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Six  treatments down, 34 to go. The insurance company just approved the second set of 20, thanks to the persistent educating efforts of my doctor. Forty is the optimal number of treatments, so I’m really glad I won’t have to stop short.

My ears and eustachian tubes are feeling closer to normal  now that the treatment-free weekend is coming to a close.  Sigh.

I have a tube buddy whose appointments are at the same time as mine.  She also is one of my oncologist’s patients, and she had the same cancer I did. She has had more than 20 hyperbaric treatments, and she told me that her ears have felt stuffy the entire time, but she didn’t need tubes installed.

She takes the chamber on the left, and I take the one on the right. Here’s the process of getting set up to go into the chamber. I get into scrubs in a dressing room, then pad into the tube room in my socks. I hang my locker key on a prong and go through the equivalent of an airport security check, complete with getting scanned with a metal detector wand. I get asked the same questions every day: Any new medications? Pacemaker? Drug patches? Batteries? etc. Each time I say, “I’m not packin’ today.”

I get on the gurney, take my socks off , and hand them to the attendant. He gives me a lanyard, which I hang around my neck. Then an air mask is attached to the lanyard and I take a big toke on it to make sure there’s no obstruction. I’m handed a big plastic mug of water with a big bendy straw, and the grounding band is fastened around my wrist. I get my pillows adjusted and put on two white cotton blankets, even though the chamber can get warm when coming up to compression level. Then the attendant swings the gurney around so my feet are facing the open chamber. There are rods under the bed that line up with grooves along the bottom of the chamber, like drawer runners. Once these are lined up, the attendant glides me in like a corpse at the morgue, and the very heavy door is closed and latched. On my first trip into the chamber I experienced a fleeting moment of panic as the door closed, but it passed instantly. Patients with claustrophobia can’t get this treatment.

The gas starts hissing into the chamber.  The attendant picks up a last-century black telephone handset to ask me every few minutes how I’m doing. The standard questions: How are your ears? Any pain in your sinuses, teeth, throat, eyes? In the chatting that ensues, we’re getting to know each other pretty well. He knows I’m a genealogist, and I know his ancestors were Swedish. He knows that I “believe in” global warming, and I know he thinks Al Gore is full of it. I also know that he idolizes the doctors who run the hyperbaric center.

In about 13 minutes I’m in 2.4 ATA, which means two atmospheres absolute, and I believe that’s around 28 psi. I don’t feel any changes, and it doesn’t feel different to breathe the 80% oxygen. Except that after awhile I start feeling mildly tingly and euphoric. Just when it starts getting good, I hear the attendant’s voice saying, “Time for an air break.” I then breathe through the mask to get outside air so I won’t get oxygen poisoning. I get two of these air breaks during the session.

I watch movies on the monitor above the hyperbaric chamber. So far the best choice was Be Kind, Rewind, which had me laughing out loud. I watched a documentary on the Irish diaspora, then followed that with Cinderella Man, about a New York boxer of Irish descent. Nothing like watching slo-mo boxing scenes right in yer face. Ugh.

When it’s time to decompress, the chamber gets really cold. About this time I become aware of a cold pit of hunger in my stomach. By the time I get to the dressing room I am ravenously hungry. They think this is caused by the metabolism speeding up under compression, and perhaps blood sugar gets low.

So far I’ve been really tired after the treatments, and I’ve been falling asleep between 8:30 and 9:30. We’ll see if this changes as time goes on. Pretty soon I’ll have another five treatments behind me.

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