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(Of course I’ve been writing this post for over a month. But the as-it-happens present tense seems to work best for the retelling. Hope you enjoy! Here’s Biopsy Hilarity part one if you haven’t read it yet.)
Biopsy Hilarity Two – now with boob needles
peterscode / Pixabay
Today I learned that they can push a needle into your lung through your favorite boob and no one will get arrested or anything.
Yep, it’s finally time for me to get the lung biopsy.
I have been waiting 5 months for it to be appropriate to investigate at this level again, and a month for the appointed day to actually arrive.
Normally I’ve only had to wait a week at the most.
So I’ve been sitting here like, good morning probably cancerous tumor who is doing the hustle behind my boob. How’s about you fucks off?
So we go to the damn place, the outpatient surgery center at Doctor’s Community Hospital (DCH).
Before we go on, one thing I have to say in favor of DCH (that’s a thing now. A chick is tired.) is that they are some friendly mofos.
Whether that’s appropriate at 6:30 in the actual ass crack of dawn, is another discussion entirely. Who the fuck is happy as shit, at work, at dawn? Unless they’re getting off work?
Still, Less pissed-off this biopsy around
I guess I should be glad that they aren’t being mean to me. And that the frequent flier miles I have racked up are adding up to fewer annoyances.
Such as…
Some people can pronounce your name.
Others will remember how badly they fucked your name up and give you the humble floor eyes instead of attempting another mangle. Which I respect.
Own your fuck ups. Extra points for not trying to make me feel like your mistake was somehow my fault for existing.
Plus, the nurse who comes to walk you back remembers your mother’s face and associates it with yours.
She walks at a pace that respects that while this cane is indeed a weapon when I need to defend myself?
And Yes I look fabulous and my joint always matches my purse?
But I don’t carry this shiny stick around because I’m expected at show and tell. If I have it with me? I need it. Walk slow if I’m following you.
Side bar: it is amazing to the point of being ludicrous, how often disabled people are treated invisibly.
Then blamed for our “annoying” problem that makes their job “harder” for eight tenths of a second. Another day we’ll discuss. But tl;dr- it’s some bullshit.
Okay so anyway, these things make what could be a very anxious and upsetting situation better.
That and how no one tries to make you think you will have to put up with “the lie timeline” of when this mess is going to pop off, just because they gave you Benedryl and a Valium.
That junk might not even work on me, playboy, and I can still tell time if it does.
So they tell you real time regarding how long shit may actually take.
Thank God for fly nurses
My mother is a nurse.
Therefore I knew how hard they work even before I started having freaking constant visitations with them. As such I love them by default — unless they piss me off.
So at first I didn’t feel any particular way about the fact that I was handed off to yet another nurse.
But you ever meet people and you instantly are cool with each other? That was the nurse chick I got this time.
Looking fly as hell (in scrubs! her hair was amazeballs too), she sat down to put my line in. A smaller Negress like myself. Another nurse came by to do paperwork type stuff.
One I very quickly found to be a patronizing skank.
Example: I told her that I was there to have the mass in my upper left lobe biopsied.
She gone tell me it’s the right lobe.
So now I don’t know where the surgeon sposd to cut me, ho?
Now, I have faltered with which lobe early on, when I found out there were multiple masses, and couldn’t keep straight which was benign, and which was a scar, and which 2016-Election-close mass was maybe or maybe not more cancer to kick.
However, when it comes to discussing my condition with a medical professional? I have wasted threat-level-midnight quantities of ink and had at least half an acre of majesty felled on my behalf.
This I have done solely in the effort of making sure I know what the fuck I am talking about when I speak to a person in a hospital, because I’m reading it to you off the gatdamn paper (or from a photograph of same I snapped of it in my brain because at that point I would have seen this paper THAT many times).
Bitch.
So don’t fucking tell me that I’m getting cut on the right side of my chest.
I don’t want my blood pressure to spike and they delay this procedure yet again.
Instead of reading her all the rights that exist, all up and through the admittance area, stopping briefly in the riot act section?
I gritted my teeth when she said:
“Okay, then initial here since that’s what you believe.”
Me and Fly Nursey Boo, who is off to my left in the cut, hooking up my IV (with the smoothest stick in the city- I didn’t even feel it go in)?
We immediately lock eyes.
No words were spoken. It took place in the 1/20th of a second that Nurse Bout to Get Her Ass Beat looked away to find me a pen.
In that look I received:
“Oh no she did NOT say that.” With her own teeth grit and and eye roll.
I sent back:
“Oooooo this gatdamn bitch is pissing me off. And I don’t call a girl out her name like that but once a year. I’m about to catch a case but no one can see us right?”
“Why don’t I take over?” -she responded aloud.
I love you Ms. Fly Nursey Boo. All your accessories were banging and your hair was LIT. No one is allowed to look that Beyonce in scrubs. Werk!
So I also saved a life today.
…I’m pretty proud.
And I’m basking in my twin thoughts of “thank you for getting that heifer up out of here, I was about to make it look like an accident” crossed with “black girls are magic everywhere I go. We worldwide.”
With a little cherry on top of “Is there any way to get out of getting this needle jammed into my lung today?”
And who walks in the you-are-kidding-for-sure room?
Wait. What?
Hold up.
It’s hefty fine boy from the last Biopsy Hilarity. THE ONE WHO HOISTED MY SHIT.
The one with the full Jesus beard and no mustache.
Only.
Now he had a mustache. And I didn’t notice the last time (we met in the procedure room as you recall) … but also dreads.
I love dreadlocks. I used to HAVE dreads, that’s how much I like them.
Hm.
