You can't wear your own face covering into Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. At the entrance checkpoint opposite the darkened gift shop, they take your temperature electronically (96.8) and give you one of their masks, one of those pale blue ones, and ask you if you know where you're going.
So much has been moved around and altered since I spent nine days here in 2015, I can't be sure. No longer does someone play piano in the atrium. The Tim Hortons has given way to a Spot Coffee. Nevertheless, urology is still at the back of the ground level and radiology is still one floor up.
What's also different are the automatic door openers. Now they're touchless. In place of the ubiquitous blue push-buttons everybody whacked with their elbows or the backs of their hands, there are little glowing sensor squares, awaiting activation with a wave.
This is my testing visit, a week ahead of my annual consultation with the genial Dr. Khurshid Guru, the man who saved my life. All this was supposed to happen back in April, but ... well, you know.
The radiology routine hasn't changed, aside from additional attention to antiseptic practices. I ask the nurse, Colleen, if she expects that all this extra caution will continue after the current situation is over, presuming that it ever will be over, and she didn't think so. I bless her when she succeeds in finding a vein on the first poke to insert an IV connection and draw blood to check my liver function. Good news. It's functioning.
There's no return to Roswell on the following Thursday, though. My July 2 visit will be by phone, the urology office informs me on Wednesday. And it turns out not to be Dr. Guru at all. The face on the screen is Elizabeth Fiorica, one of the nurse practitioners.
Everything is fine, she says. I still need to ask her my big question, though. Prior to the surgery, if I recall correctly, Dr. Guru had said this would give me five years. Now that the warranty has expired, what happens? We'll be seeing you, she says, for another five years.
