A Bad Trip

 

I’m writing this, thankfully, with a section of my right breast missing and a number of lymph nodes removed. I am more worried about there being any of the cancer left frankly and would have gratefully let them hack off the whole breast but that is not their way. It’s the next step of waiting. This time I’m waiting for the results of the lab tests on what they’ve removed to see if there is a safe margin.

 

I wondered about getting my hair cut short. It’s annoying me and I’m giving up on my identity as an attractive woman. I find the stress of being on this pathway to heaven difficult. I haven’t got it cut mainly because I didn’t want to get Covid at the hairdressers and delay the surgery. Although shaving it off did occur to me, I think I will get a professional to do it, if I do.

 

Waiting for the surgery was horrible. Since the biopsy I’d had pain from the tumour and it kept on reminding me that it was slowly killing me. I was frightened it would spread.

 

At the pre-op appointment to fit a clip, the radiographer, nurse and assistant doctor stood and sat around me with an air of gloom, looking at the ultrasound photo. I wondered if it had spread since the biopsy two weeks previously or if there was something they were not telling me.

 

The surgery didn’t begin well. I’m not sure if I can bring myself to write it. Here goes….

 

I was left half-naked, cold, and shivering, in a gamma camera in the hospital sous-sol[1]. Not many people can say that. I was also wearing a PPF2 mask and as well as cold, it was claustrophobic. The camera at some parts of this excruciating process was about 10 cm above my head. A giant square trapping me in this hellhole from a Sci-Fi horror film. I shut my eyes and said the Lord’s prayer. The overweight, woman nurse returned to announce with confidence that the process had been completely unsuccessful, and they couldn’t find any lymph nodes. She told me Dr Heffer was coming. This seemed odd as Dr Heffer worked at another part of the hospital, unless there were two Heffers?

 

I was confused. Would I like a blanket? she asked. I wish I was a nice person who thought she’d just forgotten to offer me one earlier. Instead, I understood that she was now worried that a Dr might turn up and realise that she’d left a cancer patient lying half-naked and shivering in a gamma camera. She told me to get out of the camera. No Dr arrived and I was still confused as to what was happening. She told me to get dressed and go and wait in the corridor and to take the blanket with me. By now I had a wool coat as well as all my clothes that included a long cardigan, so the blanket was a bit superfluous. However, I sat dutifully clutching the disposable blue blanket in the corridor wearing my wool coat.

 

The tears of anguish were beginning to come. I had to wait in the corridor for half an hour to see if the radioactive dye they had injected would identify the lymph nodes in a different gamma camera. I waited.

 

They called me into a cubicle, and I was told to lock the door and get undressed again. Sitting in the little square box someone opened the door on the other side and led me to the new camera. This time I hadn’t let go of the blanket and a different nurse put it over me as the machinery clunked around me and slid me, lying on my back, into the claustrophobic hellhole again. Nothing happened. I waited. I waited some more wondering what was going on. Was this safe? Had they forgotten me? Was my body being swamped with a new carcinogenic risk?  And then I heard raised voices coming from the windowed-off boxed section of the room away from the radiation risk where the staff were arguing in safety.

 

A nurse appeared and told me to get out of the camera again. Had I massaged the dye in my breast enough? He asked. At this point I was desperate. I wanted to get rid of the cancer and didn’t know if they could do the surgery without the images from the gamma camera. The male nurse reassured me that they can do this in surgery, but I must massage the area and they need the camera for someone else. I was guided back to the cubicle in haste, and they shut the door again. I sat and cried. This time clutching the blanket around me. I waited and wondered if they had forgotten me when no one came.

 

Titus Brandsma – a Dutch priest

Was tortured by the Nazis before they killed him. They did medical experiments on him as he wouldn’t publish their propaganda.

 

The cubicle door opened I was told to get dressed again and go and wait on the corridor.

 

Then they phoned the surgeon and he said to get me up to surgery as soon as possible.

 

My husband, D, waited for me in the corridor and was tasked with taking me to surgery. We went up in the lift that was working, next to the broken lift, to the Day Hospital on the third floor.  We wandered around the corridor looking for the Day Hospital sign and he asked at the Anaesthetist’s reception. We were waived into a sealed-off corridor to which we gained access through an automatic door as someone came out.

