Port Storm

I kept telling my story at Kaiser today. Eric and I went there in the morning for chemotherapy, and shortly after our arrival I started telling my story:

My port site doesn't heal. In addition to coming to Kaiser three times a month to have chemotherapy, I've been making one or two visits to Kaiser every week for over two months for my port site. Every time I come, someone looks at it and says, "It's not healing -- come back in a week". It doesn't even stay the same. It gets worse. Now I've had my port taken out, and the incision is healing beautifully -- but the opening... the "hole", as my oncologist calls it...? It just gets bigger. Now it's 50% larger than it was before the port removal. If it's not going to get better, and if it's going to get worse, is there a next step?

I told my story to 5 nurses, 1 nurse practitioner, and 2 doctors.

I waited for over an hour for the last doctor. I sat on a gurney, just a curtain away from a woman with painful abdominal abscesses and advanced lung cancer. She kept telling the nurse that she was afraid.

I waited over an hour, and when the doctor arrived he 1. looked at it, and 2. told me to come back in a week. He sat next to me on the gurney and spoke in a condescending tone: He knows that I probably just want him to stitch it up and have it magically heal, and he wishes he could. He knows I must be frustrated. He kept patting my leg, and twice he pushed his shoulder into mine... bumped up against me as if to cajole me.

It made me want to cry. I'd just had chemo, and I was exhausted, and I'd waited an hour, and all I wanted to do was go home. He was telling me that it wasn't healing, and that I should come back in a week. I was afraid to speak... afraid I'd produce some kind of shrill, shaky, unintelligible sound.

It kinda sucked.

One of the nurses was helpful, though. She recommended that I take zinc. Oh, AND...

She also told me that it's nice to talk to a patient who has come to some acceptance about dying. I'd mentioned nothing of dying, but she probably sensed some sort of grim finality it my third or fourth retelling of the Port Story.

So, there ya go.

Please... no advice.