I went to go get my normal chemo today. For the past few days the nurses have been concerned about the fact that my incision (from the port surgery) isn't healing up properly. They have been fearing infection for a few days, but through just about every nurse in the Oncology Department checking me out with my shirt off, they had collectively decided that it was a surface infection - nothing to worry about.
On Friday (Day 7) I had gone home and cleaned the affected area and treated it with triple antibiotic ointment. In the eyes of the untrained medical professional (myself) it was looking pretty good.
It wasn't until today when the nurse pulled the dressing off and looked at it, she had the first glint of what I saw as worry. She drew another nurse into the cubicle to take a look. This nurse's name was Nina, she'd taken care of me all last week. She bit the corner of her lip in concern and said that it wasn't looking too good. They squeezed the incision to see if there was anything that would come out, nothing did. As a precautionary measure, they put a hold on my Chemotherapy for today and called for labs.
The nurse drew blood from my port, then they had another nurse come from a different Department of the hospital to draw blood from another part of my body. This is called a Blood Panel, I think, I can't really remember because my head reeling by this point. Basically, they wanted to draw from two different places to have a variety of results.
They called a surgeon from the office of the Doctor that put my port in, so he could come in and look at the incision to give the nurses some insight. However, this Doctor was in the Operating Room and it took about an hour for him to finish. So there I sat. Shirtless. For an hour.
When he came in he told me that there appeared to be tissue break down around the incision. This means that the incision should have closed, like it normally does, and fuse together -- but it didn't. For reasons unknown it didn't heal together and it opened back up, except only half of it opened back up, the middle of the incision is fine. I'll illustrate it with equal signs, hyphens and X's. The X's represent where it's closed, hyphens represent where it's healing and the equal sign represents where it's opened, the aforementioned case:
======XXXXxx-----
Since the incision is like a pocket where they slip the port into, this is how the incision literally looks, almost to scale, maybe a little longer. As you can see, the healing is rather odd. The surgeon thinks the best thing to do now is to remove the port and put a new one in the other side. In fact, you know Doctors: they don't think, they know!
I guess this is a good thing that they're decisive, but it doesn't leave much room for hope. Seeing as this means that tomorrow (Tuesday, October 19, 2010) I have an appointment to have the surgical doctor (Dr. Quaid) who put this in, take it out. Well, the Surgeon that looked at me today told Dr. Quaid he should be prepared to take it out tomorrow, but that he could decide for himself. Then he gave me a slight, smug micro-expression. I can pretty much bank on the fact I'm getting it out tomorrow. I asked the "good" Doctor what his return policy was on 10 day old merchandise. Seeing as how this little gizmo is not cheap. He gave a scripted, diplomatic answer of, "We provide the services, it's not really about purchasing them or returning them." Makes sense I guess, but his follow up question was if I would be paying out of pocket. When I said yes, he didn't seem empathetic. He mentioned the financial aid that was available, and didn't say much else. Poor people must make him uncomfortable.
On Wednesday, October 20, 2010 I am scheduled for surgery to get another port put in. On the following day I have an appointment scheduled with my Oncologist Dr. Brown, whose name I see all the time, but I haven't seen her for a couple weeks. It will be good to ask some questions.
I'm really not thrilled about the news, as you can probably tell by my chiding and sarcastic tone in my post. I guess the truth is I don't want to lose momentum and I feel like this hiccup will contribute to a huge loss of it.
It's kinda funny that cancer is self-sustaining to the point where it actually runs out of inhabitable room, yet the patients themselves have to dig deep inside (as well as drawing on support from others) to find what sustains them through the process of killing it.
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