NOTE: One of the many things that change when a 'person' becomes a 'patient', and eventually a 'patient' becomes a 'survivor' is that life is seldom viewed from the same perspective as before. From diagnosis, through treatment and on to remission, our lives are changed. Depending on the situation - type of cancer, age of patient, general health of the patient, type of treatment, etc. - simply SURVIVING the treatment phase can be a major life accomplishment. For most cancer patients once they get past the point in time of diagnosis, their life becomes consumed with medical appointments, possible surgery, hospital and home recovery, varying dosages of radiation and/or chemotherapy, all with the HOPE of beating back the disease and arriving at the other end alive for as long as possible.
The challenge along the way - for the patient and the family / friends around them - is to keep things in-tact through this time. As much as the person WITH cancer has to deal with life threatening physical issues, those around them must deal with the responsibilities of day to day living.
Treating someone for cancer means almost always a loss of income, as all treatment process eats up not only time, but also the energy for the patient just to get from one day to the next. Even in the best of circumstances - in families with two wage-earners, or those with great insurance or lots of savings, costs rise, funds dwindle and this often leads to frayed relations within families.
It is often easy for the patient to forget that the emotional burden of keeping things together is as tough for the patients family, as the treatments can be on the patient. How BOTH parties deal with things can make a big difference in how strong - physically and emotionally - they will be at the end.
Chapter 15: The Extraction
Reg woke up after another anesthetic induced sleep to find that someone had kindly placed the flat-screen TV in a position where he could see it, rather than leave him - as he had ben for three days - staring at the ceiling, his view only interrupted by nurses and doctors, and family members who hovered over the tank where he lay, healing, adapting to the new treatment. He wasn't quite sure how he felt about being a human guinea pig, but he had no choice, really. What had been done to him was done while he was unconscious, he had no control, no say. He had to simply adjust to the reality that presented itself to him.
"God, damnit. How much longer will I be in this stupid goop?", he said to himself, as he lay there, listening to the noises of the hospital floor come to life for the morning. Phones ringing, machines beeping, carts with food being wheeled around, people flitting in and out with papers, orders, medicines, all geared towards making people better, or simply keeping them alive.
Sometime between the re-hydrated scrambled eggs, and the awful cafeteria coffee that he was being fed by an attractive young nurse, Dr. Emil Goerge appeared over his bed, cleanly shaven, the handle-bars of his moustache freshly waxed, "Good morning, Reg! Are you ready to get out of this stuff today? Your tests show that you may be ready."
"Ready to get out? Is this guy nuts! Why do doctors always ask such stupid questions?", Reg thought to him self. What he said was, "What do you think? I feel like a chicken breast that has been marinating in someones kitchen. God I want to shower and shave!"
"One step at a time. One step at a time. First we have to prep you for the return to a normal environment, and check the performance of the XACTO suit." Dr. George motioned to the door way and several technicians flowed silently into the room, taking up various positions around the tank, working switches, tapping on keyboards.
"The process of extraction will proceed as follows," he stood and, as Reg has noted before, moved into his lecture mode of explanation, playing to the audience of six people in the room.
"First, we will give you some extra medication to help you deal with any pain that you may feel. Then we will raise the temperature of the tank a bit to allow the bimemetic gel to soften, and for you to be released."
The doctor waved and pointed to technicians, "Nurse Beckman, administer the ansethetic. Begin the warming and draining process."
Reg was kind of disappointed that his head had barely cleared from the meds that let him sleep in comfort overnight had worn off, before he felt another wave of cooling numbness flow through his body as he was extracted from the goop. Drifting, floating, trying to stay focused, Reg found himself moved from the confines of the tank to a gurney next to the tank.
Looking at Dr. George, the meds seemed to make his moustache seem bigger, wilder and as he spoke he seemed to be speaking in a time-warp, "Hoooow, arrrrrre, youuuuuu. Feeeeeling?"
Forcing his eyes to focus on the rather silly image before him, Reg attempted to answer, "I....something....woozy....feel....smurfy skin, blue?"
The lights overhead flashed by as he was wheeled from his room to another, where he was again lifted to another bed where nurses ran warm water over his body, removing the gel from his blue XACTO suit. After the bath, it was another trip down another hallway to another room where he was moved again to another bed and this time covered with a blanket.
Pink Cloud Chocolate Nurse appeared over his bed, "Ooooo look at you chile. In yo' fancy blue suit. You be lookin' like Spiderman or somethin'. Doctor wanted me to give you a little something to hep you relax, get used to bein' back with us, regular folk." Catrice, produced a vial of yellow liquid and poked it into the IV. "There, there sweetie, you res' now."
