IN the time that it takes one to book a flight, pack his/her suitcase (if you’re organised 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 into which I had just been wheeled. Immediately I looked down at my body, I knew from what I was waking up, but to what was I waking up? 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.
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.
The surgical team visited me very early the next morning. My surgeon informed me that I had lost more tissue than we 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 30 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, “ It’s on its way with the next nurse”. No Tv, no toilet paper,no soap,no towels? Ok cool, No food? “How can there be no food?” The nurse insisted that my doctor had not ordered any 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 when 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. Ten minutes and a million hunger pangs later, she apologised for the chart not being checked for the morning. That’s crazy, how does one forget to check the doctor(s) patients’ charts? The funny thing is breakfast never did come, nor did lunch. My family and two friends brought lunch for me before the hospital did. I hope for the sake of future patients’ board of the aforementioned private Kingston Hospital has reviewed the evaluation slip I filled out upon leaving.