Industrial Medicine

Today was my first infusion at the SCCA. In its fundamentals, it was pretty much the same as an infusion at Group Health:

1. Check in.
2. Have line inserted and blood drawn.
3. Meet with oncologist or physicians assistant.
4. Get infusion.

But the details -- well, that's a different story.

By my count, GH had space to infuse twelve people at one time (assuming none of the chairs were being used to insert a line); at SCCA, I passed doors flagging infusion rooms numbered 50 to 71, and the infusion center was on a completely separate floor from the lab space where lines were inserted. There were so many potential infusion spaces I actually got lost trying to find mine until a very nice nurse saw me wandering and showed me to my spot.* 

If I was guessing, I'd say GH had maybe a few thousand square feet devoted to offices for the oncologists and patient rooms for infusions and what not. I'd bet SCCA has hundreds of thousands of square feet for the same purposes.

At GH, proceeding through the four steps above would involve interactions with seven people: infusion receptionist, nurse who inserted the line, oncology receptionist, medical assistant, oncologist, and then back to the original nurse for the infusion. At SCCA, I interacted with nearly that many in the first ten minutes I was there. I actually lost track of the number of nurses involved in my infusion.

This is industrial medicine. 

But when you get down to it, an infusion appointment pretty much boils down to waiting. You wait to see the lab nurse, you wait to see PA, you wait for the infusion space to open up, you wait for the drugs to be delivered, you wait for the nurse to hook up or change the drugs, and you wait for the pump to push the drugs up your line. Setting aside the side effects -- which are no longer much of an issue for me -- it's sort of like spending the morning at the DMV.**

This is to say, it's not how I'd choose to spend my time, but there are worse ways kill a few hours. I just wish the hot topic of conversation didn't have to be the nature of my bowel movements. 


* The nurse who inserted my line told me that they'd infused 400+ people yesterday.

** I didn't live blog this infusion as it was only Avastin which is supposed to take thirty minutes. Who knew infusion-time was like football-time and a thirty minute drip would take more than two hours?