Contributor: Martin (martinsellingzoe@aol.com)

It was a quiet white room. About six people sat in reclining chairs next to long silver polls. 
Small clear veins snaked their way into each person’s arm. I was hooked up to one of these silver trees. Plastic veins carried chemo into my arm on a robotic schedule. 

This was my first time sitting in this chair, the chemo chair. There was a strange routine. I remember feeling support from every fellow traveler and family. I was alone. The first hour was hazy, quickly lost. Just after that first hour a series of chimes on the silver tree played a short alert and I started to shiver and shake. “Chemo sucks”, I remember thinking. I tried to tough it out.

“Hey”, the man in the chair to my right yelled at the nurse. I was starting to pass out. “Hey he needs help now,” my unknown friend insisted getting the nurse to arrive just as consciousness slipped.
I saw panic in the nurse’s eyes as realization of my growing allergic reaction set in. “Don’t worry, you are going to be…,” and with that I was gone for a moment. When I came back a nurse and a doctor told me I had had a reaction and was, “stable” now.

People around me, my fellow chemo travelers who I never met, had protected my life as if it were their own. They knew what I did not. Their unselfish connection saved my life.