I file that away in the “bookmark but hope you don’t have to read” section of my mental Flipboard account.
Until I started feeling like maybe I had some Ben & Jerry’s flowing out of my butt pores.
New mustachio was kissing every part of my ass. Like “please don’t sue me” ass kissy.
But not in that “you’re our best customer” way.
In a “I promise you that even though it looked bad, I was not going to sleep with her but I DID let it get too far please don’t leave me” way.
Did I mention he was fine and exactly my type and thinking that maybe the Valium and Benadryl that Nurse Barely Missed a Bloody Nose had given me was to blame?
Was it possible my ass was just high, like 75% of a joint type high?
Cuz he’s not flirting with me.
That’s just silly.
Maybe, maybe not said firm hand squeeze out of nowhere.
WTF. I would remember dating this guy. Brain fog is not THAT crucial. Wait is it? Is chemo brain that next level shit?
So I’m still kinda marveling at that and taking the kind of deep breaths you take if you drank your cannabis instead of smoking it and want to inhale a little bit of being sober for a moment that needs whatever maximum level of jokingly-referred-to-as-clarity you have.
In walks I Actually Said Tape That Back Surgeon.
Well slap my ass and buy me a pizza.
The band is reuniting.
Something that has never happened in the history of me coming to DCH for all my dozens of stupid jibjab-needle experiences in this past decade of my life.
That was the same hoister who is now acting almost as if he is into me. Now here is the same Doctor I think I’m Funny but end up sounding like a dick.
To do my biopsy.
Except he was so fucking friendly and funny and genuine that I was now convinced that I had forgotten not to take the THC drops and was full-on daytime high like some kind of slightly wealthy hobo.
He was SO nice to me you guys. Like suspiciously, is this a trap, am I about to get tied up in the basement of this hospital.
Over. The. Top.
Except thoroughly enjoyable and believable enough to make you forget these were the same people that treated me so fucking rudely the last time.
So this is enough right?
Add another element and this is no coincidence.
This was even a different type of biopsy and more than one team does each type of them. So it couldn’t even be that was their thing, that they always work together on all the biopsies no matter what.
Or even that you get the same staff every biopsy. I hadn’t been.
It’s a bigger hospital than that. But not so big that they’d never work together twice. But that soon? MADDENING, the questions.
I’m not sure anyone besides the surgeon even has a choice. Although, on the other hand, he could choose for all of them.
As I’m mulling this over, evidence arrives.
In strolls Nurse we’re not friends, acting in a way that made me want to be her friend more than anything.
(And yeah, by then I was definitely high, no question. Not munchies high, gratitude high – that’s what Benadryl does straight into my veins apparently. The Valium was also helping with my extreme anxiety about the procedure.)
They were all making small talk with me like it was Saturday afternoon and we’re in the park instead of the Twilight Zone episode featuring a magic black girl stuck in the Opposite Day Dimension.
Please was distributed with great abandon.
Thank you was repeatedly set free with a speed bordering on frazzling.
Then there was New Mustachio. He was much more touchy feely than before.
Nothing The-Donald-y, more like a nurturing flutter. With the occasional puzzling hand squeeze.
I feel I should stop and just break down the significance and natural habitat of the male-female hand squeeze in my world.
Hand Squeezes and Me
Can we talk about when hand squeezes occur? If you can’t have someone in a procedure with you, a nurse might unceremoniously touch you, intending to comfort you.
If you’re like me, you don’t like strangers touching you with no preamble.
“This is going to hurt like a bitch” or “Hi, my name is Nurse Touches People Without Asking.”
Some shit like that is required to keep my exaggerated startle reflex (seriously that’s a real thing) from accidentally punching people in the face.
Which I have done before. I once used my aikido skills to flip a 6 foot man to the floor because a- they were a stranger and b- they startled me by putting a part of their body on my body.
It’s just the way I am.
Unless of course if you’re a hottie and we’re on a date.
Notice I said AND.
Even a smoking hot man squeezing my hand is fucking weird. And me being high, I was squeezing back.
Now, think back to all the people in your life who have squeezed your hand in the last year.
Was it ever not intimate?
Bookmark that thought and realize that at least 4 hand squeezes happened during the space of our time together.
Inapprops!
Though hilariously awkwardly so on my part. Especially the times my high ass squeezed back.
Back to the action.
So these folks are done prepping. Time for needles.
I have to say, I really feel they should knock you what is called the fuck out, when they’re going to put you on a table and stab a needle into your chest.
Repeatedly.
In the same incision.
To say I didn’t appreciate it would be to participate in the understatement of the year, even in a year as shitty as 2016.
From what I can remember outside my haze, my bed was wheeled into a room similar to the CAT scan room, that had a machine like that available. Who knows if was the same one, those details are fuzzy.
I was laying flat, and after figuring out multiple issues, the doctor put a thingee on my chest that I thought was the needle at first.
But no, it was a thing to push the needle through, which he did more than once, in two spots about two centimeters apart. I still have the scars to prove it.
There were more jokes to be had in this room.
Because at some point when I thought it was over, the doctor had more needles to stick into me. I made a face and the doctor said “Does this mean we’re not cool.”
To which I responded “I’m definitely not your friend anymore.”
All three of them laughed. With me I hope.
The rest of the memory is cloudy now. But I do remember a lot more laughter, and being treated more like a human being.
Also I didn’t fall asleep during recovery this time. I guess because I didn’t get that twilight medication. It would probably make it hard to do the chest xray you need afterwards to make sure you’re not going to, you know, stop breathing forever.
The results… well. Different story for an upcoming post. Short answer, it’s complicated.