Mandatory Relaxation

I, like most boomers, formed my impression of most things not experienced first hand by the cinema. Jail to me meant "Cool Hand Luke," or "The Longest Yard." At worst it was "Papillion" (actually, the worst was "Midnight Express" but that was more about the horrors of Turkey - not the horrors of jail). So it was completely without fear and trepidation that I entered two days of solitary confinement this week for my radiation therapy.

Here's the drill: I get to go into a first class hospital room on Tuesday afternoon and, after taking a dose of radioactive iodine, they shut the door and I get to (have to) stay in the room alone for 48 hours. With the exception of the nurses delivering food and water, I am without human contact for these two days.

At first, I am quite pleased. I bring with me several hundred pages of reading material, a note pad and pen, a deck of cards and my own fax machine. This will be a breeze -- even fun. The room has a great view, a television and I can both receive incoming and make outgoing telephone calls.

My wife Rebecca and son Sam enviously help me unpack and we make jokes about how we can get them the same treatment so that they can have a "vacation" too.

Then the radiation guy came to give me the medicine. He came with a lead-lined pharmaceutical bottle and a geiger counter. He told me "OK, as soon as I open this bottle, take the medicine as quickly as you can." He gave me the medicine and backed away from me as if I was highly radioactive (which, in fact, I was). He shooed my family out of the room and then shut the door.

I don't know what exactly it was about the "click" of the door shutting. It wasn't locked and I knew I would be free to go in a couple of days. But that "click" loosely translated into english was "you are trapped."

All of a sudden, the free two day vacation became a mandatory two day isolation. Incarceration not freedom. Isolation not separation. I felt uncomfortable, but was still looking forward to getting my reading done.

The first day, the hours tick by and I am making great progress on my backlog of articles and notes. I go to sleep thinking "That wasn't too bad. I could definitely do this for a while."

The next day everything changes. I'm looking at how I can make a clean break out of the joint. I start to tie the bed sheets together and realize that the windows don't open. AACK! No way out the back. The ceiling tiles are glued into place. The only way out is the front. "Calm down" I tell myself. It's only another day. That helps for about 6 minutes. Then I'm on the phone calling people I know to chat. Chat about anything, or nothing. It doesn't matter. Just so long as I can be rassured that they'll still take my phone call and that they'll be there when I'm paroled - I mean released.

The phone calls get shorter and shorter as people hear from me more and more frequently during the day. I know they want to say "didn't we just speak 20 minutes ago?" but being my friends they sympathetically listen to me figuratively run my tin cup across the bars yelling "ATTICA, ATTICA."

And then, it's over. As quickly as it started. The guy with the geiger counter comes in and says that I'm not quite the nite-lite I was 48 hours ago and that I'd better get my stuff together so that they can discharge me and he can prepare the room for the next patient.

"Wait a minute" I think to myself. I know the health insurance people have paid for this room for the whole day. You can't kick me out so soon. I'm entitled to another 6 hours........"