Outside the Chemo Room, Looking In
“You see a room of horribly interrupted lives -- the job promotion that just couldn't be taken, the missed soccer games, term papers that would have to be turned in next semester, maybe next year.”
A while back, I wrote that Ted Koppel and Producer Elissa Rubin had come up to Hopkins to do some shooting for an upcoming program on cancer for Discovery Channel. Elissa is not only a colleague, but a good friend, and I asked her if she would share her thoughts about the experience. Here's what she wrote:
A couple of weeks ago, I was getting ready to make a scouting trip to Johns Hopkins Medical Center for a documentary we're shooting on Leroy Sievers. The day before we went, Leroy asked me if I would write about the chemo room. He was curious to see it through the eyes of someone who had never experienced it before, and I suppose, more to the point, someone who didn't have to be there.
What struck me almost instantly was that no one really looked sick. People were in street clothes, flannel shirts and blue jeans, carrying purses and computers. There was a woman in a purple cashmere sweater, one man in an elegant business suit. No bathrobes, no hospital gowns. Aside from looking a little tired, no one looked like he belonged in a hospital. Or that their lives now hinge upon what happens in this room, or that each one now exists in a world of prognoses and time limits. None of that was evident. I felt like I was looking around the platform of a metro station, except for the surreal fact that everyone was hooked up to a machine, with chemotherapy running through their veins, killing the cells that are trying to kill them.
Then you look around and think about what it means to come here, every week, sometimes from hundreds of miles away, and sit plugged into a machine for six hours. You see a room of horribly interrupted lives — the job promotion that just couldn't be taken, the missed soccer games, term papers that would have to be turned in next semester, maybe next year. Marriages thrown into shock, children put in the upside-down position of having to worry about their parents. If anything, this should be a place of raw emotion on display — after all, everyone is in the same position and everyone knows what the person next to him is probably thinking and feeling. It should have been a room filled with anger, yelling, objects crashing against the wall — yet no one even looked particularly sad. This was a place of remarkable calm. Maybe because it was a place — the only place right now — that offered anyone any hope. People were here to fight their cancer, to get better, to keep on living. This was the place for the people who have that option — the so-called lucky ones. At least their doctors were able to offer a plan — one that explicitly said, "You do have a chance to beat this, to live longer." This was a room of science and medicine, bright lights, protocols and doctors. Finally, there was an opportunity to do something to a disease that had stripped you of all control.
All of those people, so exquisitely ordinary, looking as regular, as healthy as I do. Sending e-mails. Reading the newspaper. Talking on the cell phone. It struck me there was no reason why I, too, wouldn't be sitting in that chair next year, next month.
As I said, the main reason for my visit to the chemo room was to see the location as a television producer. I wanted to meet the hospital staff, put them at ease about what our cameras would and would not shoot. I was there to look at the light, note the space, listen for potential sound problems. But I was more than just a bit distracted from my job. I was really there because my friend has cancer. And I don't want him to be here. And I don't want him to feel the abstract fear I had, in the real and suffocating way he must feel every morning when he wakes up and remembers all over again what he is facing. But as much as he hates it, as much as I hate it, the chemo room is keeping him alive.
-- Elissa Rubin
6:07 AM ET | 12-20-2006 | permalink
