Close to Everything

My room is on the sixth floor of the University of Washington Medical Center. It's the cancer ward. The nurses are fantastic and well-trained. They pay attention to details. They provide an extraordinary amount of extraordinary care. When you approach the front desk, you will turn down the hall immediately to your left. I am in the second room. I am close to everything.

The rules are strict, but a little different than what they were in England. Between Lancaster and London, the number one rule when I was outside my room was that I needed to wear a surgical mask. All sorts of badness could be transmitted through the air, especially within the confines of the hospital. Wearing the mask keeps the badness at bay. Here, we are not so concerned with what I might happen to breathe while walking through the hallways -- the off chance that somebody might sneeze and it might linger and then I might, maybe, get sick from that airborne whatever -- as we are with physical touch. As long as hands are washed regularly, and always before touching me, the mask is all but irrelevant.

This is one of the reasons I try to get out and walk at least once a day, even if it's only one lap around the floor. So I'm a little vain and don't want to be seen with a mask. I'm bald, barefoot, wearing pajamas. I'm holding onto a rolling cart with one hand. It's got my chemo and other medication hanging from the top, all of which drips into the clear plastic tube stuck into my chest. There are visible bruises (especially through the white cotton pajamas) along my side, gathering at my waist. I am more than fine ambling up and down the halls like this.

But ask me to wear a surgical mask? In public? The horror.

If I don't need to worry about anything other than washing my hands when I get back, and making sure that nobody touches me -- don't anybody f***ing come near me -- then I'll walk around whenever I can.

Dr. Collins will scold me, of course, when I go barefoot. Glass punctures and hospital floors might not always be spotless and a certain somebody hasn't proven to a certain doctor that his feet won't bleed all over the floor when flesh meets glass. Somewhere during the summer, I will have slippers, too, but for now I'm a rebel. I'm dangerous. I life live on the dangerous edge, walking barefoot through the hospital.