A warm darkness, this time, enveloped Reg and he slept again.
Chapter 16: A Return Marked By Pain
It wasn't medication, or light, or sound, or one of the many odd, often overwhelming aromas that filled the hospital, that woke Reg from his drug-induced sleep. It was the sudden inability to breathe. Startled by the sensation, Reg tried to inhale. Over and over he struggled to catch even a single breath.
"What the HELL! I...CAN'T BREATHE!" he tried to shout, but what his ears heard him say was, "Unnnnnnngh..."
What his wife noticed, as she sat holding her husbands blue gloved hand, was that his eyes flew open, wildly looking about the room. She also noticed him struggling to breathe.
"Honey, honey, stay still! Don't try to move too much. Focus on your breathing."
Nurse Catrice noticed his struggled attempts to draw a breath and quickly fixed the oxygen tube to his nostrils. Polly looked up from Reg's face to thank the nurse, and again she had vanished like a cloud.
"It's O.K.! It's all right! I'm here. Lucy is here too."
As the pure oxygen filled Reg's lungs, his vision and mind cleared. He moved his head, which felt like it weighed 50 pounds, and saw Polly's beutiful face, and right next to her, their sandy haired daughter, smiling down at hime. "How....how....long....asleep?" Reg stammered.
Polly held his hand now with both of hers and explained, "Well, honey, you spent three days in the tank, then a day in and out while they cleaned you up, and then they kept you asleep for another 4 days. So that makes almost a week you have spent in one bed or another."
Reg nodded and looked at Lucy, she seemed upset, "Daddy, my concert was last Thursday. You MISSED it... but Mommy was there."
"I'm....so....sorry, sweetie....I....really....wanted...to...be...there." Reg, exhausted, even with the oxygen, tried to apologize.
Lucy answered quietly, "It's O.K. Daddy. Mommy made a video, you can watch it later at home. When are you coming home? Me and Mommy and Baxter miss you sooo much. Daddy, Baxter sleeps in your chair, all the time." Baxter was the full grown Greyhound they had adopted from a race track, and while Reg liked the dog, he was convinced it was the dumbest beast ever. He insisted on attempting to fit his 170 pound, six foot long body in Reg's leather recliner, his legs, tail and head flopping over the edges when he slept.
Into the room swept Dr. George, with two nurses and a med student, who was maddly tapping on his PDA trying to keep pace with what Dr. George was saying.
"Good, good, good you are awake." he said as he rounded the foot of the bed, stopped to check some monitors, and to fondle the greenish fluid in an IV bag. Looking satisfied with everything, he turned to Reg and Polly.
"Today we will remove your suit, check your progress and start the next phase of your treatment."
After spending a week on his back Reg found he had absolutely no strength to even sit up on his own. So, with the help of the nurse and Polly they worked him up to a sitting position. A nurse stepped in with blue cloth covered cart of instruments placing it on the bed next to Reg.
Dr. George moved in now, donning purple surgical gloves and flippng back the cover from the tray, he picked up a pair of large tweezers and a flat spatula instrument of some kind. "I will now begin removing the XACTO suit. Your new skin should have grown under it after we finished your first course of chemotherapy that it delivered to your system while you were in the biomemetic gel."
Polly had to leave to take Lucy to oboe lessons once Reg was sitting and the medical team had come in. They both gave him a peck on the cheek and were off, it was a good thing, because she might not have been able to handle what came next. The Doctor attempted to lift the edge of the cuff of the blue fabric near Reg's right wrist. When he did, Reg yelled out, "Owwwww. Holly shit that hurts!"
The Doctor tried to continue, ignoring Reg's outburst, "Now, now, it is probably just residue from the gel that has sealed the edge of the fabric. The Doctor now reached for a scalpel on the tray to his right. He proceed to make an incision along the boundary between Regs wrist and the fabric.
This time Reg reacted even more forcefully. "Damnit. What the HELL are you doing?" Reg yanked his arm away, with great effort, and fell back wards onto the bed, blood seeping from under his hand. "What the hell is going on?"
For the first time, Reg saw true confusion pass over the face of the doctor. "I, I, don't know. This has never happened before. The XACTO fabric has always released after treatment." shaking his head, Dr. George summoned a nurse to bedside, "Here, here, nurse, please take care of this injury."
