A Spork in the Road

So I’m not over my needle phobia after all.

Well the thing is, I got to be okay with having blood drawn over the past month. Even IV needles weren’t bugging me too much. But I’m still getting used to having a port, and it still kind of freaks me out. The port is a small round thingamajig about the size of a stack of quarters that’s implanted under the skin below my collarbone. It has a thin catheter that runs up under the skin and feeds into my jugular vein. This way I have easy access to a major vein and they don’t have to shoot up my arms every time I go for chemo, blood tests, etc.

The port is truly wonderful, but you understand why the whole system is a little freaky if one thinks about it too much.

Day one of chemo, I felt light-headed when the nurse first punched her little port needle into the port, but I was okay. Yesterday, however, I went in for routine blood work — in and out in ten minutes, right? Ha.

Sudz had died during the night, as you know, so I was short on sleep and long on stress. Also, I hadn’t eaten much breakfast and didn’t eat lunch before I went in at 1:00pm for blood work. And I am, in general, dealing with the stress of being on chemo and worrying and having my body feel foreign to me and so forth.

We got all set up, the nurse hooked up my port, and we started chatting. Then the world began to recede, slowly but surely. “I don’t feel right,” I said. My nurse tried to talk me through it, and I was grasping for words and trying to cling to consciousness when all of a sudden–

I was dreaming, and everything was calm and peaceful and then–

I woke up surrounded by faces and an insistent question: “What’s your name?”

I still wasn’t sure what was going on, but I knew my name.

“Where are you?”

I reached hard for the name of the office, the name of the hospital, trying to get my brain to work and my mouth to say the corresponding words. The world lapped back into my consciousness until I was able to look around the room and have a solid sense of surroundings. I took stock: I was leaning back in my chair with a damp cloth on my forehead; I was drenched in a cold sweat; my feet were up on a stool; I felt like I’d just run a marathon.

The staff was, I must say, exceptional. After the hullabaloo calmed down, there was discussion of my history of passing out when having blood drawn, of my father’s history of the same, and of all the factors that happily did not contribute (not diabetic, not epileptic).

When I first sat down, my blood pressure was my standard 118/72. When I was out, it was a hysterical 140/20. When I’d come back around, it had settled down to 105/75.

My doctor was concerned but not alarmed, and he had them put me on saline and keep an eye on me. So I took a seat in the infusion room, got hooked up to a saline drip, and fell asleep for a couple hours. I felt like an idiot, sitting there among people who were going through much worse cancers and much longer treatments and terrible side effects. But I didn’t balk at the chance to put my feet up and let go for a little while. As Maureen says, it’s not a competition: my issues may be comparatively small, but they feel big to me.

And next time I go for blood tests, I’m asking to lie down.