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It's a room where patients silently fight cancer

By Carl Heintze

The room looks a little like a board room except there is no table, just two rows of large blue chairs with backs that tilt into a comfortable reclining position when properly pushed.

Beside each chair is a metal pole on wheels, and across the room from the chairs is a long counter. Behind the counter, three women sit. Now and then they rise from their chairs and walk slowly down the line of chairs, and each time they do, they look at those sitting in the chairs and at the plastic bags filled with liquid that hang from hooks at the top of the poles. Across the aisle from the large blue chairs are smaller gray upholstered chairs. Sometimes people sit in these, but often they are empty.

No music plays. Most of the occupants of the chairs sit staring straight ahead or read from a book or fall asleep. The people in the chairs spend hours each week in this position, weeks each year, often months. And even though they sit silently, they are engaged in a life and death struggle.

Even though they are inert, they are fighting the cancer that in many different forms seeks to overwhelm their bodies and end their lives.

The room is an oncology infusion room. It is in San Jose near the center of things, but unobtrusive. You might never know it was there. In it each day dozens of cancer patients come to be given chemotherapy. Each day powerful drugs are dripped into their veins in the hope that as they pass through the patients' bodies they will kill any cancerous cells they meet. Of course, the drugs also may kill healthy cells, but this method of attack is the best, save for radiation, which has yet been found to treat cancer patients.

It is time-consuming, expensive and formidable. And it respects neither wealth nor position. The men and women who come to the infusion room are of all ages, heights, races, shapes and sizes, and they suffer from many different kinds of cancer: lymphoma, breast cancer, cancer of the colon, almost any site in the body. Most will be visitors to the room for months. Most chemotherapy takes at least six months, administered once a week, sometimes less often.

The three women--three oncology nurses who run the place--are all veterans with scores of years of experience. They move about the room confidently, quietly, for over the years they have seen every kind of patient come and go.

And they have seen every kind of suffering. There is, for instance, the young man who comes for chemotherapy bearing with him in a portable cart three flasks of oxygen. Without them he cannot breathe. With them he barely can. There are women who suffer from breast cancer and whose hair has fallen out. Some wear caps to hide their bare heads, some do not.

Some patients are jolly and confident, some silent and withdrawn. Some like to talk, but many do not. They simply sit and endure, waiting for their ordeal of treatment to be ended. Patients seem to come in a never-ending stream--day after day, week after week--for there is apparently no end to the number of cancer patients in the world today and particularly in the United States.

Cancer remains the great enemy.

Heart disease, of course, is still there, but a long campaign of preventive medicine is slowly making inroads on the toll from arterial and heart disease. Cancer remains.

And although it is usually thought of as an entity, cancer is probably not one but many diseases caused by not one but many agents. Few have been identified. Tobacco is surely one, but air pollution is less certain, and no one knows why breast cancer rates seem--in spite of all efforts to reduce them--to stay about the same.

In the end doctors who treat cancer and scientists who study it still have no magic bullet with which to attack it and no certain prognosis for those who suffer from it. Cancer can be capricious. It also can be swift and deadly. There seems no mean. Early discovery helps, but is no guarantee of cure.

And so the parade of patients into the infusion room continues, the grim effort to hold back the unseen enemy, an enemy as terrible as terrorists and just as insidious.