Closer:
After:
Closer:
Speak of the devil:
That stuff where the metal tube-collar joins with the white plastic?
That's me.
Or, was me. Now it's...
...gristle.
Which, I'm sorry, still strikes me as really really cool. Still enervates some imbecilic, man-child bells and whistles in my mind. Still finds me stopping just short of saying "Coooool!" with all those extras o's and the exclamation point, like I did the first time someone took me to the Air and Space Museum and I looked up and Glamorous Glynnis and the X-15 were hanging above my head on tiny tiny wires.
The yanking of my port is a threshold crossed, albeit with misgivings.
The port was a heaven-sent gift in a horrible horrible time. It was put in by the same surgeon who re-fixed the hernia I re-injured 17 years after it was first stuffed back where it came from when I was 15.
That surgeon also took the port out.
Between the installation and the yank stretched arguably the worst months of my life. Being scared I might die, having the bubble of luck and relative ease of so many of my days pop, filling N's waking and nightmare hours with worry and worry and worry, and coming up day after day against the huge and distorted reflection of my weakness and succumbing body, over and over. Little victories, astonishing collapses, fear-surfing an irregular sine wave; every next crest always hidden.
I learned what I can take, how strong one can be with support, how precious good days can be. I learned how much lower humans can go than they think they can go. I learned that my shins look eerie and really weird with no hair. That puking Dilauded is a lot worse than puking Cytarabine (not sure exactly when that last one will come in handy, but you never know). I learned EXACTLY where my pancreas is: I can close my eyes right now and its outline glows on my midriff like the chalk shape of a murdered noir body.
And the port in my chest, the silly little iPod he slipped under my flesh, made so many things so much easier.
The Drs at the City State hated the port, and are certainly rejoicing in it's removal.
In this, as in very few other things, they are totally and completely wrong. Wrong like any thought that makes it out of the salmon-sieve of Sarah Palin's mind and through her mouth. Wrong like the Napoleonic folly of Peter Angelos' ownership of the Orioles. Wrong like not believing in evolution because deep down you don't have enough self-worth to admit we're predominantly monkey.
If you are ever in a situation even a tiny bit like mine, and you are offered a port: take it. Take it and hit anyone who tells you not to with a bedpan. Preferably full.
The Drs don't like it because someone else put it in, because it might be a source of infection, because...honestly, I don't know.
All I know is that in the weeks and weeks we spent in the hospital I was almost constantly flanked by roommates and fellow travelers through this wasteland who had PIC Lines (the main alternative to the port) that were inflamed, infected, red, annoying, and/or in need of being swapped by harried phlebotomists who ran around the hospital with efficient little shoulder bags filled with needles and tubules and gauze.
Yeah, my port got squirrely, it sometimes would not give any blood return, it sometimes was so hard to access that I got stabbed for times or more before I had a rattlesnake seated. It stopped N from putting her head on my chest for nine months (that sounds bad, I'm sure: whatever it sounds like, it's worse--we're animals, and being pet, feeling the warmth of another, makes it ll so much better).
But more often than not it was a simple needle-stick, then another. A little tape, and I was good to go, with two gaping access points into which poison and strangers' blood and antibiotics and steroids and platelets and cryo factor and saline and saline and saline were dumped, efficiently and faster than the poor bastards around me with single holes in a vein.
The port came out now because I will need it less through maintenance, and the infection risk, and the use time, and the fact that building muscle up around it would be sometimes uncomfortable and sometimes difficult, and a couple more reasons the Drs could give you if you asked.
It made sense and I am OK with it. As I said, it is a threshold, a line I have stepped across that indicates to me that the medical establishment charged with my not-dead-ness seems to think I have entered a new and easier phase.
And when the wound heals and I can rest my hands on my chest in the position I have slept in for more than twenty years (Corpse Position One: on back, arms crossed on chest, not moving almost all night) and not feel the distinct lump of unnatural invader in my skin...well, that will be very nice.
And when I get some strength back and pick up the pace in my running, I will not feel the cadenced tug of a foreign body leaping subcutaneously along with my stride. That will be very nice, too.
There's a line from "Angel of Death" by Slayer: 'Surgery, with no anesthesia; feel the knife pierce you intensely.'
OK, I had anesthesia, but it was local. I was wide awake for the whole thing.
I have inherited from my mother a chemical incompatibility with opiates and/or a high level of control issues: we have never 'gone under' very well. When they were putting the port in and the sleepy drugs started, I vomited a dashing yellow, and some kind or professional forearm hove into my fading view and was nice enough to turn my head and push a sterile cloth to my face so I would not choke or spend the rest of the operation smeared.
