I could feel something happening on my lower abdomen, close to my pelvis. I saw the blue paper a few inches from my face and lights and blurry shapes through the clearish plastic to my right. Nothing else. I heard the voices of the nurses and techs talking to each other and some music. I’m fine I told myself. This is just paper and plastic. I turned my head upward slightly to look at the opening to the paper and plastic just above where I was lying on the operating table. What if I push this whole thing off of me? I thought. Would I be able to? Can I even move my body? There is enough air, I reminded myself. Soon, I’ll have a sedative in my IV and this will all be fine, I thought. But what if I don’t make it that long? What if they’ve forgotten about me? Calming words started to escape from my brain, fleeing alongside logic. I heard a slightly louder voice from the other side of the room.
“Are you just getting nervous over there?” Joy, the nurse, asked. Is she talking to me? How did she know? Words were still floating somewhere outside of my head and body, flitting about out there with its buddy logic, having abandoned feeling to be on her own inside my body.
“Are you feeling nervous there?” Joy asked again. Oh! Maybe she is watching a screen. Maybe the screen tells her my heart rate and my respiration too. Maybe Joy is an empath. Maybe both and all of this is true.
“I’m just feeling a little claustrophobic,” I croak from the operating table, trying to gauge how loud I needed to be in order to be heard through the paper and plastic sterile shield. Hands were quickly enlarging the opening, rolling the paper from above my head to eye level. My hot breath escaped and cooler air touched my face.
“Something is on my body. I don’t know what it is,” I tried to explain the feeling of lying on a table and not knowing what’s being done to your body. But words were still on the lamb.
A voice: “We use your body like it’s a table.” I shouldn’t be comforted by this, but somehow I was. It was the straightforwardness of it. This is your body. We are using it. For this purpose. And somehow it was comforting even though no one could see my face nor any of my skin even really (wrapped, as it is, in warmed blankets) save for the six or so square inches of my left chest, below my collar bone where the port has been situated ever since it was installed in a similar operating room at a different hospital eight or so months ago.
One of the nurses leaned down so that he was eye level to me. “If you need something like that, you can tell us,” and he offered to take my glasses. I was grateful that he phrased his help and care in this way. He didn’t question why I didn’t say something, just offered.
I thought that maybe I could hear the doctor who I met in the prep area an hour or so before enter the room. I could feel the IV in my left arm being fussed and fiddled with. It wasn’t painful and I knew that Joy was likely getting ready to push the sedative into my body and I could begin to anticipate the not caring. And then, perhaps, the greatest comfort, more so than having the drape pulled back so I could breathe, is when Joy said in her very serious voice, “nobody touches this patient until she is sedated.”
Joy gets it.
Another beat passed and I felt the cool liquid enter my vein. Soon, a bitter taste filled the back of my throat.
“I can taste it,” I announced. Apparently, my words found and opening and returned back into my brain. So did logic.
“That’s the sign of a good IV,” Joy assured me. “This next one is going to burn a little.” But already I didn’t care. Or maybe I almost wanted the burn, knowing that what would follow would be complete not caring. I barely even noticed when the doctor injected the numbing agent. Still, Joy assured me, “this is the worst part.”
I thought I heard someone at some point say something like, “I’m sure the chemotherapy is the worst part.” And then clarified, “that’s some nasty stuff they give them.” Or something like that. But maybe I dreamt that part. In a way, I feel proud that I endured something that even a medical professional (and one who is currently cutting into my skin no less) acknowledges as awful.
I could feel slight tugging at moments. And then someone held the port where I could see it. It was a purple triangular hunk of titanium bobbing a bit at the end of the thin, white plastic tube and covered in droplets of blood. My blood.
“See?” Joy said. “It’s out.”
“Can I take it to show my kids?” I asked her, still sedated.
“No, my dear,” she responded. “This is biohazard.”
“Yeah. I’ll just draw it for them,” I answer.
“Just draw a line with a triangle at the end.”
I thought I could hear bits of conversation. The surgeon and the nurse discussed the scar from when the port was installed. “If she scars, she scars,” the doctor said. I could feel the stitches going in. The right side of my chest, where my breast was removed a few months back, is entirely numb. No nerves there anymore. And I’m finally used to the odd way it feels to touch the skin and have no sensation.
And like that, the surgeon was done and gone. Ten minutes they told me. Someone finished bandaging me up and then they took the “after” x-ray showing nothing to pair with the “before” x ray of the triangular port in place.
When the port was first placed, it was uncomfortable and at times even painful. Still, it was better than the alternative of the chemo medicines burning the veins in my arms as they entered my body through an IV. And the discomfort didn’t last forever. At times, I even forgot I had a port, although I never really wanted to touch it, so disconcerting was the feeling of that bump of metal under my skin. I say that at times I would forget it was there, but those moments were brief. I wondered how much my body and mind had adapted to having this in me without me even realizing. After my chemotherapy treatments were complete, I still had to have the port flushed at least every six weeks. Tracking this, scheduling the flushes, getting to the office, all of that took a large amount of mental space. I wondered too, if my body was expending energy to accommodate my port in ways that I wasn’t aware. Would I feel different after having it out?
It’s been two days now and I don’t know how different I feel. Is my energy flowing more smoothly on that side of my body? Maybe. I’ll give it some time. I’m still healing.
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Rhena Writes 