Getting Poked (Warning, this is about needles!)

When you're sick you get poked with needles a lot. Before my first treatment I had a port-a-cath surgically implanted in my body. It's this donut shaped device located over my right breast just under my skin that's attached to a tube that is inserted directly into my artery. It makes chemo infusions way easier and as a result there's less damage to the veins in the arm and less chance that the toxic chemicals will do tissue damage. So, after I got the port I thought I wouldn't have to get my arm poked anymore, but alas, I was wrong. Every time I go in for treatment they have to take blood samples to determine if I'm healthy enough for chemo. Every time I get a scan done I have to have an IV so they can inject me with dyes.

And here's the heart of this rant. Why can't they ever get it right?

Lab technicians are specially trained to draw blood, and most hospitals now employ people who are specially trained to insert IVs and rove around the hospital doing just that. So if these people are specifically trained in the fine art of needle poking, why do they still mess up my veins? Don't get me wrong, there are some who are masters of their craft. One tech at the Cancer Center ("Dann the Mann") has never once missed my vein, but of the two others one has missed it every time and one has missed it a couple of times. Today for my CT scan I had an IV inserted by one of those roving specialists, and this was the third time I'd seen this woman and the third time she's missed my vein.
Missing the vein or poking all the way through a vein hurts, some times it hurts a lot. Once about 10 years ago one of the nerves in my arm was pricked and damaged by a needle during a blood draw. It took about a year, a painful year, for the nerve to heal. Things are worse now because ever since my mastectomy I'm not allowed to have any pressure put on my left arm. No blood pressure cuffs and no turnicates allowed. So my right arm takes the full brunt of constant poking and frequent mishaps.
Today, as I'm nursing my aching arm and watching the bruise appear I wonder how it is that hospitals continue to employ people so completely incompetent at their job.

Spermologer

A person who studies sperm? Not exactly. It's either a person who collects and studies seeds or a person who collects trivia. I am well known for collecting bizarre, random, and often useless facts, for example, there are twelve different ways to break a $1 bill. The fact that perplexes me is whether or not it is correct to call a single fact a sperm. If this is so then why are sperm called sperm? Are they also random, useless facts? I imagine all the facts I know swimming about my head, their little tails propelling them through the fluid of my brain searching for something to impregnate. In a standard deck of playing cards, clubs is the only suit in which all three face cards have two eyes. Does this fact mean that I am already pregnant? Am I continually pregnant, each fact pushing me further along until some moment in the future when my swollen brain expels everything it knows? Or do I become pregnant with every single fact and give birth to that fact every time I impart it on others? Is one of my children the fact that Illinois Ave is the property landed on most in Monopoly? I've begun to feel the oppressive weight and responsibility of the facts. It is important that people know that the average person spends roughly three years of their life watching commercials, for knowing this fact might prevent it from actually happening. Trivia has also ruined my social life. When friends are up for a night of Trivial Pursuit, the first person they invite is the one that knows that Beethoven's 9th symphony is roughly 70 minutes long, and that's why the maximum recording time on a compact disk is 74 minutes. For every other social gathering, I'm the last on the list. No one wants to be around someone pregnant with facts for the fear that one of them might burst into an otherwise lighthearted conversation. I've begun hiding my facts, refusing to let them out. I'm dying to tell someone that Pez was originally a peppermint candy invented in Austria, and is short for pfefferimnz. I've become a secret reservoir of forgotten knowledge that the world is better off not knowing. My head is overflowing with sperm.

What is Creative Non-Fiction?

When I tell people I write Creative Non-Fiction they usually have no idea what I'm talking about. It's a new genre that has yet to be fully defined. There's a lot of debate about what counts as CNF, but for my purposes I like to view it as fictionalized truth or embellished reality. Sometimes I stretch reality so far that it seems fiction, it is fiction in that it could never possibly be real, but it always has a basis in fact, truth, or my perceptions. I know that doesn't make sense. Frankly I don't get it either. So if you read some of my "creative non-fiction" and wonder how a particular piece even qualifies, ask away and I'll attempt to elaborate. You'll also notice that prefer the short format or even the short short format. They read as anecdotes of life and that suits my purposes just fine because my life is only interesting anecdotally.

Fat and Puffy

Whenever I see another woman who is obviously undergoing chemotherapy I can tell just by looking at them whether they have breast cancer. It's not mystical; it's physical in that many of us look more like we've gorged on one too many McDonald's hamburgers then like we're undergoing chemo. This is due to many factors, the largest factor being that the chemo drugs used to specifically treat breast cancers tend to cause weight gain. In addition, there have been great strides in developing medications that ease or prevent the stomach problems that cause so many cancer patients to lose weight. I take four medications designed to make my stomach problems less severe. While I'm grateful to have these drugs, there's one drug I wish I didn't have to take. It's a steroid called Dexamethazone, and like many steroids, weight gain and swelling are unavoidable side-effects. In addition, chemo causes many pre-menopausal women to go into menopause with all of its related symptoms. On the plus side I no longer have periods on the negative side I have hot flashes and weight gain. If that wasn't enough, many of us suffer from Cushing's syndrome, a condition that causes swelling and puffiness. The end result is a chubby, puffy, and usually bald woman who can hardly recognize herself in the mirror anymore. For those of you participating in the Race for the Cure, be prepared to see a lot of women chubby, puffy, bald and decked out in pink.

What brought all of this on? A bizarre experience. I have a lot of those now. I'm like a pregnant woman that gets her stomach rubbed all the time by perfect strangers. They see my baldness and think social standards of personal space and privacy don't matter. My most recent bizarre experience happened in the middle of the mall. I was sitting by myself, resting and people watching while my sister-in-law finished shopping, when a woman came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder. "Do you have cancer?" she asked. It was a dumb question, and the answer in my head was, "No I'm making a fashion statement by shaving my head and my eyebrows and plucking my eyelashes." What I actually said was, simply, "Yes." Then she said, "I just saw two other women who have cancer." I knew who she was talking about because I saw them too. They were both fat, puffy, and bald like me. The woman continued, "I have cancer too." She was not fat, puffy, or bald and therefore either was just beginning treatment or she didn't have breast cancer. "It's rampant," she added. I was dumbfounded. Where had she been all her life that the fact that so many people have cancer was shocking to her? "Yes," I said, pausing for effect, "it is." To this she responded, "Well, God bless you." As an atheist I didn't really care if God blessed me, but out of politeness I was about to say, "You too," when she added, "And me too." Then she wandered off leaving me stunned. I couldn't believe she actually blessed herself.

Note: My friend Stephanie has pointed out to me that I should have been more sympathetic to the poor woman, who might have been recently diagnosed and a little overwhelmed. Stephanie is right and now I feel bad, but I promise to be more considerate in the future.