One of the most interesting and unpredictable things about the whole treatment experience was the roommates. Because we live quite rurally, there is no hospital in my area that offers radiation treatments. As a result I had to go to a large urban centre for this. The hospital hooked me up with "the Residence", which is basically a hotel but that has a deal with the hospital to provide subsidized housing for long-term treatment patients.
The Residence has a lot of suites and these are two-bedroom/two-bathroom suites, which include a small kitchen (stove, fridge, dishwasher, microwave) and a shared living room. One bedroom has an ensuite bathroom, which is fairly small and has only a shower stall. The other bedroom has access to its own bathroom which has a larger shower stall (handy for installing a chair for those who need it). A meal plan comes as part of the deal and includes breakfast in a common room on the main floor, and lunch and dinner delivered to your room. They even take your dietary considerations into account when doing your meals. The suites are quite nice. The drawback, though, is that you have to have a roommate.
And so the roommate roulette began.
My first week I checked in on the Monday and even though I was an hour earlier than the expected check-in time, they gave me a key and sent me up. My roommate had already arrived and staked out the slightly larger room (with the ensuite bathroom). As I was to discover later, it's very important that these suites have two bathrooms. You don't want to have a bathroom emergency or be experiencing nausea only to find your roommate is already in the bathroom. Also, if they are a chemo patient, you definitely don't want to be sharing the bathroom. (Signs on the hospital bathroom walls provided a series of special instructions for chemo patients to follow. It seems their urine, etc. are quite toxic.)
I put my stuff in my room and loaded my few personal items of food into the fridge, and then headed out to my first treatment. When I returned, my roommate was back. We introduced ourselves and chatted a bit. For my, this meant that she spilled more details than I ever wanted to know about herself, her cancer, her family, her background, her family history, and more. It's my curse that people give me their life stories soon after meeting me. This woman found a captive audience, so I heard a lot in our week together. I quickly discovered that she is something of a hoarder.
Every morning she would return from the breakfast room with a tray laden with anything she could get. There would be several small cartons of chocolate milk, white milk, yogurt, hard boiled eggs (in the little plastic packages), juices, and fruit (apples, bananas, oranges). Every day. Every. Day. So much stuff, that when I was packing my few bits to leave on Friday, my thought about the fridge was that it was more full than most people's fridges are on a regular basis. At first I had thought maybe she was a little on the poor side and I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. Then she went shopping at Pennington's one day and came back with several pairs of pants, a couple of tops, and a nightgown. I know what the prices are like at Pennington's, so I revised my opinion of her. I revised it again when she went shopping a second time that week and came back with more clothes.
What topped off my lowering opinion of her, however, was Thursday morning. In the morning I realized that I would need more toilet paper as when I was finished in the bathroom that morning, there was very little left. I didn't see any extra rolls in the vanity, so when I went down to breakfast at 6:00 am, I stopped at the front desk and asked about it. They said they would send some up. I had a quick breakfast and was back in my room by 6:20 am. My roommate was up and about and I noticed that there was a fresh roll of paper towel in the kitchen, so I asked her if they'd left the toilet paper. Her face fell and she said, "Oh, that's for you? I'll get it for you; it's in my room." She walked away to get me the toilet paper and all I could think in my head was, "Do you seriously think they randomly knocked on the door at 6:00 AM on the off chance we might need toilet paper?" I'm sure when I left on Friday (before her) that she probably grabbed the whole unopened roll of paper towel and took it with her.
As I checked out that Friday morning, I asked the front desk whether we have the same roommate each week or if they changed. They said they could give me the same roommate and went to make a note on the computer, but I stopped them, saying, "No! Definitely not. In fact, if she does happen to ask about being roommates again, please tell her it's outside of your control." So I didn't have her again.
In week 2, I made sure to get there two hours ahead of check-in so I could get the room with the ensuite bathroom. Roommate number two was way better. In fact, she reminded me very much of an assistant I had back in the mid to late 90s. It was in her mannerisms and her way of speaking with that delightful sarcasm we all used back in the 80s and 90s. I really liked her. I would have been happy to have her again, but it was her last week of treatment. This was when I discovered the utility of having two bathrooms. The poor woman was so sick from her treatments that she was barely eating and spent a lot of time in her bathroom losing what little food she did have in her. (Happily, she reached out to me at Christmas and let me know that she was now in remission!)
Week 3 I was back to having a whack-a-doodle roommate. I would describe her as rough around the edges. In fact, very rough around the edges. Once again I learned way more than I wanted to know about my roommate and what I did learn made me pretty sure I didn't want to know any more. She seemed pretty uneducated, with very strong leanings to the political right (as in if we were American, she'd be a card-carrying member of the cult of the orange idiot). To make her even more...um, interesting...yeah, we'll go with 'interesting', it seemed like she came from a family of thugs. She had relatives, and not distant ones, doing time for various crimes. She seemed almost proud of it as she told me about them. Our suites had a very heavy door that led to the hallway and elevators and she tended to let it slam shut whenever she entered the suite or left. When you're having treatments, you're exhausted all the time and actually spend a lot of the time sleeping. It's hard to sleep when someone is slamming a heavy door and because there's no carpet, the sound carries and echoes.
In week 4 my roommate was a woman with MS. This necessitated her using a walker for everything. The heavy door to the suite was challenging for her, so I would help whenever I could. She didn't like to let it slam if she was leaving (thank you) but sometimes she didn't let it close all the way in her effort to keep it from slamming. As a result, I returned to the suite a couple of times and found the door just resting against the jamb rather than being fully closed, and I was able to simply push it open and walk in. It did make me think (and not for the first time) that it would be nice if our individual bedrooms had locks on them.
Week 5, my last week, I had another roommate that used a walker. This woman was quite elderly (82 years of age). She was hopeful that this treatment would take away the cancer for her (aren't we all?). She had already been through chemo and now radiation, and would be followed up with another process where they insert rods directly into the tumour and zap it directly. That process requires a hospital stay of several days. Although it was my last week, it was her first week. I explained to her that she definitely wanted to keep getting the room she was in for her subsequent weeks because it had exclusive use of the larger bathroom. I got her to call the desk to set her up with a bench in the shower and to swap the shower head out for a handheld one. She didn't realize this could be done, and I let her know it could and they would gladly do it. I reminded her to have it done in her subsequent weeks of treatment too. When I left on the Thursday (my last day) I forgot to grab my Contigo cup that I used for tea from the counter where I'd set it down for a moment to write her a note. I hope she grabbed it and uses it.
So that was my roommate experience. I honestly felt like a university student for five weeks because I would go away through the week, returning home on the weekend to do laundry and sleep. I learned early on to bring my own food and make my own meals because the hotel residence food was, well it was food. I'll leave it at that.
