The first biopsy
I had a great weekend with Mama and Dave… I am extraordinarily lucky to be so close to my mama, and I missed her dreadfully while I was in Brisbane. So to me, it was all one big suspended reality holiday with my parents… I got to see them, and spend some time with them… the fact that this was all because I was potentially very sick was irrelevant. I just didn’t think about that.
But Tuesday was inevitably going to come around, and it did, and we toddled off to see Dr Tam. We had a list of questions, and I think we expected to get a lot of answers. We took along my two scans (two! How this was to change – eventually we were considering buying an art folio to tote all the scans around….) and went to Dr Tam’s rooms at Greenslopes Private Hospital to hopefully get our answers. Dr Tam, naturally, had no answers. How could he? What he did say is that we would need to go in and get a bit of it before we could know anything about it. He couldn’t even tell us what it could be – mostly because it ‘could’ be almost anything. Thus, I became reconciled to the concept that yes, I would need to be cut open.
There were two options of how we could biopsy this tumour. One involved a cut straight into the chest, above my right breast, but it was the other one, which Dr Tam favoured, that we went ahead with. The biopsy would involve three cuts – one under my right arm, one on my right shoulder blade, and one, for reasons still unknown to me, on my back, about half-way between the others (hello?? Tumour in chest!). Basically, a bit of a distance from where the damn tumour was, but hey, he was the doctor, and what did I know anyway. He told me the main risk was that the cells of the tumour would be crushed on the way out during the biopsy, and that we would have to do it again, the other way. So, I went into hospital, telling few but those fairly close to me and whom I saw quite a bit anyway, but not wanting to tell too many people until I knew what the hell the damn thing was.
I think I handled the first biopsy fairly well. My last operation involving a general anaesthetic was when I was about seven, and broke my arm, needing it to be reset. I can tell you right now, there is a big difference between being operated on as a scared seven-year old and a supposedly big brave nineteen-year old! My main memory of the biopsy itself was spending the entire day sitting in the Day Surgery section of Greenslopes Private Hospital, a large chunk of which I was dressed in the oh so trendy gowny thing, waiting for someone to come and talk about the operation, and then to bloody do it. This day was my first meeting with Dr Huang, Dr Tam’s rather young registrar. I am sure he is a very nice man, and he is obviously good at what he does, but it is also obvious that he is used to dealing with much more cooperative older patients (being a registrar to a cardio-thoracic surgeon and all). Being confronted with a young person, who queried everything he said, seemed to be a bit of a challenge for him… but at this stage of our relationship, things were comparatively very smooth! I also remember being wheeled into the operating theatre, and basically being treated like a piece of meat, or someone who was already unconscious. Instead of asking me to move from my bed to the operating table, they put a board underneath me, wrapped me up in my sheets and hoisted me across. Finally, there were people all around me, scrubbing up, writing up my details on the whiteboard (which caused me some concern, given that someone else’s details were left up for quite a while) and generally acting as if I wasn’t there. People pulled at my arms, putting them into place and then putting needles into them in various places, without explaining what was happening or addressing me at all. Finally, I gave in trying to watch what was happening, and shut my eyes, waiting for oblivion to befall me. (It did.)
I then remember waking up as I was being wheeled somewhere (presumably to intensive care) and sailing past mama, who looked very worried as I was whisked off past her in my bed on wheels. It felt like something from a hospital soapie/sitcom – very dramatic. My recollection of intensive care is very fuzzy, mostly due to the anaesthetic drugs making their way out of my system, and the painkilling drugs (pethidine) making its way into my system. I really enjoyed the push button PCA pain killer delivery system – ie every time I wanted some more pain relief, I pushed the button and it was delivered intravenously into my system, and I have a vague recollection of the night nurse – mostly of our discussion of the state of her marriage and of men in general. I felt very coherent at the time, but the fact that I can no longer remember the details of that conversation or that night tell a different story… I do know that I didn’t sleep much.
