Room Eight

Last Friday, when it reached 104 degrees in Central Park, I entered the cool reception hall of the Kimmel Urology Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. The Center is new, the furnishings modern and expensive, and if you weren’t paying attention, you might think that you’d walked by mistake into the lobby of a boutique luxury hotel.

My mission that day was to receive an injection of Lupron, a drug that suppresses the production of testosterone, a hormone that promotes the proliferation of prostate cells. When I announced my presence to the young man at the desk, he told me to go to Room Eight, which caused a bit of confusion inasmuch as I had no idea of the room’s location. “Is this your first time?” he asked. When assured that it was, he led me through a door marked “chemotherapy” and brought me to a cubicle with a large, comfortable leather chair, some smaller chairs next to it, and a television set that was tuned to a show hosted by Whoopi Goldberg.

A pretty blonde nurse named Anna entered and asked me, in a vaguely Slavic accent, if I had experienced various symptoms (breathless? fatigued? blood in the urine?), most of which I was happy to say were not present. She explained the possible side effects of the hormone therapy, the least unpleasant of which are hot flashes, enumerated those symptoms that should merit a call to my doctor, drew the cubicle's curtain shut, told me to drop my trousers, asked me if I had a preferred buttock (no), then punctured the side closest to where she was standing. I understand that within a few weeks the injection should allow me to walk without pain. I hope soon to be able to hang up my cane and stride once again along Prospect Park paths.

Confused as to the location of the exit after leaving Room Eight, I wandered about for a minute or so before sighting my nurse and asking her for directions. That minute gave me enough time to glimpse at least a half dozen patients sitting in large leather chairs like the one I had vacated, each in his or her own cubicle just like mine, each attached to an IV that presumably was delivering a chemotherapy drug. I hope they were an unrepresentative sample, for they looked pretty ill, each sunk in a private reverie, despite the presence, in most cases, of another person, probably a family member, occupying one of the smaller chairs in the cubicle.

No doubt the injections are given in the chemotherapy section for convenience. After all, nurses are required for both treatments. But I couldn't help wonder if perhaps there was another reason. Perhaps it was to warn us that the feeling of regained health, which the injections provide, will be temporary, and that in the end, after the inevitable failure of the hormone treatment to halt the proliferation of cancer cells, we too will be attached from time to time to an IV line.

That there’s another stage of defense down the road is encouraging, since it suggests the possibility of greater longevity, but the appearance of those haggard patients was a downer. All the more reason, I thought, to seize the moment while I’m still vertical and reasonably ambulatory. This would take the immediate form of a raspberry sorbet should I pass an ice cream establishment on my way home. Alas one was not to be found, but on the way, I bought six yellow carnations, a treat less fattening and likely to last a lot longer.

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