Diving without getting wet: The hyperbaric experience in the wake of cancer treatment

This First Person column is written by Glenn Deir, a retired journalist who lives in St. John's. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

I keep waiting for a doctor with an axe to show up. The hyperbaric chamber is half acrylic, so I'll have no trouble seeing Dr. Kill-Deir. The doctor might strike a mortal blow for all physicians utterly fed up with my writing about them.

Don't scoff; it's happened before. OK, it was a movie. In the James Bond flick Licence To Kill, a drug lord uses an axe to dispatch a suspected quisling locked inside a decompression chamber. Fiction, I know, but doctors watch movies and can borrow nefarious ideas.

I can't say I'd totally blame them. I once used, as mom would say, a bad word to describe them — bastards. In my defence, I meant it in the nicest possible way. It popped up in a memoir about my first bout of tonsil cancer. I had a moment of intense resentment.

Their cure made me sicker than the disease. I apologized for it then and I still do. Unfortunately, I'm contemplating that epithet again, because everything I'm going through today is because of radiation therapy I had almost 18 years ago.

Radiation probably saved my life, but it also shortened the life of my left jaw bone. A consequence of shrunken blood vessels. In the past three years I've had a recurring infection which makes my cheek puff out like a chipmunk's, surgery to pull a molar and scrape away dead bone, and a hairline fracture in the bone left behind. Radiation is certainly the gift that keeps on giving.

The hairline fracture happened while biting toasted bread topped with cheese and sliced almonds. I heard a crack. Thanks to that, I'm now on a diet of liquids and puréed food. 

At least I'm not in pain.

All of this has led me to "diving" in a hyperbaric chamber. The theory is that breathing 100 per cent oxygen under pressure encourages healing. The pressure is equivalent to being 45 feet under water. To avoid ear ache on the way down, I pinch my nostrils and blow, just like a real diver. I spend 95 minutes on the bottom, five days a week. There's a TV hovering over the chamber. I watch DVDs to pass the time, though not aquarium videos.

Bruce Springsteen in Barcelona is more to my liking.

No one, apart from Dr. Kill-Deir, wants me hurt. I'm grounded with an anti-static wristband before the hatch clangs shut. There's a long list of what is not allowed in the chamber. No wedding ring, book, mobile phone, matches (really, you have to tell people that), not even deodorant.

One doctor bluntly said, "A fire in there is not survivable."

Fortunately, I'm not claustrophobic. Other patients need a pill to combat anxiety. The staff keep the atmosphere relaxed with humour. Once, with my hatch open, I heard the technologist sitting between two hyperbaric chambers say, "I've got one in the oven and one coming out." I was the one coming out, no doubt golden brown and light to the touch.

I do my dives between infusions of antibiotics. Since the jaw bone infection has stubbornly defied oral antibiotics, I'm now on intravenous antibiotics. Three times a day "Nurse Deb" connects a bottle to an IV needle in my arm.

"I didn't sign on for this," she protested.

"The vow says for better or worse."

"Right. It didn't say for better or nurse."

Despite all the medical intervention, there's no guarantee my broken jaw will heal. In fact, the doctors have warned me it's a long shot. As Bruce Springsteen sings, I'm countin' on a miracle.

In the meantime, there is kindness. Nurse Katie keeps hens. Each new patient at hyperbaric medicine is given a dozen brown eggs — free — I told my friends at a dinner party, while eating puréed chicken that didn't lay eggs.

One joked, "That's how drug dealers get you. They give you the first one free."

So true. I came for the healing; I'm staying for the eggs.

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