Friday 16 December 2011
I had to be at the hospital at the crack of dawn, get scans etc so the last thing I wanted was to hassle a friend to come with me.
I know this probably sounds odd, but I just wanted to be on my own and not have to make conversation with someone. I tend to cope best with this stuff if I go quiet.
On that morning I caught the bus to the Mater. Don't get me wrong, it's not some superhuman thing; the bus stop is a 7 minute walk from my house and stops right across the road from the Hospital!
First stop was Admittance then off to QScan for the radioactive stuff. This was actually really interesting.
To find out if the cancer has spread, the doctors need to find the Sentinel Node. Our Lymph system seems to be a network of small glands who work together to move stuff arround our bodies. What I didn't know was that there was a pecking order within this system. Each boob has a Sentinel Node; the boss node. It draws up the fluid from the boob then sends it out to other, lesser nodes who send it off to other areas. Finding the Sentinel Node to see if there are any cancer cells is the most important thing because then the surgeon can see what to do next.
They do this by injecting radioactive material around the tumour then they put you in an ultrasound machine to see which node is glowing. Fortunately my node showed up really quickly, but it can take up to an hour.
Once they get you into surgery, they inject you with blue dye, which also gets drawn up by the node. When they open you up, they're looking for the blue node that beeps when they pass the detector over it!
Now, here is where I misunderstood something my surgeon told me in consultation. I thought he had said they would look at the node under a microscope during the operation and if they needed to take more nodes because there were cancer cells present, they'd take more.
What he meant (but I misunderstood) was that this node goes off to pathology and if there are cancer cells then I'd have to have further surgery to take more nodes.
When I came around, I kept asking how many nodes he'd taken and was getting a bit frustrated with the lack of information!
My overnight stay in the hospital was not great.
Shared wards are never fun. Tip for those of you going into a shared ward? Shut the heck up!!! I had a woman in the bed next to me who'd taken her hearing aid out and she and her husband were yelling at each other to be heard.
A woman in the bed over from me groaned all night because she couldn't cough; it hurt where she'd had her op. So it was, cough, "oh that hurts", cough, "oh that hurts" all blimmin night.
ALRIGHT, WE GET IT!!! CAN WE GET SOME SODDING SLEEP PLEASE???
We're all in the same situation, we've all just had surgery. None of us are feeling so good right now - have some bludy consideration.
The best part was at 4:30am when some moronic nurse WOKE ME UP to give me pain killers. I was sound asleep, and in no pain!!!!! If I could have leapt out of bed to throttle the bitch she would have gone down.
Apart from that I was feeling fine. A bit sore but no pain. They told me I would experience quite a bit of pain once the local anasthetic wore off and sent me home with a script for mega pain killers. Which I never needed. I was waiting for days for the pain to arrive but I was perfecly fine :)
My friend, Pup, collected me and took me home. And then I just had to wait to heal from the surgery.
My boys were in Western Australia doing a labouring job. Their father had arranged a weeks work for them which was great but the timing could have been more fortunate :)
Actually, I think it was probably better they weren't around. I was more than able to take care of myself and didn't need them stressing about me.
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