Georges

Yesterday was a long day. I needed another port installed. They use this other port, a bigger, exterior, two-pronged one, during collection and stem-cell transplant. The one I have now is implanted just beneath the skin and is made to only accept one line at a time (if you look at the photograph closely you can see it on my left side, it looks like a small mound). It's been perfect up til now but is too small for the coming jobs. Anyway, I got up at 5:45 AM (!) to have the new port installed. I made it over to the hospital around seven to get an infusion of platelets (you have to have at least a count of 50 for surgery and mine was 47) then went over to the surgery center where they prepped me and wheeled me into surgery.

My big concern during surgery was that I was going to be awake during the procedure. The doctors warned me to expect a lot of tugging and pulling during surgery and told me that if I felt any pain to let them know (like I wouldn't)! Luckily as soon as they wheeled me into the operating room and gave me the sedative I was out (one of the other patients I spoke with wasn't so luckily --- she was awake during the whole procedure and they had a difficult time finding a vein to install the port! So, instead of having it implanted on her chest she has it on her neck).

When I woke up I felt a little pain (which was taken care of with some oxycodone) and looked something like the Georges Pomidou Centre.