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.
no subject
That hadn't been Jack's intention. It's not that he pouts—he's a grown man, and Jack Sparrow besides—so it must be a frown that turns down the corners of his mouth and puffs out his lower lip. He wants that spot. He likes that spot. It's one of the only things that makes this place bearable, and he's tired, and he's standing here, with the muscle of his inner thigh burning, and the man (with hair!) won't move.
It's not a pout.
The smile, however, is apparently meant to be genuine. Jack eyes the interloper suspiciously. "You're not from around here, are you?"
The man's new, or at least Jack's never seen him before and he's been around enough now to recognise most faces passing through—the nurses, the porters, the other patients. Been coming here long enough to have seen a few waves pass through, those who have left for other jobs or other wards, and those who have recovered to go home to their families. And those that don't, who go elsewhere, the ones Jack doesn't want to think about.
Despite the standard comings-and-goings of the floor, Jack more means London itself. Royal Marsden is one of the best hospitals in London (James informed him of that, of course, in a shaky, dry barritone, with lots of the throat clearing, trying and failing to hide his nerves when he offered up the findings of the secret research he'd done on Jack's case; just like a lawyer), which makes it one of the best hospitals in the country, and people come from all over. And the man's accent is generic, hard to place, which means he could be from anywhere and probably is; no one sounds like that without hiding something.
More than that, no Londoner suggests sticking around for a chat. Londoners pointedly, politely ignore one another, stuck in their own little bubble of oxygen in a sea of restless humanity. Jack likes Londoners; they're easy to startle. This man seems good at that—or poor at that; Jack isn't sure—and that strangely, irrationally makes Jack almost warm up to him.
"Could do with a chair. If you're wanting for conversation." He nudges his IV stand, a tangle of lines looping down to thread under the hem of his boxers. "What's your name?"
no subject
"It's John. John Smith." He gives a slight, perfunctory smile; yes, he knows it's a boring name. "I'm sort of new here. Been stuck in my room for the past four days or so, or we might have met earlier. I've come down from Cardiff."
He glances around the room in the hope of spotting a second, easily accessible chair, but without success--mostly due to the dull, persisting throb in his side that prevents him from turning around properly. He gives a small sigh and looks back up, jerking a thumb at the line of chairs by the wall. "You can have the chair if you help me drag one of those over here."
Nothing like jointly overcoming an obstacle to start building friendships. And this place is so good about providing obstacles. No wonder it's all about the heart-felt support.