Opium Den 2010

"Which is it to-day," Watson asked, "morphine or cocaine?"
Holmes raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.
"It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?"
-The Sign of the Four, Authur Conan Doyle




I woke up when the blood pressure monitor, which carries the heavy-lifting scientific name sphygmomanometer, started beeping in my right ear. You see, unlike the olden days when a person with the sphygo-whatever would listen to your pulse with a stethoscope and look at a dial to take your blood pressure, today’s sphygo-thingies are attached to a monitor, complete with battery backup, blinking lights, and of course an unpleasant beep to alert whomever needs to know that something is amiss. What was amiss was my elbow pinching the cuff of the sphygo-man-eater against the arm of my chair, rendering it unable to take a proper reading. So the machine beeps, the nurse troubleshoots the problem, and blood pressure is again taken and recorded.

Every eight weeks I go into the hospital for an infusion of a wonderful drug called Remicade. I say wonderful drug because I know it has eased the pain I was feeling from rheumatoid arthritis. I can tell that because I no longer wake up with my feet feeling like they were both broken, my hands feeling like I had splints on all my fingers, and my body generally feeling like I fell down a flight of cement stairs, carrying a box of broken and jagged bricks, and landed on Legos. (I tried to find a Lego opium den but couldn't. I'm thinking the carpet in this graphic looks a little Lego-ish).

During this treatment, which lasts about 4 hours, I usually read, watch a little daytime TV (gag), and snooze. This time the only chair available didn’t have a working TV so it was just snoozing and reading for me. I read a few chapters of my book and dozed; for two and a half hours. Had the Sphygo-lama-ding-dong not beeped I might have slept the entire four hours, or if the nurses didn’t need the chair even longer.

So I woke up, my book safely on the arm of the chair, and thankfully no drool on my collar. I looked around the room which consists of 10 chairs like mine arranged in a semicircle. Each chair was occupied and each occupant had an IV and a sphygo-you-know-what attached to them.

The book I’m reading is a novel about Isaac Newton and his assistant investigating a series of grisly murders in the late 1600’s. And aren’t the best murders grisly? They are basically filtered through a Holmes/Watson template where Newton figures out everything by noticing a red hair here or evidence of mercury poisoning there and I’m guessing solves the crime(s) somewhere near the end of the book.

I guess this comparison must have put Holmes’ London on my mind as I drifted off because looking around at my fellow Infusioneers when I woke up, it occured to me that there is a similarity between us lying down attached to medicine to make us feel better, and the patrons of opium dens that featured in Victorian England literature, if you take away the bright lights, the 21st century technology, and the general cleanliness of course. Those people went to those dens to feel better, maybe some of them even tried the drug to remove a little of the discomfort of the very condition which currently occupies my temple. Remember, opium was legal in the 19th century. I wonder what an opium den would look like if it were still legal. Probably a lot like an infusion center except the TVs would probably showing Fantasia on a loop.

As a side note, the infusion center is also the office for infectious disease. In the front office there is usually a person sitting behind the reception desk, ready to log you in. On days when there is no receptionists there is a phone provided with instructions to dial a specific extension to let them know you are there. I’ve used this phone probably four times before finally realizing that it is the same phone used by patients who are there for the infectious disease side of the office.