Fighting Breast Cancer

Karen has a hospital room prepared for me.  I put on a gown and lay in the bed.  My mom is there and she sits in a chair next to my bed with a somber look on her face.  To cheer her up I turn on MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen and start making fun of all the ungrateful brats.  (Seriously, have you ever watched this show?  If they were my kids, I’d make them work in a soup kitchen a couple of times a week.)

Finally, Karen came in and began the process of creating a surgical environment.  She sterlized my right arm and used a miniature ultrasound to find a vein that she could tap into.  At last, she found one towards the inside of my arm at the base of my bicep.  Next, she numbed my arm with some local anesthetic. 

Finally, using the ultrasound to guide her, Karen began the process of trying to thread a tube with a wire in it into the vein in my arm.  The wire acts as a way to help guide the tube through the vein to the center of the chest once it is inserted.  Karen was having trouble, though.  Every time she pierced my arm with the needle, my vein would collapse and hide.  She was about to give up and have me get a port, when she finally got it.  She was able to feed the tube through my vein to my chest.  She then removed the wire and bandaged my arm.

I sat up and examined the addition to my arm.  There tucked beneath the bandages, I could see a tube coiled around itself.  At the end of the tube was a splitter that sectioned the tube into two seperate ends.  The ends were capped off; one with a red cap, the other with a white.  This is now where I would have all of my blood draws and infusions.

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