Friday, September 2, 2011

Leakage

First round of chemotherapy today, and it lasted about 5 hours. Lying in bed this morning when the house was still quiet, in anticipation of our big day, Chris squeezed my hand and asked me how I felt.

"Strangely excited. Like the troops are about to land at Normandy," I said. We know how THAT turned out.

My buzz about the day lasted until the nurses administered benadryl (to prevent reactions to the chemo), and then I just felt loopy. Turns out "benadryl" is code for "night-night." Which maybe explains what happened with only about 20 minutes of treatment left.

Chris pointed at my shirt. "What's that?" I looked down; there was a big wet circle over my ta-ta. "Oh, my boob's just leaking." I'd still been nursing our son up until the diagnostic - and radioactive - tests this week, and my milk hasn't dried up yet. I've heard cabbage leaves help, but I'm not sure how I feel about walking around with a salad on my chest.

A few minutes later, my oncologist came over to ask how I was doing. "Fine, just leaking a bit," I said, not thinking that my PORT THAT ADMINISTERS MY CHEMO is embedded DIRECTLY above the culprit leaky boob. My doctor sprinted to get a nurse and nearly gave them both heart attacks as they returned to figure out how much chemo had been lost to the "leak." A light went off in my benadryl-fogged head and I realized they had misunderstood from whence the leak had sprung.

I really thought he'd run away because I'd embarrassed him by pointing out the silver-dollar sized wet spot on my shirt - because that makes total sense, that I'd made a breast cancer specialist blush by pointing at my breast. Benadryl, people, it's good stuff.

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