As the nurse quickly stitched up the wound, Dr. George sat, obviously pondering this new development, not something he had expected. Clearly he was trying to come up with a plan to figure out what was happening.
Returning Reg to his seated position, the doctor approached his equally confused patient. "Reg, I don't know what is happening, but in order to figure it out I will need to attempt to free the suit from other areas of your body."
"What? What do you mean 'free the suit' exactly?" Reg said, holding his bandaged wrist gingerly.
The doctor continued, all note of confidence gone from his voice, "Well, to put it simply I will have to try to cut it free....Like I did at your wrist. We must get samples to see what is really going on."
The next hour seemed like an eternity, to Reg. Tired of all the anesthesia, tired of being misled about his condition, he refused anesthetics and the doctor and nurses tried, unsuccessfully to remove the suit. His screams were heard up and down the floor. Inciting all kinds of concerned looks and hushed voices from the other patients, and staff going about their business.
Towards the end, they had no choice but to sedate the blue-suited patient as he struggled on the bed. Once unconscious they bandaged the eight or ten incision points, and whisked the samples off to the lab to try to figure out what was going on.
A few hours later, Polly returned to find her now multiply bandaged, sedated husband back in his bed. She stormed out of the room, demanding to see Dr. George. Demanding to know what had happened while she was gone.
"Mrs. Ularguy. Please come with me." the doctor led her to a consultation room just down the hall from her husbands room, she noticed she had a thick file and some x-rays under his other arm.
Once in the room, the doctor proceeded to slide x-rays on the wall mounted light boxes. He arranged micro-photographs and printed test results neatly on the table in between himself and the puzzled Polly. He proceeded with a detailed explanation, which quickly went beyond Polly's ability to understand the specifics, what she got from the doctor was this.
"The XACTO fabric suit has bonded with your husbands newly grown skin, in a permanent fashion. We don't understand all the specifics yet, but it seems to have to do with the natural silk in the fabric weave, the radiation needed to activate the suit and the regenerative compounds in the biomemetic gel in which your husband was immersed." Dr. George explained, point in here at charts, tapping on photographs.
The doctor continued. Polly took a couple breaths and tried to follow along, "Your husband was the first subject to receive an entire suit of the fabric. We have used it successfully on other patients, but only in limited coverage situations, and rarely had any problems with the release of the fabric."
Polly put up her hand to stop the doctor from going on, her head was swimming again. "So, what you are telling me is that the fabric suit used to treat my husband's cancer is no permanently attached to his body." She waited for the doctors response.
"Yes. And there may be other.... hmm, side effects that we do not understand yet.... according to other reports." the doctor tried to add with as much sympathy as he could.
The challenge along the way - for the patient and the family / friends around them - is to keep things in-tact through this time. As much as the person WITH cancer has to deal with life threatening physical issues, those around them must deal with the responsibilities of day to day living.
Treating someone for cancer means almost always a loss of income, as all treatment process eats up not only time, but also the energy for the patient just to get from one day to the next. Even in the best of circumstances - in families with two wage-earners, or those with great insurance or lots of savings, costs rise, funds dwindle and this often leads to frayed relations within families.
It is often easy for the patient to forget that the emotional burden of keeping things together is as tough for the patients family, as the treatments can be on the patient. How BOTH parties deal with things can make a big difference in how strong - physically and emotionally - they will be at the end.
Chapter 15: The Extraction
Reg woke up after another anesthetic induced sleep to find that someone had kindly placed the flat-screen TV in a position where he could see it, rather than leave him - as he had ben for three days - staring at the ceiling, his view only interrupted by nurses and doctors, and family members who hovered over the tank where he lay, healing, adapting to the new treatment. He wasn't quite sure how he felt about being a human guinea pig, but he had no choice, really. What had been done to him was done while he was unconscious, he had no control, no say. He had to simply adjust to the reality that presented itself to him.
"God, damnit. How much longer will I be in this stupid goop?", he said to himself, as he lay there, listening to the noises of the hospital floor come to life for the morning. Phones ringing, machines beeping, carts with food being wheeled around, people flitting in and out with papers, orders, medicines, all geared towards making people better, or simply keeping them alive.
Sometime between the re-hydrated scrambled eggs, and the awful cafeteria coffee that he was being fed by an attractive young nurse, Dr. Emil Goerge appeared over his bed, cleanly shaven, the handle-bars of his moustache freshly waxed, "Good morning, Reg! Are you ready to get out of this stuff today? Your tests show that you may be ready."
