Bye, Bye Port!

The procedure

The day finally arrived! My port has been removed! Not sure what a port is? No problem – here’s a link from Memorial Sloan Kettering if you want to know more. The most important thing is that mine is now out of my body!

The day actually did not start off on the right foot. As of last week, I was supposed to have my procedure to remove my port on Friday, September 8th. My last Kanjinti infusion was July 14th. I could have gotten my port removed the next day. My breast surgeon was on maternity leave, so I considered going to Interventional Radiology to have it removed, but I decided to wait until she came back this week to have her do it. At the end of last week, her surgical coordinator called to ask if we could move it up to Wednesday the 6th. If I had stayed on Friday, I would have been later in the day, and it would have eaten up my whole day despite it only being a 20-minute procedure.

I agreed to move it up and they told me my arrival time would be 6:30 AM. Yesterday, the 5th, the surgical coordinator called me and left a message on my cell phone to inform me my arrival time was changing and to give him a call back. I was at work, so I didn’t have my cell phone with me and missed the call. I called him back and left a message to ask him to just leave a message with the new arrival time if I didn’t answer. Unfortunately, he never called me back and never told me anything else, so I had no idea when I was supposed to arrive.

I woke up at 5:40 AM and arrived at the hospital at about 6:20 AM. When I talked to the scheduler at the surgical center, she was surprised. “You are pretty early…” I explained what happened and told her I just came at the original time. That’s when she informed me my procedure had been moved to 10:30 AM and I actually didn’t need to be at the hospital until 8:30 AM! UGH! I was so irritated. I had not gotten much sleep and I was still pretty tired. I ended up going back home and taking Maddie to school. At least Sean was able to come with me instead of having to ride his bike to meet me at the hospital.

Everything after that went really smoothly. For some reason I had thought I was going to get some type of anesthesia or something. In retrospect, that made no sense because they told me I could eat and drink normally before my procedure, which wouldn’t be the case if I was getting anesthesia. That’s when I realized I was going to be awake! I’m not completely sure why it freaked me out to not be under. There is something weird and surreal about being awake when someone cuts you open and pulls something out of your body. Of course, they numb the location a lot, so you don’t feel any pain. But you still feel them touching you, tugging on the device, etc. It’s weird. You both feel it and don’t. Also, the port is in your external jugular vein with a tube that goes down to your heart. The thought of pulling that tube out of my vein and my heart through the front of my chest is just disconcerting in general. Now I’m going to be awake to hear, smell and sort of see what’s going on!

Prep for the procedure was minimal. It only involved getting undressed and wearing the hospital gowns. I didn’t need an IV started or anything like that. They took me up in a wheelchair and I laid down on the surgical table. They mop the pretty much the port site, shoulder, neck, chest and everything else within a pretty big radius of the site with Betadine surgical scrub. It’s a dark brown/orange substance that’s pretty sticky. Then they covered me with a blue tarp, and I really couldn’t see anything after that point. They lifted it up so it wasn’t smothering my face completely. I was wrapped in some nice warm hospital blankets and that was pretty enjoyable.

The numbing was probably the worst part of the whole thing. They inject a bunch of local anesthetic, many times, to get the area numb. The first injection is fairly unpleasant because you get the stick of the needle and then the burn of the anesthetic. My surgeon said it probably felt a little more uncomfortable because my skin was pretty thin around my port. Then she narrated me through the whole thing. I realized at some point that I was keeping my upper body tense and tried my best to relax. I was squeezing the surgery table arms and scrunching up my shoulders fairly tight. I did my best to relax. What was funny was that despite being so tense and nervous, my blood pressure was really low! All in all, the procedure probably took 20 minutes. It doesn’t hurt all that much other than a bit of nerve pain and intermittent stinging. I’m allowed to resume all my normal activities as well!

How I feel

A lot of people ask me if I was excited. I don’t actually think I was all that excited about getting my port removed. On the positive side, I enjoyed my port. It went in smoothly. It worked well during all my infusions. It didn’t cause me any problems throughout its residence in my chest. The only annoying parts of it were that I couldn’t easily wear racerback sports bras and sometimes it hurt when it was bumped. One other downside was that one of the little bumps on the port that help nurses identify where to access it was rubbing through my skin. That was not so great. I had a little hole in my skin around it and that probably wouldn’t have been good in the long run.

And just like with everything with a cancer journey, there are definitely milestones, and it is good to get through them, but there are a lot of mixed emotions. Obviously, the first thing is that you always kind of wish it wasn’t actually happening at all. The fact I even had a port is a reminder that I needed it for chemotherapy… because I had breast cancer… when I was 36 years old. Then, I was worried about the whole thing with it being in my heart and being awake for the procedure – that’s not exciting. It doesn’t feel like an accomplishment in the same way as finishing a marathon or something. Maybe it’s also because I might personally reserve ‘exciting’ for very positive things like new cars, vacations, getting a puppy, winning the lottery, etc. Finally, I think it’s a little scary because I’m hoping I really won’t need it again.

Ultimately, I am pleased that the port is gone. It is a milestone albeit not a huge one for me. It is the last step of active treatment, so I can truly close the chapter on that. I asked my surgeon if I could keep my port after she took it out. Unfortunately, the hospital policy is that I could not take it with me. My surgeon sends all her ports to the lab, because she once had a patient who didn’t believe it was actually removed. They pushed for a scan to prove it was gone. Sending it to the lab allows them to officially catalogue that it was, in fact, removed from my body. I did get to look at it, in all its glory, once it was out. It was actually blue and white – I thought it was purple! No final memento of my treatment, but now I can buy some more racerback sports bras!