Mediports and Football: Thursday's Procedures, Part II

The other procedure today was the installation of my mediport. This is a device that’s meant to ease the delivery of chemotherapy, which I’m probably going to start on the week of the 11^th. When my doctor mentioned a port, I pictured something like this:  

Ten years ago I did not have a port; back then, they were bulky and external and prone to fun things like infection, leakage, and clogging. Also, it had to stay dry. So I took the second option—an IV stick for every chemo session, which amounted to needles upon needles until I developed a needlephobia that persists to this day. When my oncologist told me that port technology had advanced in the last ten years, and I should really consider getting one, I was skeptical. But then I found out that now, ports look like this:

And once it’s installed, it looks something like this:

The picture above is not my chest or port. Mine is still under wraps until next week, but I’m hoping that it will look something like the above picture when it’s revealed. Right now, it looks like this:

When they installed my port, they lifted me off the table in the biopsy room, wheeled me down the hall, lifted me onto another table in another room, wrapped me up like a mummy with an inflatable, heated pad (very comfortable), and put a tent over my head. Then a nurse named Linda shaved the area and cleaned it with some prep fluid that she told me was orange. “For Halloween,” she said. Once the procedure started, the doctor gave me a series of sharp injections to numb me up so that I wouldn’t feel the incisions. What I would feel—but not be hurt by—was the tugging and rubbing that he had to do in order to work the port in under my skin and get it into place. Hearing this, I was thankful for the tent they set up that shielded my vision.

Once the tugging and rubbing started, the anxiety that had been building over the course of the morning felt ready to let loose, when apropos of nothing the doctor asked me, "Do you like football?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Chargers?”

“Bears, actually.”

Several of the attending nurses let out a low, ominous “Oooooooo…”

“What?”

“Your doctor is a Lions fan,” a voice in the room said.

At which point I told him that I was, too, after last week’s game against the Cowboys, when Matthew Stafford—who happens to be the starting quarterback on my fantasy football team—pretty much assured me victory with his ballsy call to fake a spike and run the ball in for a touchdown as time expired.

This led to a longer conversation about fantasy football—my number one non-work related, non-family related obsession—and before I knew it, the procedure was over and I was on my way to the recovery room.

And what was I thinking about there? The folder of instructions for what to do today after having two invasive procedures? The biopsy results, due back next week? My impending chemotherapy?

No. I couldn’t wait to get home to obsess about my fantasy lineup for this week.

Never underestimate the value of a good distraction.

Put Your Hand in the Hand: Thursday's Procedures, Part I

One of my favorite short stories is Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” and no matter what class I’m teaching, I’ll almost always find an excuse to use it. The story is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who’s anxious because a blind man—a friend of his wife’s from before he knew her—is coming to visit them. Our narrator isn’t a bad guy, but he doesn’t get out much, either, and he’s uncomfortable (to say the least) with anything that exists outside of his own narrowly-defined boundaries. Anyway, this changes over the course of the story in the unlikeliest of ways. After the narrator’s wife has gone to bed, our narrator and the blind man, Robert, are smoking pot in front of a television documentary on cathedrals. The narrator, in the first of a series of small but significant moves outside of his comfort zone, asks Robert if he knows what a cathedral is. He doesn’t, so the two of them decide to draw one together. Or rather, the narrator will draw it while Robert goes along for the ride. Whenever I talk about the story, I always spend a lot of time on two lines that Carver writes to capture this moment:

“He found my hand, the hand with the pen. He closed his hand over my hand.”

I love these lines and how their repetition of the word “hand” shows how much this moment of connection means to the narrator.

I thought of this story and scene today. I was back in the hospital for two procedures—having a mediport installed (which I'll cover in another post) and getting a biopsy done of the growths in my abdominal cavity. We did the biopsy first. This involved me climbing onto a narrow table, lying face down (while protecting my still-tender incision from Monday’s surgery), and remaining as still as possible while they ran CT scans, inserted biopsy needles in my back (thankfully, I couldn’t see this), ran more CT scans to check their position, repositioned the needles, and took samples. I was sedated for this, but I could still feel movement back there. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but it was uncomfortably noticeable, and I started to visualize a long, sharp needle poking organs and arteries and other tender pieces of my insides.

I must have winced or had some kind of a distressed look on my face, because one of the nurses, a woman named Julie, came over and bent down by where my head and arms were sticking out of the CT machine, and as the doctor fooled with the needles in my back, she took both of my hands into hers. She didn’t say anything; she just held my hands through the rest of the procedure.

For these last few days, I’ve been moved at whiplash-inducing speed through doctors’ visits and tests and hospitals, so when someone reaches out—in Julie’s case, literally—to slow me down, I’m grateful beyond words.