Drain, Drain, Drain....Drain the Pooools!

Hooter Hotline #14: Drain, Drain, Drain…..Drain the Pooooools

February 10, 2010

I was absolutely thrilled to have my twin drains out last Thursday. I acted like a kid on Christmas morning. As I left the surgeon’s office, I began singing, “Drain Free” (to the tune of “Born Free”). I wore a cheesy grin all day. The drains had been voyeurs of my life for too long. I’ll happily admit right now, that copulation is possible with them in place. Ladies, remember that our men don’t see things the way we do. I’m not saying that drains are as sexy as a black garter, just that they are virtually invisible to men…perhaps in the same way a messy garage is invisible…

Drains are high maintenance when it comes to taking a shower. To start with, it means pinning them on the corners of a washcloth I’ve hung around my neck. Split drain dressings and tape have to come off the insertion sites, which means wrestling sticky tape, drain tubing and gauze in a place that’s hard to see. The multiple dressing changes have left tender skin and a tremendous amount of scummy tape residue. After showering, I set the drains on the counter and try to dry myself without them slipping off and yanking on the stitches. The drains have a pretty short leash. Then each site needs to be redressed before I can pull on my underwear, again without pulling the drains off the counter. Redressing the drain sites is a form of gymnastics for this less-than-youthful body. I have to “Do the Twist” to each side while looking down, accurately aiming the new gauze and tape so that it will be on the site, but not on the incision. Trying to accomplish this in a foggy, post-shower mirror usually created some muscular complaints from my neck and back. On to getting dressed and finding the right place to pin drains on the shirt de jour. That is an art in itself. I’ve worn shirts where I repositioned the drains and safety pins at least eight times to find the “sweet spot.” A couple times I thought of just pinning them were my boobs had been. They would have made very youthful and pert protuberances that might have fooled some one. I suppose putting a clean shirt on first and pinning the drains on before my round of “Underwear Tai Chi” would have been a smarter strategy, but for 49 years, I’ve always put my underwear on first after a shower! It only occurred to me NOW that I could have done it differently. Remember that I am a dork. The process is not awful, just a hassle and it has made me late to appointments. It’s reminds me of when I had a new baby and I underestimated how long it would take both me and the baby to be ready to go anywhere. The good news is that when you have cancer, neither the surgeon nor her office staff “climb on you” because you are ten to fifteen minutes late. Phew! Drainless however, I have no excuses.

It’s true, I have complained about the drains a lot. I feared infection that never happened. I became testy after three weeks of drain omnipresence. I griped when the drain tubing repeatedly caught on the edge of the pullout cutting board. I fumed when one of the stoppers popped open and leaked serous fluid all over my cozy fleece pants imitating incontinence. I resented losing sleep due to necessary awareness of positioning them as I turned over in bed. Yep, I’ve really indulged in whining about them. So, it may come as a shock to you that I wish I had my left drain back. That’s right, I’m pining after it like I did after my first boyfriend, Mike. He left me to go back to his previous girlfriend after our “Puppy Love” summer just as our senior year began. Even though he was a trumpet player and therefore a great kisser, I wasn’t willing to “give up the goods” and simply put, she was. Oh, how he broke my heart. Like all first “loves,” I thought I might physically die! I can’t tell you how “gross” (to use the slang of my generation) it was to have both of them in my Speech Class after that. I had good reason to sit in the front of the class in order to avoid their PDA. Even so, I longed to have him back, sort of, in a seventeen-year-old’s kind of way. Now it’s about the same for my left drain and it serves me right for all my sniveling.

The drains had established some pretty nice tunnels during their inhabitance. In fact, I continued to drain fluid from the sites until Sunday. I’d like to know who told the little Dutch Boy to put his finger in my drain dike because they have “some ‘splaining to do!” Pressure began building as the fluid recollected with no where to go. I felt achy allover and my previous superstar left arm was too sore and swollen to lift more than 30 degrees. I tried and tried to express the fluid down the tunnel, but nothing budged. I had to take a couple pain pills to even go to sleep. On Monday morning I was in Dr. Wheeler’s office at 9:30 AM, slightly less chipper than I had been on Thursday. There would be no singing of movie themes on this visit. A long sterile Q-Tip opened the floodgates and blessed relief flowed. I thought she might do a needle aspiration of the fluid, but she said there was more risk of infection with that versus reestablishing patency of the drain tunnel. Go figure. She placed an occlusive dressing over the drain site while holding pressure on the breast area to prevent air from entering the space through the drain tunnel. Hopefully, this will send a message to the body that it needn’t make so much fluid because the space wasn’t as big as it seemed. Then she wrapped me in a couple wide Ace wraps for compression. Things were much better. They needed to be. We had an appointment with the oncologist at 4:40 that afternoon. Finally, we would get the results of the Oncotype-DX test that would predict my probable chance of breast cancer recurrence. This is the piece of info we’ve been waiting for to determine if Chemo is part of my therapy plan.

Early in the cancer journey, when I was still a “Poster Child” for lumpectomy, both surgeon and oncologist thought it was possible that I might dodge the Chemo bullet. When the path report came back from the third surgery with clear margins for the first time, I remained hopeful that Chemo might not be necessary. There was one surprising find from the bilateral mastectomy pathology however, a third cancer was found. This time it was lobular cancer. Good heavens, I have got to stop overachieving!!! While it is not good that I hosted a veritable buffet of breast cancer, it did reassure us that “whacking” (and I mean that in the Mafia, Sopranos sort of way) the breasts was absolutely the right call.
I went home from the doctor’s office, took a couple pain pills and fell into a deep and needed sleep for four hours. Rog came home from work and gently woke me up to take us to Dr. Olson. The car ride was pretty quiet.