Vampire Juicebox

The port freaks me out.

It doesn’t hurt at all, and it made round 7 of treatment SO much easier. It’s not noticeable under my clothes. In fact, the incision is neat and tidy and will be easily covered with tattoos one day. My arms finally have a chance to heal now after nine months of endless poking. There is so much good that comes with caving and getting the port.

But it freaks me the fuck out.

I’ve said before I hate being reminded that my body is a body. Well, nothing makes me more aware of it than having something that is not my body inside of my body. There’s plenty of room here for a joke about having a "long piece of hardware inside me..." BUT LET’S NOT WASTE TIME WITH JOKES. A port is scary! I wanna talk about it!

Maybe some of my fear comes from ignorance. Before I got one I truly had no concept of how a port works, where it goes, how it’s accessed, what it looks like between treatments. I have one now and I still don’t know all those answers. But here's what I have learned about it so far:

• It does NOT stick out of your neck like a straw all the time. One of the first thoughts that popped into my head when I decided to get a port was “vampire juicebox.” While “Vampire Juicebox” is a phenomenal band name that I wish existed, it has no basis in the reality of living with a port. Nothing sticks out at all. To the casual observer you are just a person with a surgical scar, not a human CapriSun.

• They do NOT cut you open and sew you back together every time they need to access it. This is maybe common sense to some people — of COURSE they weren’t going to perform a full surgery every three weeks in the treatment room, Brenna! I, however, have no common sense and an abundance of imagination, so that is exactly what I was picturing. How they actually access it I still don’t really know because I didn’t watch. But all I felt was a quick needle poke — a for real “quick needle poke”, not like when the doctors tell you that and are lying to you — and then they secured the IV and sent me on my way. About ten times faster and more painless a process than trying to find a stupid vein in my arm had become by Chemo Round 6.
  

• It DOES change the way the pre-chemo meds hit you. Every round of chemo up until this point, my veins got irritated at the infusion of Benadryl. I’d gotten into the habit of warning the nurse I’d like some heat packs to help ease the pain, and towards the end my veins were so shot they needed to slow down how quickly they sent meds through the IV. No more of that! With a port there was zero irritation, zero need for heat packs, and zero reason to not succumb to the blissful sleep that came with a slug of Benadryl through my system. I had so many plans for what I’d do to keep myself entertained during treatment now that both arms were IV-free — I brought embroidery projects, a book, a notebook, even my work laptop — and I wound up sleeping through almost the whole thing. Win.

• They DO put you under sedation when they first put the port in. At least they try to. In my case they hit me with three doses and had to give up. “Are you a natural redhead?” the OR nurse asked me (which is a pretty funny question to ask someone in my situation. As if I would dye all .2 inches of hair black before it falls out for the third time in less than a year.) Apparently certain redheads have a higher pain/drug tolerance and are more resistant to sedation as a result. As I am not, in fact, a natural redhead, the only explanation I have for my own resistance is that I am generally bad at napping.

• You CAN feel it through your chest. Only if you incessantly run your hand over the incision spot like a weirdo as I do. When I’m sitting still like a normal person — nope, can’t feel it at all. It’s like it isn’t even there. But I KNOW it’s there. And so I have to constantly trace the shape of it under my skin and freak myself out. I have to imagine it’s psychologically a similar weirdness to having any other implant or prosthetic. But a few weeks in and I’m not sure how people ever really get comfortable with having a foreign object inside them. (…stop laughing.)

In the interest of breaking stigmas, here are some (very sexy) #portpics.

For the record, I still think the world could use a scene where a vampire goes after a cancer patient with a port. When the IV is attached it really is like a straw. And with chemo in the bloodstream maybe it could be the vampire equivalent of one of those alcoholic juice pouches. Stored in the freezer to keep fresh...

Can you tell I've been rewatching a lot of Buffy lately?