Double Flee A

I want it to be clear that I am not embellishing a single thing. All that is presented below is my most faithful representation of the truth. Also, I know this link is going to get passed around the department, and I'm not doing this to hurt anybody's feelings.

And now another riveting chapter, in what a friend and I once drunkenly referred to as the epic adventure of mediocre proportions that is my daily life.

So for those of you who were checking, there was quite the cliffhanger. For those who weren't, I had to go to work in chemos this weekend after having refused to go in an email to my managers. When they didn't have anything to say about it, in essence calling my bluff, I just went in anyway. Touche. Then when I got there, the guy who was training me was the most obnoxious person pretty much of all time. I sat through that all day Saturday, even with him making bad noise about my personal life. There's a time for giving a guy a mouth full of bloody chiclets and a time for lamenting the decisions that have led you into this dark valley, and when you're at work and not in jail, you have to go with the latter.

What happened yesterday, the actual things that took place, culminated in such a wild freak-out that I'm going to lay out the events like this was some kind of police report, which is what this summary was roughly twenty inches away from actually being.

So yesterday bright and early (at work by seven, not eight, and including daylight savings that's six Dale time) I materialized in the pharmacy and gowned up. We wear bunny suits, shoe covers, hats, plastic gowns, and two pairs of gloves, so it took a couple of minutes to get that on, and the day began.

First was getting the pump set up, where the TPNs get made by a fairly simple machine. Saturday monkey saw, so yesterday monkey did, which wasn't too hard. There are just quite a few steps to go through and it's not like you can carry a binder in there and take notes; it's a "clean room" and paper is the enemy. I got that most of the way set up and an order came through for some chemo to get made, so we grabbed the envelope and went in, sat down, and got to making it. Not to get bogged down with the details, but this chemo was one of those really expensive ones that you're kind of happy to be making, so you know it's being done right. My aseptic technique is good and I knocked it and another one out and then went out and finished up setting up the pump. Then back in (chemos has its own little room) where the guy over my shoulder told me what things got which stickers, where to check, and where once I forgot to kink off a line and about five mls of a highly diluted etoposide solution spilled out inside a bucket. If that's the worst thing that happens when you're training in chemo, you're doing pretty goddamned good. I wasn't dropping vials all over the floor and having to call the hazmat team or anything. So I did some of those and listened to the radio, which amazingly got reception. First we listened to classical (the guy training me likes "more of the ballads of classical", which fit in perfectly with his pattern of opinionation, more about later), then after rejecting the hip hop station, settled on NPR, all I can say for which is that 1) it came in and 2) the diction was excellent.

I can never figure out who the weird-asses all over America are who listen to the radio on Sunday morning. Have you ever heard the commercials for herbal such and such? Later Sunday morning it's the glory-wrought hand-clapping gospel hours, but early Sunday I think it's a bunch of unintentional-mouth-noise-making, gummi-bear-popping coneheads listening to all the radio stations.

So the radio got old, which sucks, because it would have been drowning him out as he studied intently the package inserts for a couple of drugs, and for this I really have to stop and paint a moment.

This man, we'll call him James, which isn't too far from his actual name, is thirty three or thirty four. I successfully blocked that fact out. You tend to do that with James. James is "the expert". Everyone I know at that place, who has had the misfortune to catch James in one of his weirder-than-normal moods, will tell you that he purports to know everything, or at least some interesting and challenging new fact about every single thing that might come up. "Ugh" fails to capture the magnitude of it all, but not the spirit.

Saturday James decided to get righteous about science being all phony, a bunch of "theory-based stuff". So you can imagine that was a lot of fun to sit through. But the guy's not a vision of hell all the time. We had a genuinely good laugh about how we should draw birthday candles and tape a plastic fork to bags of chemo that people get on their birthdays. That was really funny, actually. And I think there may have been something else that came close to that, but I'd prefer to just stick to work and hear nothing, to the nonstop barrage of random James-ness, which more often than not is painful.

[I just realized, that thing about mouth noises I take from James, too... we had lunch at the same table Saturday. It was horrible. Like a horrible child smacking a mouth full of peanut butter. Suck your tongue off the roof of your mouth as hard as you can and that's really what it was like. It was not what I needed to hear over lunch.]

