Friday, October 17, 2008

Any Bruises?

That is what the nurse in the pre-surgery waiting area asked me on Tuesday in preparation for placement of a "metaport" under the skin just below my right shoulder. It's funny, because this was less than a week since I was on the same floor waiting for a thorocoscopy to remove a pea-sized "node" from my chest. (A thorocoscopy is when they make tiny little cuts in your back and slip cameras and tiny tools in through your ribs and steal part of your flesh while they are at it.) And just the day before another surgeon had stabbed the hell out of the vein on the left side of my chest only to discover that it was too scarred already to accept another central line (it would've been it's third)--which is why I was there in the first place. So yes, I was most definitely bruised.

Then she goes on to ask a series of qustions that make her chuckle and laugh to herself at their absurdity. Questions like "do you have trouble seeing?" (not really, but I do wear glasses for distance) and "do you wear a hearing aid?" This one in particular she thought was hilarious to have to ask me. Afterall, how could such a healthy-looking young person need hearing aids? I do not, in fact, wear hearing aids. BUt my ears have been ringing for the last three years--ever since a particularly toxic round of chemotherapy left me with minor hearing loss. I won't, at this point, be having that type of chemo again, so hopefully I won't need hearing aids before my 30th birthday; but maybe let's not laugh at the absurdity of such a possibility while I wait to have a permanent line place in my chest for the purpose of receiving high-dose chemotherapy.

2 comments:

eternalsunshine said...

Ugh, yeah. I can see the humor in some of my health issues, but it's MY call when I want to be funny about it, you know? I remember a nurse digging around in my arm for a vein and laughing about it. She was new, she was learning...I get that! I was used to the array of blood-takers by then. BUT, don't laugh when you're impaling me with a needle. Grrrr.

I always hated the "You're too young to be this sick" comments whenever I'm in the hospital, esp. when I get colonoscopies. Like, people are BORN sick and I know all you nurses know/see that. Don't make me feel like I did something "wrong" to be "this sick."

xine said...

yea, ha ha ha. you can't really help a virtual stranger laugh at their really not laughable stuff, all you can do is laugh along with them when they do.

boy, that thorocoscopy makes a colonoscopy sound like a walk in the park!

sending you non-bruising thoughts