Surviving cancer

–and other potholes in Guyana

IN THE time that it takes one to book a flight, a their suitcase (if you’re organized of course 🙂 and board a plane to a vacation spot, I was already there. Waking up from an unknown journey to an even more unknown destination my eyes slowly adjusted from the nothingness that existed just a few hours before to the stark white lights of the recovery room I had just been wheeled into. Immediately I looked down at my body, I knew what I was waking up from and what was I waking up to? I felt nothing on my upper right side, even my arm was numb. The horror movie was real. I had become a mummy. The right side of my chest was swathed in white. White gauze, white cotton. I prodded at the bandage, nothing moved, I felt nothing. It was as if the right side of my chest and my right arm were divorced from my body. Yes! I rejoiced in my mind, I definitely lucked out on the good drugs – this local anaesthesia stuff was the bomb. As I floated off on the morphine family tree, the sound of someone in pain threatened my impending nirvana. A few feet across from me, a male patient not much older than myself from the way he looked writhing around in agony. He had just had steel put into his legs following an accident. ‘Why wasn’t he given the same stuff I was?’, I wondered, of course not considering at the time what it must mean to have metal inserted into your flesh. Cringe much? I didn’t have time to, all the feel good medicine was making me hazy but I vaguely remember telling a nurse that I was good and wanted to go to my room, eventually I got there.
I remember seeing my parents in my hospital room when I woke up again or was it when I opened my eyes? It was hard to tell, I was in and out of many realities before I settled on the present. Upon hearing I was out of surgery and well, my grandmother comforted herself by mentally preparing all the different kinds of curry she would make for me. Yes, I love curry. Curry everything! but I was ordered to spend a curry free night in the Kingston hospital. Lucky for me my best friend managed to shuffle a television into my already paid for (non working) television room and kept my company for the night, though to be honest I fell asleep before the TV was even turned on. I passed the night relatively well, I was still hooked up to an intravenous saline which meant I had to move in and out of the toilet whilst wheeling my refreshments along.
The surgical team visited me very early the next morning. My surgeon informed me that I had lost more tissue than we had discussed due to the nature of what they saw when they removed my tumour. I wasn’t fazed. “So you got it all then?” I asked. Pause. “From what we saw I would say we got most of it,” my surgeon responded. Oh great! Was all I could think – the whole point was getting rid of that monster – never once did I think it was cancerous. Then the blow “I’m sorry but from what we saw..and in my experience”, my surgeon went on “I would say the tumour was at a grade three, it doesn’t look great but I believe we managed to get all of it, the biopsy results will confirm whether it has spread to your body but we also removed some of the affected lymph nodes- so it may be in your lymphatic system.”
Suddenly there was a dementor sucking all the life out of my room like a vacuum. I looked at the doctor, he was just mouthing words now. I couldn’t hear anymore. My ears rang as though they had been exposed to some serious soca all night. I looked around the room at the medical team, my eyes fixated on a young female doctor- she was crying. I was not. And I would not. But as soon as they all left the room and my best friend came back in I did. I cried for about thirty minutes that day. I would go on to cry a little bit less every day after that until I decided to accept what I could not change.
As it turned out, I discovered the surgeon’s premature diagnosis wasn’t the only thing I couldn’t change. I couldn’t change the fact that after two days in this private Kingston hospital there was no soap or toilet paper in my room, luckily I had brought my own toiletries but a broken TV and no bath supplies warranted a better explanation than “ its on its way with the next nurse”. Sure, I can see the nurse wheeling a new tv in- because that’s what they do right? No TV, no toilet paper, no soap, no towels? Ok cool No food? Wtf? “How can there be no food?” I asked the nurse when she brought tea in for me after the surgical team had left and way after my 30 minute crying spree. Cancer? Ok I can work around that but tea for breakfast? Like an entire meal comprising of just tea? No way this was happening. The nurse insisted that my doctor ordered no food for me but yet when he visited with me a few hours earlier he mentioned somewhere in the ‘you might have cancer’ conversation that there would be breakfast. I wasn’t taking this nurse at her word where my belly was involved. I called my doctor’s cell, it took him less than two minutes to confirm that I should be having a solid breakfast, he was pretty upset and told the nurse to check the chart he left. Ten minutes and a million hunger pangs later she apologized for the chart not being checked for the morning. That’s crazy, how does one forget to check the doctors’ patient charts? The funny thing is breakfast never did come, nor did lunch. My family and two friends brought me lunch before the hospital did. The hospital’s idea of lunch? Breakfast apparently! Because I got four mashed up looking cheese sandwiches. What I found extremely interesting about the meal debacle was the fact that I filled up a very detailed meal chart highlighting what I was allergic to and what I wouldn’t eat example milk and yet my tea was all milk and no tea. As my parents checked me out of the hospital, I was made to wait in my wheel chair for no less than forty minutes in the lounge of the ‘new’ south wing while the staff checked off my prescriptions. For someone going through surgery recovery the wheelchair wait was painfully unnecessary. Perhaps someone from the board of the aforementioned private Kingston Hospital – (where my only complaints are only administrative – has reviewed the evaluation slip I filled out upon leaving. It is my hope that this hospital may be truly sanctified again.

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