"Ready to get out? Is this guy nuts! Why do doctors always ask such stupid questions?", Reg thought to him self. What he said was, "What do you think? I feel like a chicken breast that has been marinating in someones kitchen. God I want to shower and shave!"
"One step at a time. One step at a time. First we have to prep you for the return to a normal environment, and check the performance of the XACTO suit." Dr. George motioned to the door way and several technicians flowed silently into the room, taking up various positions around the tank, working switches, tapping on keyboards.
"The process of extraction will proceed as follows," he stood and, as Reg has noted before, moved into his lecture mode of explanation, playing to the audience of six people in the room.
"First, we will give you some extra medication to help you deal with any pain that you may feel. Then we will raise the temperature of the tank a bit to allow the bimemetic gel to soften, and for you to be released."
The doctor waved and pointed to technicians, "Nurse Beckman, administer the ansethetic. Begin the warming and draining process."
Reg was kind of disappointed that his head had barely cleared from the meds that let him sleep in comfort overnight had worn off, before he felt another wave of cooling numbness flow through his body as he was extracted from the goop. Drifting, floating, trying to stay focused, Reg found himself moved from the confines of the tank to a gurney next to the tank.
Looking at Dr. George, the meds seemed to make his moustache seem bigger, wilder and as he spoke he seemed to be speaking in a time-warp, "Hoooow, arrrrrre, youuuuuu. Feeeeeling?"
Forcing his eyes to focus on the rather silly image before him, Reg attempted to answer, "I....something....woozy....feel....smurfy skin, blue?"
The lights overhead flashed by as he was wheeled from his room to another, where he was again lifted to another bed where nurses ran warm water over his body, removing the gel from his blue XACTO suit. After the bath, it was another trip down another hallway to another room where he was moved again to another bed and this time covered with a blanket.
Pink Cloud Chocolate Nurse appeared over his bed, "Ooooo look at you chile. In yo' fancy blue suit. You be lookin' like Spiderman or somethin'. Doctor wanted me to give you a little something to hep you relax, get used to bein' back with us, regular folk." Catrice, produced a vial of yellow liquid and poked it into the IV. "There, there sweetie, you res' now."
A warm darkness, this time, enveloped Reg and he slept again.
Chapter 16: A Return Marked By Pain
It wasn't medication, or light, or sound, or one of the many odd, often overwhelming aromas that filled the hospital, that woke Reg from his drug-induced sleep. It was the sudden inability to breathe. Startled by the sensation, Reg tried to inhale. Over and over he struggled to catch even a single breath.
"What the HELL! I...CAN'T BREATHE!" he tried to shout, but what his ears heard him say was, "Unnnnnnngh..."
What his wife noticed, as she sat holding her husbands blue gloved hand, was that his eyes flew open, wildly looking about the room. She also noticed him struggling to breathe.
"Honey, honey, stay still! Don't try to move too much. Focus on your breathing."
Nurse Catrice noticed his struggled attempts to draw a breath and quickly fixed the oxygen tube to his nostrils. Polly looked up from Reg's face to thank the nurse, and again she had vanished like a cloud.
"It's O.K.! It's all right! I'm here. Lucy is here too."
As the pure oxygen filled Reg's lungs, his vision and mind cleared. He moved his head, which felt like it weighed 50 pounds, and saw Polly's beutiful face, and right next to her, their sandy haired daughter, smiling down at hime. "How....how....long....asleep?" Reg stammered.
Polly held his hand now with both of hers and explained, "Well, honey, you spent three days in the tank, then a day in and out while they cleaned you up, and then they kept you asleep for another 4 days. So that makes almost a week you have spent in one bed or another."
Reg nodded and looked at Lucy, she seemed upset, "Daddy, my concert was last Thursday. You MISSED it... but Mommy was there."
"I'm....so....sorry, sweetie....I....really....wanted...to...be...there." Reg, exhausted, even with the oxygen, tried to apologize.
Lucy answered quietly, "It's O.K. Daddy. Mommy made a video, you can watch it later at home. When are you coming home? Me and Mommy and Baxter miss you sooo much. Daddy, Baxter sleeps in your chair, all the time." Baxter was the full grown Greyhound they had adopted from a race track, and while Reg liked the dog, he was convinced it was the dumbest beast ever. He insisted on attempting to fit his 170 pound, six foot long body in Reg's leather recliner, his legs, tail and head flopping over the edges when he slept.
Into the room swept Dr. George, with two nurses and a med student, who was maddly tapping on his PDA trying to keep pace with what Dr. George was saying.
