Dan You Have Cancer - Any Port in a Storm or Cancer Can be Fun!

In a previous blog I explained how it is very difficult to get an intravenous line started in my. This failing on my part has nothing to do with having or not having cancer. It has always been that way. That being the case my oncology nurses lobbied for me to agree to have a port put in my chest. This would save me from going through the struggles of having an IV started each time I needed any medicine or death chemicals dripped or pumped into my body. I cannot accuse anyone of having ulterior motives but it would also make their job infinitely easier too. No more poking, stabbing or goring of this patient’s arm, hand or ankle.  The Friday before my second round of chemo I am scheduled to have a port placed into my chest.

This ‘port’ is about the size of quarter. It is placed just under the skin on my chest. It reminds me of the prime-bulb on a lawn mower, chainsaw or other gasoline powered tool. The port has a tube that extends from the port upwards to my neck where the surgeon will attach it to one of the main blood vessels in my neck.

I report to the hospital early that Friday morning. I check in. I prep in and am laying in a hospital bed with curtain drawn on three sides. The foot of the bed is open and I can see that is taking place this day in the out-patient surgery room. Pretty tame stuff. The attending nurses are kid and very attentive to detail as well as my comfort. Ann’s comfort too. Then it happens! An infusion nurse comes in and sets up to start an IV in me. Before her rear end hit the chair Ann let her know in no uncertain terms that she was not going to be the one to start this patients IV, this day. Ann spoke the magic words, “IV Team”. In a move that one would normally associate with the finals of the women’s individual ice-skating at the Winter Olympics, that infusion nurse was “outta here’’; Gone!; Vamoose!; Made a run for it and beat a hasty retreat to where ever shunned infusion nurses go. After explaining the situation to my attending nurse, she said she would contact the IV Team. Mission accomplished.

The IV Team nurse showed up shortly thereafter. She was somewhat somber and cool towards us, very businesslike.  I can only guess what she had been told when she was summoned to the out-patient operating room. After a few minutes with us she realized that we had a legitimate reason for asking for her presence, that we were more Ma & Pa Kettle than Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck. I was amazed by her because she reached into her Mary Poppins bag producing what I recognized as a Garmin fish finder. I’m sure what she had was way more sophisticated, more expensive and had never seen the inside of a jon boat or the deck of a Bass Tracker. I do know it worked! She greased my arm and within seconds found a viable vein to use. The hardest part for her was listening to the play-by-play delivered by her patient as I asked what kind and how many fish she was finding. She stuck that needle in, hit it on the first try and had a flowing IV in short order. She was carried out of the room upon the praises of her patient and his wife.

My surgeon, who had been pacing the hall that I could see from my bed, was my next visitor. He came in and after explaining exactly what he was going to do provided us with a bit of his surgical history. He had been a surgeon for over two decades but had fallen into the port planting business the past several years. He had done over a thousand of these or was it ten-thousand, maybe a hundred-thousand. My mind was become relaxed as the pills they gave me to relax me were becoming very relaxing. With a spin on his foot and clap of his hands I was on my way to the operating room.

I need to talk about operating rooms. For the first fifty-five to sixty years of my life my experience and my recollection of operating rooms on a first hand observation and by what I have seen on TV has been of cold, tiled rooms, green or blue, somewhat cold, a narrow table in the center with a big round light attached to a moveable arm. This day I was wheeled into what appeared to be an oversized closet. Possibly a very small kitchen as I could see from my prone position cabinets hanging on the wall. Maybe this was the operating room used for cancer patients because statistics showed that until any real legal litigation could unfold, the patient would be no more. In the room that day was the surgeon, whom I previously met, an anesthesiologist, who shook my hand and into whose hands I was placing my life, several men and women young enough to be my grandchildren and one student surgeon, to whom I was introduced but her name resides in the same place in my brain as the number of ports my surgeon had placed. Darn! I just had a thought. When he told me how many he did I should have inquired about his success rate. Next time.

Those in attendance helped me go from my narrow hospital bed to the eight foot long two-by-six being used in the closet operating room this day. “Are you comfortable?” they asked. Break multiple ribs, one sternum and several vertebrae; then lie down on a two-by-six board and tell me how comfortable you are. I replied through clenched teeth, “Yes”. Several of those in attendance this day in the phone booth covered me from head to toe with a sheet. I was asked to turn my face to the right. Upon doing that I could look out under the sheet and see light and the knees of the anesthesiologist. Then a flap was opened that exposed the “field” where the procedure was to take place. A quick rinse, a shave and the application of orange stuff that had to be forcefully rubbed off, followed. All this time there was a din of conversation by everyone as well as the step-by-step explanation from teacher to student. I was not asleep. It was twilight time. “Heavenly shades of night are falling, it’s twilight time…” is how The Platters described it.

From the conversations I knew the surgery was underway. I could feel fingers in my “field”. Then it hit me. It wasn’t sit-straight-up-and-scream pain nor was it the gentle pressure of a loved one hands. It was the cutting edge of a very sharp scalpel being drug across my chest. My subconscious registered as pain. My conscious registered it as really weird pain without the hurt. Had someone asked me what my pain level was at that moment I would have said, “One, no four, no six, no I have no pain”. I do remember saying, “Ouch!” Upon the utterance of that world the room fell silent. Think how it would sound if suddenly without warning the water was shut off going over Niagara. Silence. My surgeon broke the eerie silent spell with the words, “Did you feel that?” No doctor that’s the new ring tone on the anesthesiologist’s iPhone. No I have programed my mind to randomly say words beginning with the letter ‘O’, my next random ‘O’ word is ‘over’ as what this surgery is going to be if it happens again. No I’m sorry I was reviewing the tenets of onomatopoeia in my twilight state and the word ‘Ouch’ came to mind and slipped across my lips. YES IT HURT! YOU JUST CUT ME WITH A SCALPEL!

The surgeon requested that the anesthesiologist give me “a little more”. We were once again back in the saddle heading towards a western sunset only a bit more subdued than before. After a brief recovery time I was returned to Ann at the point of origin. The surgeon stopped by on his way to his 10,001^st port surgery to see how things were going. I do not remember us reminiscing about being wide awake during surgery but what’s a little slip up among friends. He did ask if I had any questions. I don’t know if this surgeon was caught unaware, if he was trying to humor me or if in his haste to get past recent events he slipped up but I asked the same question of him that I ask every doctor who asks me that question. “Will I be able to play the piano when I get home?” He immediately answered, “Yes there is no reason you shouldn’t unless you find it uncomfortable.” I was thrilled. If I was able to I would have gotten up danced around the bed and do-si-doed Ann at each corner. I replied, “Good! Because I couldn’t play it before this surgery!” Cancer can be so much fun! I couldn't choose not to have cancer but I can choose how to live with it. Thank you Jesus for the attitude you have given me.