Dispatches From The Hospital Room 3

More of my experiences in the hospital during December.

My oncologist came into my hospital room trailed by an uncommonly large retinue of interns, residents, fellows, and cancer groupies. I raised the head of the bed to listen. He had spoken, vaguely, of a cutting edge treatment for which I was eligible that was under study at the hospital. A nurse wheeled in an incubator with something squirming swaddled in a blue blanket.

My doctor explained that the new treatment for my type of leukemia required the filtration of the leukemia cells from my blood and the Genetic Research department of the University had engineered a new lifeform to accomplish this.

From the incubator he lifted a tube-shaped object about 2 and a half feet in length and 2 feet in diameter. I was intrigued until I noticed the tube wiggled by itself like a piglet that doesn’t want to be held. The idea wasn’t new, he continued, medical science had used leeches to bleed patients since ancient times and they are currently used with great success in draining blood after reconstructive surgery.

He handed me the tube. It weighed about the same as a terrier puppy and wiggled almost as much. It was warm to the touch and its skin felt like the nylon cover of a neoprene support brace. It smelled coppery – like blood, but with a sickly sweet finish. Surrounding the holes on either end of the thing were a brush of needle-like extensions that I can only assume were teeth.

Before the wide-eyed and excited crowd my doctor told me that this thing had been bio-engineered right there at Penn. And while it wasn’t a leech, its DNA was based on leech DNA but it was designed to attach itself to me, suck out my blood, filter out only the leukemia cells and return my clean blood to my body. The neat thing, he told me with pride, was when the leukemia was all gone, the thing would starve, die and drop right off my body. Cured.

One doctor opened my shirt. One end of the thing turned like a cobra and struck against my right pec. The sensation was like getting an over-enthusiastic hickie followed by a pleasant numbness. The other end attached itself with some force to my left ribcage. That side burned and swelled.

I was sweating. I looked around the room. I knew every face in the room. No one looked out of place. I could smell them. The air was thick from their breathing. The thing wiggled on my chest. My doctor smiled – a bit too much, I thought. He reached forward and patted the thing on my chest. I could smell the ever-present sanitizer on his hands. I could hear IV pump alarms outside the room and the soft sound of carts being pushed in the hall.

I looked everywhere for a hole. There had to be a way out of this world somehow. I felt the sheets beneath me. They felt every bit as real as they do now. I tried to rise from the bed, but the thing on my chest reset its grip on my flesh forcing me to stay put.

It was then I noticed behind my doctor – where the bathroom ought to be – was a stained glass window. My mind wrapped itself around the fatal flaw in this scene and I clawed my way back to reality.

This was no dream. I had not been sleeping. I watched the crowd disappear from my room, followed by my doctor. And when I looked down, the thing on my chest was gone, too. I sat in my hospital bed panting in sheer panic. Which was worse? Seeing a giant leech on my chest, or thinking I saw a giant leech on my chest?

Now I am no stranger to “seeing things.” I am, after-all, of the generation that spent Saturday nights watching 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Midnight Movies. Over and over again. I have been known to have conversations with inanimate objects and people that were not there. But never in my life have I had a fictitious experience as real as this one.

Maybe it was the fevers or the Dilaudid or the loneliness, strangeness and isolation of night in the hospital. Maybe it was the combination of things. But from time to time I still feel the weight of the Leech as it wiggles, smell its sweet coppery stench as it sucks on my chest.

Such is the anatomy of a hallucination.