Part 11
"Kinky"

After a two-week break, I was now scheduled to repeat my cycle of chemotherapy. This week was going to be the long one. I went in at around 8:00am on Monday and got back in my usual chair. The nurses came and got ready to connect me up to the IV machine. Since my port ready to go I didn’t have to get stuck in my hands or arms anymore. Before I went in that morning I put on some numbing gel that the surgeon gave to me after my port operation. So when they stick the needle (which is about the size of a nail) into your port it won’t hurt that much. The nurse had all of the equipment in the room and got ready to put “the nail” in. She poked my port slightly and asked if I felt anything. I sure did. I guess the numbing gel didn’t work as good as it was supposed to. “No problem”, the nurse said, as she left the room for a second to get more supplies. She came back with another needle and a bottle of something. “I'm going to inject some of this numbing solution to the area of your port.” She then poked mea few times in the general area. After a few seconds my port area was completely numb. Now she was able to stick the “port connector” (I don’t know the exact medical term for it). When she stuck it in she geared back, like she needed all of her body weight to put it in. I hear a “Pop” sound and sure enough, the port was in place.

I was now ready for another 8 hours of boring chemotherapy. “Since we got this in”, the nurse said, “let’s just take the blood for your marker counts now.” That sounded like a good idea to me. She connected a needle to one of the port tubes and started to pump out some blood. The only problem was that nothing came out. “Let’s try that again”, the nurse said. Still no blood. “Hmmm, let’s take you to this other room so I cane lay you down on the bed and try. Sometimes this works better.” I got up and went with her to the room next door. When I there I hopped on the bed and waited for her to give it another shot. This time, before she tried to pull out blood, she tried to see if she could pump anything into it. She got out a bottle of saline and extracted some of it with her needle. She connected the needle to the port tube and pumped in. I heard a something that sounded like someone was trying to suck out the last drops of juice from their “Capri Sun”. Sure enough, all of the saline went in. She one more time to pull some blood. This time, blood came out. “Good”, she said. “Even though we got some blood out”, the nurse said as she was signing some papers, “I want you to go upstairs to “X-Ray” and give them this slip. I grabbed the slip and walked upstairs.

I gave the slip to the receptionist and sat down in the waiting room. After a few minutes the doctor came out and called my name, “Cliff, we’re ready for you.” I got up and went with him to a small room. “Well Cliff, it sounds like you might have a kink in your port.” A KINK? Geeze, do I have to have surgery again to get rid of the kink? “If you could just lay down on this table Cliff, we can get a better look at you port.” I did what they told me. The doctor’s nurse brought him a needle and a bottle of something. “Now Cliff, I’m going to inject this stuff into your port. This will make your port tubes show up better in the X-Ray.” He connected the needle to the port tube and pumped in some “glow in the dark juice”. After he pumped it in he took out this mechanical looking box. It had some wires coming out of it. He positioned it around my port area and looked into a monitor. After a he checked several different angles he said, “Yep, it looks like we have a little kink in your tubing.” Great. This is all I need. He told me that I could sit up for a second. “We have two things we can do”, the doctor said. “I can schedule another appointment with the surgeon, ASAP, and we can put another port in. Or, since the kink isn’t stopping us from pumping fluids “in”, we can still give you your chemo through the port. The only problem is that we would have to withdraw your blood from your arms.” Hmmm…this is a hard decision. I can go under the knife again or just miss out on getting blood taken out from my port. I told the doctor that I would live with it. He said that would be fine and told me that he would call the nurses to let them know as I walked back down to the room.

So I walked back down to my little room and sat back down in the chair. “It looks like we can get started”, the nurse said. They hooked me up to the IV machine and started the process. Since I had just wasted about an hour and a half on this “kink” ordeal, I had to stay a little longer that day. Fun, fun, fun!

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