On Friday, my radiologist said I would be cursing her name by Sunday. It’s Monday now. She was right.
She could tell on Friday I was about to have a nasty burn “blossoming” all over my right side. An interestingly euphemistic verb they use for what did indeed happen, as if it were a flower or something pretty. It’s not. It looks awful, like your worst blistering sunburn. It hurts, a lot, though it’s nothing my pain pills and I can’t handle. But I’m crazy tired.
Have you ever spatchcocked a chicken? Basically, they spatchcock me daily. You take off your clothes and they arrange you like a half-chicken on a grill. Your right hand has to stay in an unnatural position, just so, above your head, and your left hand has to stay out of the way. You have to turn your head to the left and stick your chin up so that your esophagus doesn’t get in the line of fire. And you have to hold this position, on a Monday, for 40 minutes or so. (Mondays this all takes longer than on other days, because they take a bunch of x-rays every Monday in addition to the regular treatment.) The room is freezing cold, because the machinery likes it that way. By the end of the 40 minutes your arms are shaking, because they can’t stay in that position much longer, and you are shivering. Then the tech comes and pokes you in your burned armpit again with ice-cold fingers, because apparently you have moved, and she needs to find her target dot. You try not to jump, and she tells you to relax. You would like to relax, you really would, because if you don’t, your shoulder could be a centimeter out of line and the x-rays might come out blurry and they will have to do this all over again tomorrow, which would suck. You look at the insipid photos of cherry blossoms they have put on the ceiling, for the thousandth time, and try to relax your right shoulder.
When they finally finish and they come back to tell you that you can take your arm down, you almost can’t. And your neck is stuck at a strange angle, and you could sure use a neck rub from someone, but you don’t want anyone to touch you, unless their hands are really warm.
What is extra fun is when they use a “bolus,” which is a fancy name for a big, soaking-wet towel. Every other day, they drape you in a sopping wet towel before they zap you. The wet towel, which gets cold pretty fast, helps you brown evenly. It’s like when you drape slices of bacon over a turkey breast before you roast it. I am pretty well done; put a fork in me. Crispy on the outside, hopefully not too dried out on the inside.
I am not joking. I had to ask the tech this morning if I am supposed to be turning this color, or if I have got skin cancer now, too. Oh, no, she said, this is what you’re supposed to look like. Your neck isn’t quite brown enough, but the rest is coming along nicely.
How brown do they want me? If I were poultry, I would be Peking duck already. That’s what my armpit looks like, anyway. If I weren’t such an uptight person, I would post photos, but that ain’t gonna happen.
Enough whining. There is good news, too.
I aced rehab.
I have enjoyed all the recent rehab jokes, friends, but here is what I really had to get rehabilitated from: all this radiation, along with the surgery, where they took a bunch of lymph nodes out of that same armpit, causes scar tissue. The scar tissue started interfering with the movement of my shoulder and arm. I couldn’t reach the top shelf where the glasses are, for example, or push the vacuum cleaner without some pain. The answer to this problem was physical therapy at the rehab place at Montgomery General Hospital in Olney.
Well, I was the star pupil at rehab. I was motivated, as they say. I did not want to piss around with any more medical appointments than was strictly necessary. Also, I did not like that place, where it is crowded, and there is no privacy, and one of the old biddies in the office there thought I was Matthew’s grandma. So I did all my exercises just like they told me to, and I studied their pamphlet on how to not get lymphedema, which is when your arm swells up because your lymph nodes are gone. My therapist was impressed. When they measured my arm movement and it was back to normal, and I correctly recited my lymphedema facts, I got a gold star and an honorable discharge.
I know I shouldn’t be glib about lymphedema. One of my friends has it. It sucks. And one of the other women at rehab has it, and I wouldn’t like the treatment she was getting. They wrapped her entire arm tightly in thick, stretchy foam and left her trussed up that way for a couple of days, to try to compress everything back to where it should be. I cannot tell you how claustrophobic this would have made me, or how hard it would be to drive or eat or sleep in that getup.
So, I basically have to be very nice to my right arm from now on. I’ll have to wear a pressure sleeve on it when I fly. I can’t take my blood pressure on that arm any more, or get flu shots in it. Everyone at the cancer center at Sibley Hospital bitches at me if they see me carrying my backpack on my right shoulder, so I try not to let them see that. I have to get a Medicalert bracelet that tells people to leave my right arm the hell alone. For now, my right arm and right hand are exactly the same size as my left—we measured them—so I’m pretty lucky.
The other thing that seems to be going well is boob reconstruction. Without going into too much gory detail, let’s just say that I can look past the scars and the blistered skin and see where the plastic surgeon is going with this. In the end, I am going to have two fine boobs, even if it is going to take a while to get there. I’m not posting photos of that, either.
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