Oof! What a day!
It was my day for an appointment with my oncologist and infusion, which is standard procedure for me every 3rd Friday. I checked in at the lab at 10:30 am, expecting to be home by about 1:00.
Had a few little glitches in the day, however...
So, I have a port in my upper chest, just under my left clavicle, which makes for less scarring in my arms. They use this for needle pokes of all kinds: blood draws, infusions, and even anesthesia when needed for things like a routine colonoscopy. Occasionally, a port gets temperamental and doesn't work the way it's supposed to. Sometimes the body treats it as a foreign invader and the tube, which goes straight into the aorta, will get covered with a myelin sheath. I've had this happen a few times. Sometimes they can use a blood thinner to flush it out, sometimes they inject a solution into the tube that sits there for a while and works like a drain cleaner, sometimes they have to do a short surgery to remove the port and replace it with a new one. In the almost 10 years since I was first diagnosed, this is the 4th port I’ve had. It was replaced last June.
This morning, my port worked perfectly when the phlebotomist, Donna, accessed it in the lab. They leave it accessed when you have an infusion that same day. I went on to my oncology appointment, and mentioned to the CNP, Nancy, who was my provider today that I still have a gross open wound from the port they took out last June. (That was 7 months ago). This is not the first time I’ve mentioned this problem, but she called a surgeon, Dr. Bryan, to come take a look at it, and the surgeon said, “Nope. That’s not right.”
As I suspected, the sutures from that surgery never fully dissolved, and it was not going to heal on it’s own. After poking around a little on it in my infusion room, she said to head across the hall to her office after infusion so she could numb me up properly and dig in a little deeper.
Meanwhile…
The infusion nurses, who are straight-up PROS at using ports, could not get my already accessed port to give any blood return. My nurse, Lindsay, tried every trick in the book, even some I’ve never done before, and NOTHING! It was definitely plugged. She used Heparin to flush it, out, to no avail, so they called in an Rx for CathFlow, which Lindsay described as “Port Drain-O”. It took a while to arrive from pharmacy, then it had to sit in the cath line for 30 minutes minimum. I tried to hop across the hall to surgery to have Dr. Bryan pop that little granuloma out while I waited, but she didn’t want to be rushed. So I went back and got some work done instead.
Try #1 after CathFlow didn’t work at all. Try #2 fifteen minutes later was also unsuccessful. I suggested we could just use a vein. I have really big ones. Lindsay was fine with that, but kept trying the port a few more times. Nothing. Time for an IV. My veins were happy to give up all my blood, and infusion went smoothly for the next 45 minutes. About 20 minutes in, Nurse Marcia popped in and said she wanted to give the port a try. Got it first time. What a rock star. I told her she should go out there and strut around in front of Lindsay a bit. To her credit, she didn’t. That’s probably why I’m not a nurse.
Anyway, I had an uneventful infusion, then popped across the hall to surgery. By now it was 3:00 pm, on a Friday, mind you, and I was the only patient left in their office. Dr. Bryan and her nurse (Dang. Can’t remember her name!) took care of my gross wound. I got to see the gross granuloma (which was almost an inch long that looked kind of like a garden slug) that had encased the tiny shard of plastic (maybe 2mm) that the sutures had melded into. (No pictures. You’re welcome.) She put in non-dissolvable stitches, which I’ll have removed in a couple of weeks.
So, I finally made it out of the Prairie Center around 3:30. I stopped at the drugstore to get some appropriate band-aids for the next week. Then as I was driving past USF, I remembered that I need to talk to my pal, Hailey about something, so I pulled into a loading zone, shut my car off, but put on my hazard blinkers, and went in and visited with Hailey for a while. Of course, it lasted much longer than it should have, and by the time I got back out to my car, my battery was dead.
Back up a hot second… my car has been starting hard in the cold the last few days, and I knew my battery was probably on it’s last legs, but why take care of something proactively when you can wait to get stranded?
Now, we have AAA for this very purpose, but I didn’t have my card with me. Matt was at a Christmas party already, but kindly took a picture of the AAA card and texted it to me. Then I remembered, “I’m on campus! Campus security will do this for me. I don’t need to wait for AAA.” So I walked the 50 feet over to their office, and they happily took care of charging me up so I could go.
At this point, it was 4:30 and I didn’t dare shut my car off. I drove over to an auto parts store, that was advertising free battery testing and asked if they would test my battery- and whether I needed to shut off my ignition. I did, they tested my battery, confirmed it was “bad,” then they put the charger back on my battery while I called the closest mechanic to see if I could get a new battery put in right away- not really thinking that it was almost 5 pm on a FRIDAY.
Three cheers for Tires Tires Tires, for squeezing me in at 5 on a Friday and sending me on my fully charged, merry way!
And the biggest hero of the day was Matt Morrison, who took down and put away all the indoor Christmas decorations while I was gone. Yes, he went to a party without me, (I wasn’t invited and it was sportsy so I was fine with that) but he cleaned up Christmas, which is one of my least favorite things to do ever.
And I don’t have any pictures of all of these adventures, but I was stopped in my tracks by the winter scene when I first stepped outside this morning. The magic was all gone by the time I got home, but here’s a nice picture of my pretty little neighborhood.