Mama came back the next morning. Every time I have been to intensive care it has been fairly surreal, again, due to all the drugs, I presume. My main recollection of that next morning was the damn toilet issue. I cannot, cannot, CANNOT, pee into a bedpan. No matter how many frigging taps are running in the room. It will not happen. Nope. Especially not with people entering the room every couple of minutes to see ‘how I’m going’. It is not going to happen. Threaten me with the catheter, I don’t care. My bladder will NOT see that a bedpan is a valid receptacle.
This was probably a blessing in disguise, because it meant I had to get up. Unfortunately, by the time I decided it was REALLY time to get up, my nurse was with someone else, and couldn’t come and detach me from the squillions of machines I was hooked up to. In the end, it took about half an hour to remove all my connections to the ECG stuff, the blood pressure machine, the pulse and oxygen thingys, the damn drainage tube poking out of my ribs, and then of course I couldn’t actually walk alone (something I’m glad I didn’t realise before I tried! It’s amazing what you can do just because you don’t know that you’re not supposed to be able to!) so I was put onto this walker thing, toted all the machines that had to come with me, and it only took about another half-hour to get to the bathroom on the other side of ICU!
Thus began my first experience of lack of privacy – sharing intimate functions with a total stranger! (At least back then I didn’t know just to what extent it would go…) But I finally got to pee, and then had a shower (introduction to shower while seated, attached to machines, and dependent on a washer and a nurse), and then began the trek back to my bed.
Back up in the ward, it was interesting being a young female in a cardio-thoracic chest ward in a veteran’s hospital… Most of the other patients were elderly men with heart problems. On the plus side, it meant I got a private room to myself, partly because I was a private patient, and partly because who the hell would I share with? There was a fairly steady stream of old men shuffling past my door during my stay… I later realised that instead of wasting all that time in bed, I should have been up and about exploiting my golden opportunity! Where else would I find so many old men with heart problems? The only catch was I would have needed to find a rich one…
The other memory is of getting my tube taken out of side. In case you’re wondering (tube, what tube? Honestly, who has a tube?), after an operation like that, you always have a tube to drain away all the fluid that collects in the lymphatic system, and mine usually came out from between my ribs… ow! So although I knew rationally that I would hurt less when the tube came out, I still had to get over the mental block of ‘someone is going to pull a tube out of my chest… yuck, how weird, and I wonder if there will be a sense of air going in or out?’ When it happened, it was pretty much as imagined… it felt exactly as if someone was pulling a tube from out of my chest, but it didn’t actually hurt… it was just weird.
The other thing that was going on that I had to get over was the fact that one of my lungs had to be collapsed during the operation. Trying to reinflate a lung using little more than deep breathing is pretty exhausting and a lot of hard work, not to mention bloody painful. I can tell you right now, you get pretty sick of people telling you “Just breathe deeply, just breathe deeply”. You bloody breathe deeply when each inhalation feels like you’re trying to blow up a balloon on the inside simply by sucking air in! (Oh wait, that’s what you are doing…)
All throughout this stay in hospital was the question of my hair. What on earth should I do with my bloody hair? Long, thick hair does not go well with a hospital stay, but cutting it was like giving in to the possibility that this stupid tumour might be cancerous and I might lose my hair through chemo. So during this stay, Mama braided my hair every morning and every night, usually off to one side so that I could sleep on my back. Such style.
I have a vague recollection of visitors. I know that there were quite a few, including a friend from high school who took taxis each way across town just to see me, but unfortunately, I was too stoned at the time to really remember these visits. I talked a lot of nonsense as well, going on about a ‘war on Woolworths’ and asking my next door neighbour how her massage was. I would really love to know what was going on in my head during this time… but I can’t remember! Once again, while I was fairly coherent (with some exceptions, the bloody war on Woolies being the main one!) during these visits, it all fades into stoned fuzzy recollections afterwards.
I also remember dropping off the sleep fairly regularly – just another effect of the pethidine. During this stay in hospital, Dave had to return to Mackay to work, and Mama’s (and my) friend Kate had come up from Canberra to give Mama some support (I was in no position to offer support). So when I did finally get out of hospital, we had lots of fun… going down to Southbank and eating prawns straight from the shell, one of my favourite pastimes, and going to the markets. Again, it’s amazing how much fun you have when you just don’t think about what’s going on. I still had no real emotional reaction to all that was happening to me.