 

D was told to go away by the staff, and I was ushered into a larger, curtained off cubicle with a bed and bedside drawers in it. This time I was told to take off all my clothes and put on a gown, disposable hat and some knickers made of bandage. I didn’t get how the knickers worked so the nurse showed me where the leg holes were. He also said that I had six minutes to get ready as they were taking me to surgery urgently. As he manoeuvred the bed with me in it through the doors, he told me that I was going before the woman over there who has been waiting since 7 am. I am not sure why he felt this was helpful information.

 

The next bit is too traumatic to recount. A confusion of people, beds, fear ridden corridors and rooms from horror stories.  

 

The surgeon supportively put a hand on my arm and reassured me that he would remove the tumour. I wanted him to also remove a safe margin of tissue, but this communication failed. It had also failed in previous conversations and on the phone.

 

He couldn’t find a vein on my arm to put the drip into. I was too cold, and my veins are very small. He asked for hot water twice and everyone ignored him completely. I tried to warm my arm up under the heated blanket they had put over me.  He seemed grateful. I felt I was the only one trying to help him accomplish his task.

 

Go to your dream place said the anaesthetist as he pumped down on a tube of something and I lost consciousness.

 

‘C’est bien passé’ a face said loudly into my face as I was lying on the bed. I felt horrible, uneasy and didn’t know why I was lying there. Then I remembered the surgery.

 

I was fighting a feeling of deep unease and discomfort. My mind was in a fog of disturbance that I now know was a drug induced state of horrible incapacity, detachment, and psychological pain.

 

I was vaguely aware of being bumped around corridors again and was put into a big metallic room. There were people and other beds. Some people were standing. Some were lying in beds. Someone in a white coat asked me what the level of pain was on a scale of 1 to 10. I said 4 to 5 and he gave me two shots of something from another tube into the drip on my arm. That’s all you can have. In retrospect this had been a mistake. It was then I noticed an insect or a spider on the wall next to the bed. It was huge. I couldn’t work out if it had 6 or 8 legs and tried to count them as my focus veered in and out of the fog.

 

 

Malcolm Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451

Dystopian fiction where the orderlies use machines to pump out drugs overdoses. It’s their everyday job and they smoke casually as they carry out their duties. Many people take overdoses.

 

The fog continued and I found myself back in the curtained cubicle again on the third floor with no memory of how I’d got there. Men in white coats blundered in and out periodically taking my blood pressure and checking the wound as I drifted in and out of consciousness, fighting the fog. ‘Hé Paul! Je viens de le faire.’ Paul shrugged and blundered out again with an air of vague boredom. I recognised him as the one who showed me how the bandage knickers had worked.

 

I was falling backwards, through the bed, down, down…..and then I jerked back into the reality of the Day Hospital cubicle. I wondered if I’d been dying and going to hell.

 

They offered me food and I said no. Did I need the toilet? I said no. I needed the toilet but was incapable of transferring myself to it.

 

Gradually I fought the fog quietly until my consciousness slowly returned and with it the ability to think again. I asked to go to the toilet. Did you bring slippers? They’re in my bag. I thumped my legs down to the floor and insert them into the slippers as the nurse watched over me. She showed me to the toilet and told me not to lock the door, but she would stand outside. If I felt dizzy, I was to sit down. I clutched the back of the gown as it gaped open revealing my bum encased in the bandage knickers to the rest of the Day Hospital.

 

This time I accepted the food and she brought a tray which albeit the most ordinary of meals, brought tears of gratitude to my eyes. I sat in the bed quietly weeping in the seclusion and privacy of my curtained cubicle eating some bread and soup. The exilian Rotapunkt of freshly brewed coffee brought me back into the land of the living from the drug induced fog I had been fighting.

 

I waited. People messaged and it was good to know that the source of the cancer had gone.

 

The true horror though of this tale is perhaps yet to come.

 

I don’t know if they have removed enough or if it had quietly spread to the lymph nodes……

 

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[1] basement