So there he is, poring over the package inserts for cisplatin and carboplatin, a couple of chemo drugs we're going to be making later, announcing to me that there's platinum in them. He gets curious and sets them down and then starts to stare at them, as if he's telekinetically going to make a beanstalk pop out of one of them, either will do. He stares at everything like that, including people. But here's the thing, it's a performance. Everything. I'm supposed to notice his mad-scientist poring. He was literally going over the molecular structures, which the inserts lay out like a comic book, saying "the cis- is simple, see? just an x, basically, but the carboplatin... it's got this over here... double bond, fascinating!" It was like when Harold Ramis as Dr. Spengler in Ghostbusters was talking about some building's being made partially out of selenium: "whoever did this was a certified wacko or a total genius!" And James doesn't know DICK about why someone would attach a methyl group to some molecule or how it synthesizes or any other damn crazy thing. Neither do I. But Jaems, the expert, wants your respect and attention any way he can get it. This is the man who has been training me. This incident, just one in a weekend full of incidences of grotesque self-fulfillment on James's part, was somewhere beneath comedy; tragedy was nipping at it like a fish nipping at, say, the penis of a skinny dipper. Two things were meeting all weekend that never should, namely, James, and other people.

I went out for a cup of water.

I got back and started in on the ganciclovir, which the expert has told me isn't chemo, so I didn't treat it like one. I put it in a bucket and gave it to Laurel. Well, the expert's out there no doubt challenging the foundations of Laurel's whole existence with his endless intellectual high-wire act, and he looks over her shoulder at the bucket I'm handing her and says, and here's the thing, he says it in this voice... I have to explain this. There's a way that you can slow your voice down to a croak. I normally hear children do it. You slow it down so it's one vocal cord popping, you know what I mean? He's doing this, saying "put...it...in...a...bag...
put...it...in...a...bag...
put...it...in..."
My last frayed nerve cried uncle.
I jump in.
"If you say that one more time I'm leaving."
"a...bag..."
"Ok, that's it. Bye."

I went to the anteroom and stripped out of my paper clothes and walk out, taking a deep breath. I was relaxed. The light from beyond the tunnel was bathing me in goodness and I opened like a sweet Tennessee flower. Ahh.

But my respiration was premature. The expert wasn't going to let me get the last word like that. Did you think for a moment it would be his style to allow someone else to exist all over the place like that? Oh, no, friend. You would be very mistaken indeed.

The door I've just passed through and out into the regular pharmacy swings open, with James in it, yelling at me. Yelling has the unfortunate effect of making the person who's doing it do it more and louder, and rather than releasing pressure, makes it gather and roil and spill. I got the feeling I was to be party to an exercise in tantrum, and may I announce I am sick of being right.

His diatribe lasted probably about a minute, which is a good long time, with your target no more than seven or eight feet away. I just stood there. It might sound strange, but this event was just another which felt very much like nothing more than the hammering away at my psyche this strange man had been doing all weekend. To understand why I just stood there, the only thing you need to know is that this wasn't the singular, explosive event it sounded like to the outside observer; this was only a continuation, more of the same (is insanity too strong a word?) thing I'd seen so much of. As far as I can describe it, I was filled with a sense that this was unquestionably the final moment, and that sweet freedom was now closer than ever. There was no way anything else could happen after this one. Not a chance. In the catalog of human interaction, this is the final page in sections as odious as was mine with this man, and I was already peeking, smirkingly, into the home and garden section. I remember him yelling "You're untrainable!" and calling into question my attitude, my attention to setting up the pump, and how I didn't want to be here. My wanting to be here has never been a secret to anyone, mind you, but the other handful of increasingly broad and reckless comments, which would have earned someone in a situation different from this a facial bruise, were just more bad noise in a weekend of bad noise. Finally he, sputtering, spun on his heel and tried to slam the door in my face after a lady named Sue said "That's enough, James", and he finished whatever bit of vitriol he had been composing to devastate me. But you know those things that keep doors from slamming? There's one of those. So it made a slightly louder than normal hiss, and then closed normally.

I walked out into a pharmacy that only sees moments like these happen every year or greater. I could see myself passing into mythology in real time. Nothing else was happening. Time had stopped. It was clear as a bell I was the guy they'd all be talking about three years from now. As if a strong wind was coming from me, people moved away like little sailboats, and when I very calmly said "I'll be leaving now", the manager on duty, Pam, not only agreed, but agreed with the awe normally reserved for acts of herosim and self-sacrifice.

So then I badged out and went home and got drunk, so that I wouldn't write an email to my managers. I was a little curious when I was about half in the bag yesterday and tried to phone a work friend and ask her what the general perception of the event has turned into, but she didn't answer. The event itself is over, but I'm sure that's just the beginning of what is to come. All in all, I'm sorry they put me in chemos this weekend for entirely different reasons than I originally was. It's the easiest job at the whole hospital and about as dangerous as anything else, which isn't all that dangerous.

So I'm tickled a deep sunburned pink to be headed back out the door into the future, which is guaran-fucking-teed to hold less pharmacy than watchmaking.

Cheers!

posted by dale @ 9:03 AM