From the first moment my wife discovered she had breast cancer, there was a deafening silence from the men I know. Even ones whose wives, mothers or girlfriends had breast cancer seemed to have received a gag order from some Central Cancer Command and did little more than mumble about the experience. Not one to shut up for any known reason, I started this blog…
The port came out yesterday!
It was – and it WILL be! – a celebration for the next few days.
But there was a sobering note that sounded yesterday as well.
First, however, I’ll explain WHAT a port is.
When my wife chose to go with an aggressive regimen of chemotherapy (amazingly, I talked about neither!) she had to have a port installed so that they wouldn’t have to go vein diving with a sharp needle in her arm every time we came in for a chemo session.
“Port” is short for “portal catheter”, which is slightly shorter for “totally implantable venous access system”. You can see a picture of it above both “out and about” and implanted.
Because she was going to have six, six-hour-long sessions of continuous injection of the therapy drugs. I’ve copied the Wikipedia entry, then translated the long words into English so that they are understandable: “A port is a quarter-sized bowl with a flat bottom and a plastic bubble across the top like a drum head. A tiny tube leads out of the bottom of the bowl and that can be attached to thin tubes – one that goes up the neck (for blood samples) and one that goes into the heart (where you want the drugs to go).
“To put the port in, the doctors make a diagonal slit just above the collarbone and slide it in between the muscles and the skin. They put a couple stitches in the muscles to hold it in place then glue the cut with superglue and put a clear plastic band aid over it. It looks like a bump under the skin below a red scratch. You don’t have to do anything special to take care of it because it’s completely inside your skin, so swimming and taking a shower are not a problem.
“The bubble is made of a special self-sealing silicone rubber; it can be punctured hundreds of times without popping. To do chemo or to draw blood, someone will disinfect the area. Then they’ll poke the skin with a 90° Huber point needle and tape the whole thing down. The hole it makes will be so tiny that it will look like the person got a mosquito bite when they pull it out.”
The worst part is that my wife was able to FEEL the catheters all the time and they pulled when she turned her head.
That’s all done now!
The sobering part of the morning came while I was in the waiting room. The intern wheeling her into the surgery asked what her surgery was (they do that like a bazillion time before anyone even PICKS UP a scalpel!). When she said that it was a port removal, the intern got serious and asked, “Is that good news or bad?”
My wife replied, “Good news!”
The intern replied with a smile and the removal went on. When she related the story to me, I realized that there was an implied message in the first sober response. For some people, the removal of the port would be a surrender to the inevitable – the port is no longer useful and we might as well make the coming end as comfortable as possible.
I’m not sad; nor has the joy of the port coming out diminished at all. I simply now have more to be thankful for than ever before and I can hold up in prayer those whose ports are coming out because this is the end of the line…
Image: http://images.ookaboo.com/photo/s/PAC_met_Gripper_erin_s.jpg
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