Went in for the Muga test on Monday to check my heart and make sure it is strong enough to go through the type of chemotherapy I am going to have. This entailed another trip to nuclear medicine. Wonder how a Geiger counter would react around me these days? Heck, if things keep going at this rate, I should be able to pull off a really cool Halloween trick this year by glowing in the dark. No extra accessories needed.
I will know the results of the Muga test later this week.
I also stopped by the chemotherapy room so the nurse could check the condition of my veins in my right arm. This was necessary to see if they will be able to withstand eight chemotherapy sessions.
As it turns out, they probably won’t.
She couldn’t even get a vein to surface. So, she put in a call to my surgeon, Dr. B. to recommend my getting a implanted port put in my chest.
An implanted port is put under the skin, normally on your chest, directly into a vein. It is used for drawing blood and giving medicines such as the chemo directly into the vein. For people like myself, who only have one arm that veins can be used and those veins are not reliable (rolling over, ballooning up, collapsing etc.) it makes the process a lot easier.
Dr. B. had me come in Wednesday to discuss it. She said she could do it Thursday and that it is a simple procedure. Short and sweet……should only take about an hour to do. Light anesthetic to induce “twilight sleep” along with local anesthetic in the area where the port would be placed under my skin. I would be awake but not able to feel anything. The anesthetic is one of those where if asked a question, you tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Oh, boy, guess this wouldn’t be a good time to have Mom drive me! I have no doubt she still has questions she would love to ask after all these years!
The appointment is made. Thursday morning, Ed and I arrived at the designated time, 7:30 a.m.. I check in, we are taken to my room and I put on the stylin’ gown and robe. And there we sit. At 8:45 a.m. the nurse tells us that my surgery has been bumped due to another surgeon needing the room for an emergency surgery. No problem. I feel bad though for the person that has to have the emergency surgery. Don’t know what it is for, but if it is an emergency, it can’t be good.
At 10:00, they come to get me. I’m off to the surgery room. Everything is going well. I told Dr. B that under no circumstances do I want the anesthesiologist that I had last time and I didn’t get him. Thank goodness. This one was like the first one I had that I liked. He asked plenty of questions and listened carefully to my answers.
They put me on the surgery table and the next thing I know I am waking up in recovery. The key words here…. “waking up”. I knew from the way I awoke that I had been knocked out completely. Warning bells started going off in my head. First-off I wasn’t at all happy that I had been put under. Secondly, I was very concerned as to why. After I got back to my room I received a little more explanation. Dr. B stated that she did the incision on my chest, but every time she tried to put the port in I would start coughing. After several attempts, she had them put me under completely, injected local anesthetic in my neck area, did an incision in my neck and put the port there. By the time we left there and got home, it was after 3:00 p.m. So much for short and sweet!
I have some very mixed feelings about this whole thing and the placement of the port in my neck. I don’t know if it is good or bad or indifferent to have it there rather than my chest. It scares me to have it in my neck. Should I be scared? Will it make it through all the chemo that I will need? Will it cause problems or be uncomfortable to have chemo put in through my neck?
I do know that between the two incisions, I and percocet ended up being very good friends for the next 24 hours. It took forever for the local anesthetic to wear off. My throat was extremely sore and tender and again I was sick to my stomach and had major ongoing heartburn from the general anesthetic.
This time, I am afraid my attitude isn’t the best. There have been too many things that have gone wrong, in too short of time here. I just want to get better. I just want to live. I want to be able to have the various procedures that I need done and have them go as expected. I really hate surprises. Having breast cancer is a big enough surprise. I think that surprise in itself should have superceded and wiped out all other surprises. I think I’ll print up a “get out of surprises free” card and carry it around with me everywhere I go to let people know…..no more surprises.
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