But Tuesday was inevitably going to come around, and it did, and we toddled off to see Dr Tam. We had a list of questions, and I think we expected to get a lot of answers. We took along my two scans (two! How this was to change – eventually we were considering buying an art folio to tote all the scans around….) and went to Dr Tam’s rooms at Greenslopes Private Hospital to hopefully get our answers. Dr Tam, naturally, had no answers. How could he? What he did say is that we would need to go in and get a bit of it before we could know anything about it. He couldn’t even tell us what it could be – mostly because it ‘could’ be almost anything. Thus, I became reconciled to the concept that yes, I would need to be cut open.
There were two options of how we could biopsy this tumour. One involved a cut straight into the chest, above my right breast, but it was the other one, which Dr Tam favoured, that we went ahead with. The biopsy would involve three cuts – one under my right arm, one on my right shoulder blade, and one, for reasons still unknown to me, on my back, about half-way between the others (hello?? Tumour in chest!). Basically, a bit of a distance from where the damn tumour was, but hey, he was the doctor, and what did I know anyway. He told me the main risk was that the cells of the tumour would be crushed on the way out during the biopsy, and that we would have to do it again, the other way. So, I went into hospital, telling few but those fairly close to me and whom I saw quite a bit anyway, but not wanting to tell too many people until I knew what the hell the damn thing was.
I think I handled the first biopsy fairly well. My last operation involving a general anaesthetic was when I was about seven, and broke my arm, needing it to be reset. I can tell you right now, there is a big difference between being operated on as a scared seven-year old and a supposedly big brave nineteen-year old! My main memory of the biopsy itself was spending the entire day sitting in the Day Surgery section of Greenslopes Private Hospital, a large chunk of which I was dressed in the oh so trendy gowny thing, waiting for someone to come and talk about the operation, and then to bloody do it. This day was my first meeting with Dr Huang, Dr Tam’s rather young registrar. I am sure he is a very nice man, and he is obviously good at what he does, but it is also obvious that he is used to dealing with much more cooperative older patients (being a registrar to a cardio-thoracic surgeon and all). Being confronted with a young person, who queried everything he said, seemed to be a bit of a challenge for him… but at this stage of our relationship, things were comparatively very smooth! I also remember being wheeled into the operating theatre, and basically being treated like a piece of meat, or someone who was already unconscious. Instead of asking me to move from my bed to the operating table, they put a board underneath me, wrapped me up in my sheets and hoisted me across. Finally, there were people all around me, scrubbing up, writing up my details on the whiteboard (which caused me some concern, given that someone else’s details were left up for quite a while) and generally acting as if I wasn’t there. People pulled at my arms, putting them into place and then putting needles into them in various places, without explaining what was happening or addressing me at all. Finally, I gave in trying to watch what was happening, and shut my eyes, waiting for oblivion to befall me. (It did.)
I then remember waking up as I was being wheeled somewhere (presumably to intensive care) and sailing past mama, who looked very worried as I was whisked off past her in my bed on wheels. It felt like something from a hospital soapie/sitcom – very dramatic. My recollection of intensive care is very fuzzy, mostly due to the anaesthetic drugs making their way out of my system, and the painkilling drugs (pethidine) making its way into my system. I really enjoyed the push button PCA pain killer delivery system – ie every time I wanted some more pain relief, I pushed the button and it was delivered intravenously into my system, and I have a vague recollection of the night nurse – mostly of our discussion of the state of her marriage and of men in general. I felt very coherent at the time, but the fact that I can no longer remember the details of that conversation or that night tell a different story… I do know that I didn’t sleep much.
Mama came back the next morning. Every time I have been to intensive care it has been fairly surreal, again, due to all the drugs, I presume. My main recollection of that next morning was the damn toilet issue. I cannot, cannot, CANNOT, pee into a bedpan. No matter how many frigging taps are running in the room. It will not happen. Nope. Especially not with people entering the room every couple of minutes to see ‘how I’m going’. It is not going to happen. Threaten me with the catheter, I don’t care. My bladder will NOT see that a bedpan is a valid receptacle.
