The Blue Towels and My Power Port

When I go to get chemo, or to give blood, or anytime they access my port, the nurses come to my chair with all their tools - needles, a can of skin numbing spray, saline, and anything they might need while poking a hole in me. One of the items they bring is two, blue towels wrapped together in plastic wrap. They unwrap the two, blue towels and lay one across my shoulder before they insert the needle into my port. When they are done accessing my port, they give me the two, blue towels to take home.

Pretty much everything they use these days is disposable because the cost and risk of sterilizing tools is prohibitive. I'm guessing they can't use one towel on me and another on a different person because of sterilization rules and the risk of passing on some icky flesh eating virus or some such nastiness that lurks in the hospitals these days.

I take the blue towels home because I think it would be wasteful for them to be thrown away. Also, they make awesome dusting rags and garage towels. I have about 800 of them now. I may be giving them out as Christmas presents this year.

I was just thinking that some of you might not know what a port is. I did blog about it awhile ago. The picture below shows what my port looks like. The center circle is what the nurses stick the needle into. This dude was surgically implanted under my skin on my left upper torso just below my collar bone and sutured to a vein. The port makes getting intravenous medicine a snap. Veins accessed by an iv eventually give out after so much use. The port is much safer with the chemo drugs that were given to me, some of which can eat away skin and muscle if a vein happens to collapse.

I just found out that my port will stay in another year. The year following cancer treatment has the highest chance of recurrences so leaving it in makes sense. I will go in once a month to have it flushed with saline so that it won't get a blockage in it. Then, after a year, I will have it surgically removed.

I am so thankful for my port.

My port is higher and on the left.