So when the surgeon said it could be local if I wanted, N and I both jumped at the chance.
It seemed like a slightly less good idea on the day of the procedure, when they are peeling off butt-access gowns and tightening the 'safety strap' across my legs.
The pulse monitor they put around one of your fingers beeps in time with your heart, and has different pitches for the various speeds your heart beats. I had enough self-awareness to find it amusing as I heard the beeps rise and speed up when the surgeon came in, and rise again when he started cutting, and fairly canter when the scalpel went deep enough to get close to where the lidocain hadn't been--just a little twinge, but still...wheeee!
I couldn't feel the actual slicing, but I could map the little slashes from their 'sszzzzt' sound and the pressure jumps along my chest. Things went taut, things went slack. We talked about the young people owning Egyptian streets in an effort to oust Mubarak. I did the HBO voice while they widened the hole. That went over big.
I did some breath-control stuff. I am sure it was annoying because they were using me as a table and I could feel the tray or whatever was on my stomach moving up and down in big deep roils. But it worked; I got the pitch and the pace of the beeps down, and mostly kept them there.
And as a side note, I have been used as a table a lot through all this, and I like it. I think it makes me feel more involved in my care; like I had more to contribute than just being the patient.
I said to the nurse setting me up, as she was explaining all that would happen, "I know, I get it, I'm just the steak."
They all had a good laugh.
When the cauterizer was going full bore and the room filled with the intensely particular scent of me being burned, I said something about being medium-rare.
That got a pretty good laugh as well. Beep! Beep! Beep!
The cauterizer is electric, and makes this little sparking fizzing sound which, when joined with that smell, leaves a real impression.
Apparently my port and I had gotten close. The surgeon--a good man I trust implicitly, with a great calm around him and a hearing aid bigger than a gherkin--had to pull very hard to get it out. I know, I felt it: not pain per se, but clearly a serious tug. He said that the tube normally slides right out of the vein and he had to sort of tease this one out. And he showed me the meat in the above photo, indicating that I had grown somewhat attached to my port.
Well, OK, yeah, I had.
He is not supposed to, but he gave it to us. The insurance worries you'll sue unless they can say for certain that whatever was in you got yanked, so the surgeon is supposed to give it to the pathologist, who will write up that he saw it outside my mortal form. And then he'll throw it away.
The surgeon is intelligent enough to see the idiocy in that, so showed it to the pathologist and then gave it to us, in the little plastic jar behind it in the photo--I smudged his name so Kaiser Permanente or whomever doesn't try to rough him up in an alley.
He said to cover it in peroxide for a couple hours, then drain it and do it again. He said that a bloody foam would result, and that the tissue might not come off, but it would clean the rest of it if you left it in there. One of the three of us used the word 'steep,' which seemed perfect. Like tea...only different.
We're gonna frame it. N spent an hour or so tonight writing down the dates and substances that make up the story of my port's life--taken from the copious and exact notes she kept and continues to keep in what this month became a two-volume Cancer Book. We'll write it all out on a background and place the port on the words, in a frame. Nice mass-reproduced Robert Doisneau print of French people kissing there, buddy: I'm gonna hang my personal poison pusher on our wall, 'kay?
They sent us home with a Tylenol-with-codeine scrip, but we didn't fill it.
It started to hurt when the numbing wore off in the early afternoon, and I didn't take anything for it. It hurt. Hurts a bit now.
N thinks I'm crazy, or stupid, or macho, or whatever.
She's right. But there's a reason.
I've said this before--I think about soreness from exercise. Pain means something to me.
Pain is a grounding point in a time when so much is floating and outside my control. Pain is a stake holding a line that keeps a tent taut and upright. Pain is a ghost hand holding you, saying 'Here you are. Right here. Right where it hurts.'
It isn't a lot of pain. It hurts, but I'll live. It stabs a bit if I move my left arm too fast, or throbs calmly underneath watching TV, or tightens and pulls against the sutures and the surgical super-glue when I yawn and draw the skin taut in my neck.
And that's all good. Immediate. Undeniable and undiluted.
You know when a cat feels you are ignoring it, so it swats you? Or when a dog wants your attention and shoves your hand with its muzzle?
It's like that. 'Hey; I'm here. In this room with you. Acknowledge me.'
Happy to. Because you can't really feel insubstantial when something hurts. You can't feel slow and tired and removed and withdrawn: it hurts too much for those dalliances, for those weaker sensations. They're like light bulbs against sunshine. They lose.
It's nice when they lose. It's kinda like I win.
