterility of the place unsettling and irritating. Possibly this is because he's never been in a hospital that didn't make him feel unsettled and irritated, but leaving his personal dislike of hospitals aside, the Royal Marsden still seems like a place he wouldn't be sad to never have to visit again. He's not sure what annoys him more, the motivational posters of smiling, bald women plastered on the notice boards, or the discreet, hushed tone adopted by the staff, as if the patients on this floor were too fragile to be talked to in a normal volume. Which, admittedly, most of them look like they are. The Doctor doesn't quite feel like one of them yet, though, so all the hushed voices are doing are making him want to talk extra-loudly and jovially.
Not that he's feeling particularly jovial. About a week since the surgery, and they only started to let him get up three days ago, after the last of his drainage tubes had been pulled. He's been through enough surgeries and hospital stays to know the routine--walk to the sink and back on the first day, one corridor length on the second, two on the third, but only if you're feeling up to it. And no matter how much you want to do more, those will usually be your limits before that deep, throbbing wound ache gets too much to continue pushing. He's feeling it now, a dull, pulling pain along his right side, but he's not quite yet at the point of giving up and going back to bed.
They started giving him the chemotherapy today; just another IV, but this one in a shiny silver bag rather than the transparent plastic bottles that the normal fluid IVs come in. It felt both daunting and surreal; mental images of the other patients on the ward, sunken eyes and bony wrists, competing with the Doctor's inability to picture himself in that state. The thing that made him abandon his bed in favor of the common room chair was his roommate Pete, a heavyset prostate cancer patient in his mid-fifties, mocking him for refusing to shave his head. The Doctor has a feeling that being a cancer patient himself, Pete missed out on the bandwagon of heart-felt support the entire rest of the oncology ward seems to have gotten on. He supposes he can't really blame him, but that doesn't mean that he has to let Pete mock him, either. If the chemotherapy will make his hair fall out, fine, his hair will fall out. The Doctor doesn't feel like he should be helping it along, though.
He taps his fingers on the chair's armrest and puts his chin in his hand, looking out over the rain-swept Chelsea roof landscape. He should have brought a book, but going back to get it would exceed his two-corridor-lengths limit for today. So he supposes he'll just sit here until it's time for dinner. Either that, or until his hair starts falling out. Whichever will happen sooner.
Sitting in a chair in the fourth floor patient common room of this posh establishment, the Doctor can't help but find the upscale sterility of the place unsettling and irritating. Possibly this is because he's never been in a hospital that didn't make him feel unsettled and irritated, but leaving his personal dislike of hospitals aside, the Royal Marsden still seems like a place he wouldn't be sad to never have to visit again. He's not sure what annoys him more, the motivational posters of smiling, bald women plastered on the notice boards, or the discreet, hushed tone adopted by the staff, as if the patients on this floor were too fragile to be talked to in a normal volume. Which, admittedly, most of them look like they are. The Doctor doesn't quite feel like one of them yet, though, so all the hushed voices are doing are making him want to talk extra-loudly and jovially.
Not that he's feeling particularly jovial. About a week since the surgery, and they only started to let him get up three days ago, after the last of his drainage tubes had been pulled. He's been through enough surgeries and hospital stays to know the routine--walk to the sink and back on the first day, one corridor length on the second, two on the third, but only if you're feeling up to it. And no matter how much you want to do more, those will usually be your limits before that deep, throbbing wound ache gets too much to continue pushing. He's feeling it now, a dull, pulling pain along his right side, but he's not quite yet at the point of giving up and going back to bed.
They started giving him the chemotherapy today; just another IV, but this one in a shiny silver bag rather than the transparent plastic bottles that the normal fluid IVs come in. It felt both daunting and surreal; mental images of the other patients on the ward, sunken eyes and bony wrists, competing with the Doctor's inability to picture himself in that state. The thing that made him abandon his bed in favor of the common room chair was his roommate Pete, a heavyset prostate cancer patient in his mid-fifties, mocking him for refusing to shave his head. The Doctor has a feeling that being a cancer patient himself, Pete missed out on the bandwagon of heart-felt support the entire rest of the oncology ward seems to have gotten on. He supposes he can't really blame him, but that doesn't mean that he has to let Pete mock him, either. If the chemotherapy will make his hair fall out, fine, his hair will fall out. The Doctor doesn't feel like he should be helping it along, though.
He taps his fingers on the chair's armrest and puts his chin in his hand, looking out over the rain-swept Chelsea roof landscape. He should have brought a book, but going back to get it would exceed his two-corridor-lengths limit for today. So he supposes he'll just sit here until it's time for dinner. Either that, or until his hair starts falling out. Whichever will happen sooner.