Port-o-Cath
The pain lasted a week and I could do nothing but lay flat. Any movement caused me to wince and the tears to well up. I stayed home until the time for my first chemo appointment. I had made my family look online for possible causes for the pain and one possibility that came up was that the port was lying on a nerve. My surgeon thought I was nuts. The day of my first chemotherapy appointment arrived and I was scared and in pain. The oncology nurse explained the procedure in great detail, swabbed the port with alcohol and told me to take a deep breath while she inserted the needle into it. I held my breath and WOW! relief flooded my body. My port had been on a nerve. Once they accessed the port I feel great. Now my story is not common and most people breeze through the port insertion. Would I do it again? In a heartbeat.
The port is a small roundish rubber-lie stopper that lies just beneath the surface of the skin and is attached to a catheter which is fed into a main artery. This way, the nurse can access the port (it's just a pinch, much less than a needle stick) to take blood and give you your chemo treatments. You don't have to worry about short sleeves or finding a good vein or black and blue arms. You just push aside your collar and the chemo is in!
Right after the surgery the site is just like any other surgery site - red, raw and ugly. Eventually the soreness and newness goes away and you just feel this bump under your skin. For a while, I couldn't get used to it. It didn't hurt, but I was always touching it. This was a foreign object in my body. Watching those who didn't have a catheter endure the nurse searching for a good vein for their blood tests, then waiting for two hours for their chemotherapy, made me glad that I had a port.
Eventually, I forgot it was even there. Since I work in a hospital, I would go down to oncology, have my port accessed for the blood tests, the nurse would tape down the IV hook (the needle that they insert into the port looks like a small meat hook, but really doesn't hurt), I would button my blouse and go back to
Latest Articles