I Didn’t Expect THAT: Chemo Port

When you’re told that you have cancer and will need the full complement of treatments, you focus on the concepts of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Chemo, for example, can be frightening to think about because of purported its side effects, so you gloss over the details. But when you get down to a practical level and start learning about exactly how the infusions will take place…

I knew I needed chemo. I assumed that it would be administered intravenously, as in, into an arm vein with the bag o’ drugs hanging from the IV pole. Ahhh, but the drugs are caustic and would cause damage to a smaller vein, so to avoid that, they go directly into a major blood vessel to allow for quicker mixing with blood, faster circulation through your body and much less discomfort. This is done through a port.

Let me be clear: a chemo port is a revolutionary device that has made administration of chemo drugs far easier on the patient. Not having the port would be absolutely miserable and likely necessitate breaks in treatment as the patient recovered.

However, it wasn’t until we were talking about setting up a port implantation appointment that I began to grasp what was actually going to happen: a small disk would be implanted onto my chest wall, just under the skin, from which a thin flexible tube would run up and over my clavicle and then down into the blood vessel (probably the superior vena cava, but I didn’t ask). Once I started infusions, the needle from the bag containing the drugs would be inserted through my skin, through a membrane on the port, and that was it for the needle prick. Simple and relatively painless.

But about that port. To me, “port placement”, as the implantation procedure was called, was surgery. And I wasn’t great at handling surgery. Usually I like a lot of info to prep me for what’s coming, but I couldn’t even handle watching a video of a placement procedure.

I don’t have a lot of fat on my chest. There was nothing to nestle the port down into, and as a result, after implantation my skin was stretched tight. I could see the lump in my chest and I could see the tube as it ran up from the lump, over the clavicle. Turning my head pulled the skin — ow! I avoided looking at it, let alone touching it. All I could think was that I had an entire year of this.

Eventually the skin stretched to accommodate the port, but because it stuck out like a little knob, I worried about twacking it. When I hit it with a dumbbell during a workout, I cried. Seatbelts were a constant concern; I was afraid that the port would get dislodged and injure me in a car accident. Hugs hurt and I instinctively turned that side away from people. And of course, in the event of a huge catastrophe that resulted in the collapse of society and all modern services including port removal procedures, I might be stuck with that thing on my chest for the rest of my pathetic little life.

Eventually, the day came when I finished my last infusion and my oncologist gave the go-ahead for port removal. That thing was out within a week. Removal was simpler than implantation, done under local anesthesia without the need for fasting, and even all the tugging to get it loose didn’t bother me. I was so happy to have it out.

But I’d carried it inside me longer than I had carried either of my children, so I asked to take the port home. While I had hated it inside me, I was so grateful for what it had done. I mean, I couldn’t just let them throw it out! It was handed to me in a bright pink box designed for dentures (apparently, keeping your port isn’t popular enough for the creation of “used port” containers) and now sits on my desk. I prefer it there rather than in my chest.

Author: franticshanti

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