For notjackkerouac

[dreamtofbeing]

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.

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[notjackkerouac]

It's the hospital again. That's what they told him, two weeks ago. Two weeks, and an ultrasound, sitting on the bed in one of their ridiculous gowns, knees pale and knobby and hairless, with gel smeared across his belly, listening to the doctor drone on in a calm, detached manner. Jack thinks she might have been shooting for sympathetically competent; if so, she missed.

He doesn't remember much of what she said. He weren't particularly paying attention. Her tone alone communicated the gist of it, Spark Notes version, all the important phrases highlighted in the air—not responding to treatment—recommend another cycle—chemotherapy still the best option—I'm sorry.

And that were the worst of it, really, that last. The bloody sympathy. Giving out hope and taking it back with the same hand. They won't give him dates, won't give him a time-frame—and he doesn't want it, but James might, bloody useless James, bloody useless sodding James who won't have the sense to know when that's that and—. But they keep playing him like he has all the time in the world to sit in hospital and get poisons pumped into him. Must be like being in the army. Hurry up and wait.

Once upon a time, he went to the pub on Fridays. Now he goes to bloody chemo.

It's been eight months, this; eight months and he can't fucking stand it, for all it makes him an expert at navigating the oncology ward.

Second verse, same as the bloody first: little bit louder and a little bit worse. That used to be a song. He used to sing it, drunk and high on life, staggering down the street with Gibbs, or Bill, or Elizabeth. Or James. Buggering, beautiful, stubborn, stupid James.

He doesn't sing now. The stagger is still with him a bit, towing the IV stand along behind him, line swaying and dangling and threaded up to the cathetar in his thigh, growing out of his skin like a corrupted jellyfish of plastic. The muscles are sore today, from when they put the line back in yesterday evening, flexing around something thick and foreign and unnatural. It gives him a bit of a limp, a slow hop-drag of one bunny-slippered foot, making the open sides of his robe sway.

It's his one from home—home: the flat, James, and maybe it shouldn't be anymore; maybe he shouldn't think of like that anymore, try to distance himself—ages old and worn thin, silk and oriental by design. It clashes horribly with his tartan boxers (also James's: HUGO BOSS ostentaciously printed on the waistband in black block letters, mockingly high-end), the bright pinks and oranges and greens, flowers and hummingbirds, faded but still overpoweringly colourful admist the beiges and browns and calming blues of the ward. Left open and too short to cover much, his legs bony and bare, all muscle definition (hell, all muscle) gone, the robe itself serves little purpose besides doing just that. Bit of colour; bit of life.

The common room doesn't offer much in the way of entertainment. Few magazines, few forgotten books, but it's too quiet in here even for a telly. Musn't disturb anyone seems to be the rule of thumb about the place, nothing rowdy or lively. If Jack were a cynical man, he might make a crack about Rest in Peace—but he's not, so he doesn't.

He doesn't have much need for entertainment anyway. His stint here is two nights, and only then because they couldn't schedule someone to put the line in today. He's out-patient; by every petulant, stubborn, argumentative, annoying instinct he's doing his treatment out-patient (and his boyfriend is—was, were—a lawyer, so it's not like he's out of practice when it comes to debates). For two days, he can manage the doldrums of boredom staring out the window from the corner chair. The hospital actually has a decent view—Chelsea rooftops, and the river scrolling into a green speck on the horizon. Everything's lower out here, except the hospital, and it opens up the sky on clear days, grey and extending forever.

It's nice, or a bit of nice. As nice as you can get around here. Except when he finally hobbles to the chair, someone's in his spot. Bored- and sick-looking, the man looks proper hospital material. He's still got his hair, the bastard. It's nice hair. Jack's hair is just starting to grow back—no chance of that now—prickly and too smooth and making his face look too sharp, too severe, a bit like one of those stupid teenagers up in Camden with the bandana on.

His jumper as a hole in it and makes him look like a tramp, so he figures it evens out.

"You're in my spot," he says, sighs more like, tired, and leans heavily on his IV stand to flap a hand towards the window, explaining. Its wheels squeak. "It has—mrr, views."