It’s quiet in the Chemo Room of the Oncology Clinic at Oskar Helene Heim. Eight or nine big club chairs whose high backs and footrests can be adjusted by a remote control. Mobile phones aren’t banned, but even when a patient uses his, he murmurs rather than speaks. The chairs are scattered across the room but all more or less directly face the long strip of window on one side. Through the window: Trees beginning to turn green, their tops and bottoms truncated; sparrows, blackbirds, finches soundlessly alighting, hopping, flying off again. The nurses have a pop hit radio station playing just audibly beside the computers, but that too hardly impinges on the peacefulness of the room. We read, doze, look at the trees again, read, heads nod forward. There are five infusion bags and bottles suspended from the stand beside my easy chair. One infusion to combat nausea, one to deal with the cancer cells and so on. The tubes from the bags pass through an electronic counter before reaching the port inserted at the front of my right shoulder. A repeated bleeping whenever a bag is empty, a nurse comes to close off the tube from the now drained container and open the tube from the next one. A mother, sitting on a stool, talks to her son, around his head a bandana, which at once covers and draws attention to his hairless skull. I read again, nod off, stare out the window, shafts of sunlight falling across the leaves, at the bags on the stand above me, willing them to empty more swiftly into my body. At the end of the afternoon, when my last bag is drained, I’m the only remaining patient. Even Herr Hille (You’re Herr Hille? – Jawoll) left a few minutes ago. But even when it’s time to leave the chemo room the infusions continue. I get a little barrel-like jar, still attached to the port, containing a pump and more fluid to take home with me. I have to carry the jar with me for the next 48 hours, hanging from my belt or around my neck as if I were my own St. Bernard, while it dribbles 4800 mg Fluorouracil plus 13 ml Isoton (i.e. salt solution) into me. After two days, needle, tube and empty pump barrel are removed. And in two weeks the whole business again. Arrival at the clinic at 11, needle through the skin into the port, blood sample (I never look), infusion bottles attached, reading, dozing, the trees grown greener, the foliage thicker in the overgrown grounds of Oskar Helene Heim.
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