Geo Borg

Wednesday we sat down with an oncologist and started outlining a treatment plan. One thing we discussed was giving me a single lumen port. This really does look like a Borg implant. Check out a picture of a single lumen port here

The port is put under your skin and the end of the port is put into a major vein in your  chest/throat area. After the port is implanted, the skin heals over it so from the outside, you just appear to have a bump on your chest. When they give you chemo, they take  this wicked bad ass needle and punch it through your skin into the port.  The chemo can then be injected through the port directly into a major vein. Apparently this kind of chemo can be hard on your veins (let's not think about what it's doing to your arteries...) so the port allows the chemo to be injected more directly into you bloodstream.

Kind of like when you want to dump some major pesticide into your garden to kill some nasty weeds but don't want to damage the fruits and vegetables in other parts of the garden.

I'll have this port for about 4-6 months, depending upon how many chemo cycles I have. I'll be able to do all my normal activities with the port in place. Probably body surfing using my upper chest as a surfboard might be a bad idea and ditto for crawling bare chested through a swamp. But I should be able to swim, shower, etc. ok.

I'm thinking about trying to get a wireless bluetooth access point added to the port so I could then support bluetooth devices pairing with my body...

Another thing - I think we'll need to have a Borg collective to keep track of these things. Going by age in our immediately family, I would be 2 of 7, with Susan at the top of the ladder at 1 of 7 and Socrates (our cat) at end of the line as 7 of 7.