This was probably a blessing in disguise, because it meant I had to get up. Unfortunately, by the time I decided it was REALLY time to get up, my nurse was with someone else, and couldn’t come and detach me from the squillions of machines I was hooked up to. In the end, it took about half an hour to remove all my connections to the ECG stuff, the blood pressure machine, the pulse and oxygen thingys, the damn drainage tube poking out of my ribs, and then of course I couldn’t actually walk alone (something I’m glad I didn’t realise before I tried! It’s amazing what you can do just because you don’t know that you’re not supposed to be able to!) so I was put onto this walker thing, toted all the machines that had to come with me, and it only took about another half-hour to get to the bathroom on the other side of ICU!
Thus began my first experience of lack of privacy – sharing intimate functions with a total stranger! (At least back then I didn’t know just to what extent it would go…) But I finally got to pee, and then had a shower (introduction to shower while seated, attached to machines, and dependent on a washer and a nurse), and then began the trek back to my bed.
Back up in the ward, it was interesting being a young female in a cardio-thoracic chest ward in a veteran’s hospital… Most of the other patients were elderly men with heart problems. On the plus side, it meant I got a private room to myself, partly because I was a private patient, and partly because who the hell would I share with? There was a fairly steady stream of old men shuffling past my door during my stay… I later realised that instead of wasting all that time in bed, I should have been up and about exploiting my golden opportunity! Where else would I find so many old men with heart problems? The only catch was I would have needed to find a rich one…
The other memory is of getting my tube taken out of side. In case you’re wondering (tube, what tube? Honestly, who has a tube?), after an operation like that, you always have a tube to drain away all the fluid that collects in the lymphatic system, and mine usually came out from between my ribs… ow! So although I knew rationally that I would hurt less when the tube came out, I still had to get over the mental block of ‘someone is going to pull a tube out of my chest… yuck, how weird, and I wonder if there will be a sense of air going in or out?’ When it happened, it was pretty much as imagined… it felt exactly as if someone was pulling a tube from out of my chest, but it didn’t actually hurt… it was just weird.
The other thing that was going on that I had to get over was the fact that one of my lungs had to be collapsed during the operation. Trying to reinflate a lung using little more than deep breathing is pretty exhausting and a lot of hard work, not to mention bloody painful. I can tell you right now, you get pretty sick of people telling you “Just breathe deeply, just breathe deeply”. You bloody breathe deeply when each inhalation feels like you’re trying to blow up a balloon on the inside simply by sucking air in! (Oh wait, that’s what you are doing…)
All throughout this stay in hospital was the question of my hair. What on earth should I do with my bloody hair? Long, thick hair does not go well with a hospital stay, but cutting it was like giving in to the possibility that this stupid tumour might be cancerous and I might lose my hair through chemo. So during this stay, Mama braided my hair every morning and every night, usually off to one side so that I could sleep on my back. Such style.
I have a vague recollection of visitors. I know that there were quite a few, including a friend from high school who took taxis each way across town just to see me, but unfortunately, I was too stoned at the time to really remember these visits. I talked a lot of nonsense as well, going on about a ‘war on Woolworths’ and asking my next door neighbour how her massage was. I would really love to know what was going on in my head during this time… but I can’t remember! Once again, while I was fairly coherent (with some exceptions, the bloody war on Woolies being the main one!) during these visits, it all fades into stoned fuzzy recollections afterwards.
I also remember dropping off the sleep fairly regularly – just another effect of the pethidine. During this stay in hospital, Dave had to return to Mackay to work, and Mama’s (and my) friend Kate had come up from Canberra to give Mama some support (I was in no position to offer support). So when I did finally get out of hospital, we had lots of fun… going down to Southbank and eating prawns straight from the shell, one of my favourite pastimes, and going to the markets. Again, it’s amazing how much fun you have when you just don’t think about what’s going on. I still had no real emotional reaction to all that was happening to me.
posted by Jessie at 12:37 pm
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