cancer – day 19
4:30PM
Just got home. They couldn’t get the pain under control, so I was admitted to the hospital last night and they kept giving me morphine every hour throughout the night. No real sleep, but I did doze in and out of consciousness, which was very strange. I’d be in the middle of texting Mark and get too drowsy to finish the message and then after a minute or two I would come to again and turn the blackberry toward me again in my hand (I didn’t get drowsy enough to actually let go of the blackberry in my lap) to finish the text message.
9:00PM
Ahhhhh, so nice to be lying in my own bed. I didn’t sleep worth a darn in the hospital, but at least they kept the morphine coming, little doses all night. So, you must be wondering, just what did happen to Cynthia yesterday?
Well, the first thing the morning of the surgery was actually getting an echocardiogram done for my cardiologist. He wants echos before and after chemo to decide whether to put me back on my heart medication after chemo or if we need to do something else (like a pacemaker). Then we went to get the stints put in, and that’s where the fun starts. [I should mention now that if you have a weak stomach or can’t stand the thought of me in severe pain, you should probably skip the rest of this blog.]
You have to keep in mind that I have had two biopsies on my right breast in the last two weeks, with the second one requiring a larger incision and more cutting which led to uncontrollable bleeding that created a hematoma in my right breast. . .basically, think of a tennis ball sized bruise at the just-turned-yellow stage, and that’s what my right breast looked like yesterday morning, and, since it’s just one big bruise, it has been ridiculously sensitive to even the slightest bit of pressure. Now try to imagine compressing that breast for a mammogram and then compressing it further to insert large needles that allow wires to be set into my tumor clips (I had two sites, two clips), then set those wires with lead weights, and do it all without pain medication. That was my morning. Then we had to go up the hill to the hospital.
By the time we got me in a wheelchair and in the hospital, I was in agony, tears everywhere, teeth clenched, every muscle tense to the point that I could barely say the words “I can’t tolerate this much longer” and I thought I was going to pass out. And it was tearing my mom apart, having to see me in pain like this. The look of agony on her face was unbearable, and I tried to signal my dad to take her outside. Then a surgery nurse came rushing up with morphine, which helped ease the pain to a sufferable level, and we got me out of the wheelchair and onto the x-ray table.
Then it gets worse. The next thing they need to do is inject this radioactive material in my breast so that it travels from the breast to light up my lymph nodes and identify the sentinel node (first node from the breast) via x-ray. So they have to give me more shots, like getting Novocain, and then there’s this radioactive stuff burning in me. Mind you, the morphine shot merely eased the previous pain somewhat, nothing more. As if all this radioactive stuff isn’t bad enough, they then have to use tape to pull my breast toward my sternum so they can take an x-ray straight down to the lymph nodes, and then, to block the blazing light of the radioactive material they just inserted in my breast tissue, they have to put a lead weight on my breast, and take a whole bunch of x-rays and then make marks on my body to direct the surgeon to the sentinel lymph node and then x-ray again to check the marks, so here I am with this lead weight on my just-turned-yellow tennis ball bruise of a breast for 20 minutes. It was awful.
Then they take me to a surgical staging room and say my parents can come in if I want them. The pain is generally unbearable and the thought of Mom seeing me like that made me tell them to keep my parents out until after the surgery. They don’t want to give me any more painkiller because it was only 45 minutes or so before the surgery. Forty-five minutes? Of feeling like this? Then they leave me alone to wait.
I can’t stand it and I text Mark. “Oh baby this sucks!” He reminds me to breathe and focus (a little trick he used on me during a practice session once right before my conference in Atlanta when I was so stressed out I couldn’t dance, but visualizing that breath later when I was in Atlanta actually really helped me calm down from an almost frantic lack of sleep state). So now I’m in the surgery prep room, trying to breathe and focus on the breath. But it’s just too much. I text him again: “suddenly wish I had your hand to squeeze, all alone in here.” He’s on his way, and my surgery is in 30 minutes. I tell the nurse who he is and she goes to tell the desk clerks to let him in right away when he arrives.
Meanwhile, my mom is fussing at the clerks that she wants to come back to be with me. They try to tell her that I asked them to give me privacy but Mom isn’t taking no for an answer. (No more wondering where I get that little characteristic from, eh?) Mark arrives, and the nursese give up trying to dissuade Mom and they bring all three of them back to my room.
I was relieved to see Mark but asked Dad to take Mom out almost immediately. A quick hug and “I love you” for them both and then “please, go.” And I had a few minutes to clench Mark’s hand before they finally took me in for the surgery.
I of course don’t remember the surgery, I just wake up in the recovery room where they’re monitoring me closely before releasing me back to the surgical prep room. Then they took me back to my room, G, which was apparently the kids room, it was painted in bright colors with fish and such on the walls and ceiling. My parents and Mark come back in, and the pain’s getting bad again as the anesthetic wears off.
The hospital has a pain chart on the wall next to my bed. The nurse comes in and I ask her “how much pain am I supposed to be able to tolerate?” as I’m looking at this chart. The nurse asks me to tell her what level my pain is, I scan through the levels and descriptions and tell her “Nine.” There are 10 levels all together, ten being pain so severe that you lose consciousness, zero being no pain at all of course.
But they can’t get the pain under control, morphine helped, they got it down to a 7, but it was getting late and they needed to have me on oral painkillers before they could send me home. We try some Tylenol-3 which I guess has codeine in it, but it doesn’t do anything to lessen the pain. They’re trying to decide whether to send me home or not and I’m like, “I can’t even get to the front door of the hospital from here, there’s no way I’ll be able to handle the bumpy steep winding dirt road to my house.” The nurse told me that she wants my pain down to a 3 before she sends me home and I tell her I’d consider a 5 tolerable enough, but even that clearly wasn’t going to happen any time soon so they call Dr. Thayer and he has me admitted to the hospital overnight. Then they gave me more morphine, and after another 30 minutes or so it finally starts being bearable (a six). Mark’s been with me this whole time, letting me squeeze his hand when the pain surged, brushing the hair off my face, doing his soothing calm thing and really comforting me. It was one of those times I think I’ll never forget how much his being there meant to me right then. My muscles are finally relaxing somewhat, I’m not trembling anymore, and I can breathe without scrunching up my face in pain. They have a room for me, my parents come back in, and Mark has to go teach. By then it was ok though, my parents took me upstairs to my room for the night, and then left to go back to my house for the night then come back for me in the morning.
I have another whole story to tell about the day in the hospital, but I’ve been writing too long already tonight, so I’ll have to leave this for now as . . . to be continued . . .