I had my fourth-to-last chemo session today. The remaining three are already planned. The two coming ones on Mondays two weeks apart, and the last one on a Friday with a slightly shorter recovery period. Why this nonsense, you might ask. I will have to go to the hospital on a Sunday to have the pump removed. Do I not have anything better to do on a Sunday? I might, but the next day I’m scheduled to fly to San Francisco to teach at a crystallography course at the Stanford synchrotron. If history is anything to go by, this will be the best transcontinental flight ever. The day after the pump is removed, I’m always so tired I can’t do anything else but slumber and sleep, and what better to do on a cheap economy seat?
Where was I? Oh, yes, the fourth-to-last session. It was like all the sessions before it, uneventful and not painful. The nurses inquire how I am and have been doing and react with slight incredulity heartfelt happiness when I say that everything is fine and I have nothing to complain about. Then they hand me the anti-nausea pill, which I probably don’t need, but who am I to argue with kind and compassionate nurses about instructions they receive from a somewhat more remote and abstract doctor? I’m happy the nurses run the show.
During my first chemotherapy session, I got a strip of contraband anti-nausea pills, capsules imported from Germany (and apparently not officially available in Switzerland) that were designed to release their active ingredient over an extended period of time. One capsule covers an entire day. I forgot to take them after the second session and suffered no ill effect. Since then, they’ve been out of my mind.
The only time I got nauseous was yesterday when I visited Technorama, the Swiss Science Center, with my daughter. The winter holidays over, the girl should have been in kindergarten, but the teachers were on a one-day training course. Can anyone explain why such a training course needs to be scheduled right after instead of during the holidays? Do teachers really get as much time off as the kids get holidays? In Switzerland, this would be twelve weeks (two weeks in winter, two weeks around Easter, five weeks over summer, two more weeks in fall and a week + holidays over Christmas and New Year’s), more than twice a normal Swiss employee gets. This can’t be real. But then, why not schedule training during school holidays?
Anyway, I took a day of compensation for the trip to Thailand, which had taken place on a Sunday, and took the girl for a day out. Influenced by the gospel according to Peppa Pig where George gets this for his birthday, she wanted to go to a museum. We have the Swiss Children’s Museum right in front of our house, but this wouldn’t be much of a day out, plus she’s been there already with after-school care. I wanted to go to Zurich instead. Lots of museums there. Unfortunately, the vast majority is closed on Mondays. The tram museum was open and would have been a good choice, but then Flucha suggested Technorama in Winterthur, not far from Zurich, and we were on our way.
Technorama consists entirely of exhibits you can touch, try out and play with. It’s a cool place to discover science when you’re a bit older than four and have the mind for it. Nevertheless, the girl was happy to play in the mechanics section and discover the magic of mirrors. We even attended a presentation of gases featuring a mighty bang or two. The undisputed highlight, though, was the total perception vortex (which would be a nice name for the contraption if it hadn’t already been claimed by Douglas Adams).
The vortex is a dark tunnel about five meters long and two-and-a-half meters in diameter. Near the bottom of it runs a narrow walkway with handrails. The walkway is a metal grid you can look through. The tunnel itself is cylindrical. On the black walls of the tunnel is a spiral of bright glowing stars, like a cartoon Milky Way. The spiral rotates one way, then another.
Inside, without a fixed reference point, you lose all connection to reality. I stood on the walkway, the spiral changed rotation, and my body was quite violently thrown against the railing of the walkway, as if it were the (immobile) walkway that had changed its rotation. There was no way for me to keep upright without assistance. After two journeys through the tunnel, I was profoundly sick, in my belly and in my head. The girl, in contrast, loved it. She wanted to walk through again and again, and walk through it she did, in stark contrast to the slinking along the railing that I performed.
It was only on the train back home that my nausea subsided. A day later, after the ninth chemo session, it didn’t come back. I’m blessed with a lack of side effects that is as lucky as it is sometimes disconcerting. At the end of the day, I’m not complaining. I now know for a fact that I will fly through the remaining three sessions like a mid-classement rider on a connecting stage between the Alps and the Pyrenees.
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