"Good, good, good you are awake." he said as he rounded the foot of the bed, stopped to check some monitors, and to fondle the greenish fluid in an IV bag. Looking satisfied with everything, he turned to Reg and Polly.
"Today we will remove your suit, check your progress and start the next phase of your treatment."
After spending a week on his back Reg found he had absolutely no strength to even sit up on his own. So, with the help of the nurse and Polly they worked him up to a sitting position. A nurse stepped in with blue cloth covered cart of instruments placing it on the bed next to Reg.
Dr. George moved in now, donning purple surgical gloves and flippng back the cover from the tray, he picked up a pair of large tweezers and a flat spatula instrument of some kind. "I will now begin removing the XACTO suit. Your new skin should have grown under it after we finished your first course of chemotherapy that it delivered to your system while you were in the biomemetic gel."
Polly had to leave to take Lucy to oboe lessons once Reg was sitting and the medical team had come in. They both gave him a peck on the cheek and were off, it was a good thing, because she might not have been able to handle what came next. The Doctor attempted to lift the edge of the cuff of the blue fabric near Reg's right wrist. When he did, Reg yelled out, "Owwwww. Holly shit that hurts!"
The Doctor tried to continue, ignoring Reg's outburst, "Now, now, it is probably just residue from the gel that has sealed the edge of the fabric. The Doctor now reached for a scalpel on the tray to his right. He proceed to make an incision along the boundary between Regs wrist and the fabric.
This time Reg reacted even more forcefully. "Damnit. What the HELL are you doing?" Reg yanked his arm away, with great effort, and fell back wards onto the bed, blood seeping from under his hand. "What the hell is going on?"
For the first time, Reg saw true confusion pass over the face of the doctor. "I, I, don't know. This has never happened before. The XACTO fabric has always released after treatment." shaking his head, Dr. George summoned a nurse to bedside, "Here, here, nurse, please take care of this injury."
As the nurse quickly stitched up the wound, Dr. George sat, obviously pondering this new development, not something he had expected. Clearly he was trying to come up with a plan to figure out what was happening.
Returning Reg to his seated position, the doctor approached his equally confused patient. "Reg, I don't know what is happening, but in order to figure it out I will need to attempt to free the suit from other areas of your body."
"What? What do you mean 'free the suit' exactly?" Reg said, holding his bandaged wrist gingerly.
The doctor continued, all note of confidence gone from his voice, "Well, to put it simply I will have to try to cut it free....Like I did at your wrist. We must get samples to see what is really going on."
The next hour seemed like an eternity, to Reg. Tired of all the anesthesia, tired of being misled about his condition, he refused anesthetics and the doctor and nurses tried, unsuccessfully to remove the suit. His screams were heard up and down the floor. Inciting all kinds of concerned looks and hushed voices from the other patients, and staff going about their business.
Towards the end, they had no choice but to sedate the blue-suited patient as he struggled on the bed. Once unconscious they bandaged the eight or ten incision points, and whisked the samples off to the lab to try to figure out what was going on.
A few hours later, Polly returned to find her now multiply bandaged, sedated husband back in his bed. She stormed out of the room, demanding to see Dr. George. Demanding to know what had happened while she was gone.
"Mrs. Ularguy. Please come with me." the doctor led her to a consultation room just down the hall from her husbands room, she noticed she had a thick file and some x-rays under his other arm.
Once in the room, the doctor proceeded to slide x-rays on the wall mounted light boxes. He arranged micro-photographs and printed test results neatly on the table in between himself and the puzzled Polly. He proceeded with a detailed explanation, which quickly went beyond Polly's ability to understand the specifics, what she got from the doctor was this.
"The XACTO fabric suit has bonded with your husbands newly grown skin, in a permanent fashion. We don't understand all the specifics yet, but it seems to have to do with the natural silk in the fabric weave, the radiation needed to activate the suit and the regenerative compounds in the biomemetic gel in which your husband was immersed." Dr. George explained, point in here at charts, tapping on photographs.
The doctor continued. Polly took a couple breaths and tried to follow along, "Your husband was the first subject to receive an entire suit of the fabric. We have used it successfully on other patients, but only in limited coverage situations, and rarely had any problems with the release of the fabric."
Polly put up her hand to stop the doctor from going on, her head was swimming again. "So, what you are telling me is that the fabric suit used to treat my husband's cancer is no permanently attached to his body." She waited for the doctors response.
"Yes. And there may be other.... hmm, side effects that we do not understand yet.... according to other reports." the doctor tried to add with as much sympathy as he could.
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