The Chemo Room — It's not a bubble.

Germs are my enemy, especially now that I will he on five days of Cytoxan chemo to intentionally delete my defective immune system. Cloistered here at Northwestern Hospital, I will be vulnerable to infection until I get my stem cells back and they engraft to start building a new non-autoimmune healthy immune system. Target date to be released back into the wild world is somewhere the first week of February. 

Friends and family ask if my hospital bed is inside a big germ-proof orb, like the one a young John Travolta lived in during his first big movie break in 1976, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. Nope, no bubble for me. What I do have is a  pretty normal hospital room with a high-troughput hepa air filter, and nurses who wear masks, gowns and rubber gloves. Also, walking into the chemo wing requires going through a massive double-door airlock that closes with a reassuringly solid boom. I assume this is to scare off unfriendly anti-hsct neurologists and infectious feral street cats.

In my room, the IV machine I'm hooked up to  looks like a mutant jellyfish tree. Several bags of translucent fluids simultaneously drip their contents down dangling clear tubes into an octopus catheter in my arm. A tube within the catheter snakes up inside an arm vein, through my shoulder, under the clavicle and to within an inch or so of my heart where drugs will get pumped though my body. When I get nauseous or headachey from the chemo, my nurses offer a progression of several different drugs to calm my symptoms.

I'm not very mobile due to leg spasticity, but I'm encouraged to unplug my IV machine and run it on battery power so I can walk around the hall a bit to keep my muscles working and the blood flowing. Bald, in a hospital gown and pushing a wheeled rack of infusion drugs, I no doubt look like a hare krishna trying to sell salvation through magic jellyfish. So far, nobody's buying.