Portnoia

I'm paranoid about my port.

I should explain. I had an access port to my heart installed before I started chemotherapy, partly because it makes access to my bloodsteam easy and convenient, and partly because some of the chemo drugs are so toxic they would destroy ordinary veins that they were injected into. What the port amounts to is a rubber bulb implanted just below the skin on my right pectoral muscle. It feels about like an enormous nipple mounted about three inches above and one inch inboard of the genuine article. From this rubber bulb extends a piece of plastic tubing that goes about halfway up my neck before entering my jugular vein and then proceeding down again and terminating just shy of the heart valve.

What it amounts to, really, is a sort of faucet tapped right into my heart, for good and bad. If allows quick access for chemo, and it allows the chemo drugs to mix with 100 mile per hour bloodflow that prevents the drugs from burning out my veins. But I'm also paranoid. I don't mind the dogs crawling all over me, but not on my upper right quadrant, where the port is. I don't even like to scratch itches in that part of my body. I usually have a fairly relaxed attitude toward my body - I'm the sort of person that finds arterial bleeding "kind of interesting" because how often does one get to see blood squirt? But my port could bleed me out in a matter of a few minutes if something went haywire, and I can never really get that thought entirely out of my head.

It doesn't help that as I lose weight it becomes more and more noticeable. The plastic tubing is clearly visible under my skin, and the port itself seems to grow as my subcutaneous fat slowly disappears. The surgeon that put it in claimed that many people never have any problems with their ports at all and often leave them in for years. I'll accept that the vast majority of ports never cause any problems, but I'm so anxious about mine that I really doubt I'll consent to leaving it in any longer than absolutely necessary.

I guess it's a sign of my increasing ability to withstand chemo in general that subsidiary issues like my port suddenly become Big Damn Deals. And no, I don't feel any better these days. Chemo still sucks. But I'm losing the memory of what it feels like to feel halfway decent and to have a digestive tract that works. I'm finding chemo somewhat easier to deal with physically simply because I'm coming to accept it as normal. I still get depressed sometimes, and I still want to know what I did to deserve all of this, but since I can't remember what it feels like to feel good, I accept feeling bad as inevitable. The dreadful Bookstore Incident doesn't even humiliate me any more; it was just another day in that wonderful paradise that we call chemo.