If you have been following along for the past few years (thank you; if you HAVE), you are aware that I encounter a lot of needles along my journey. Many are intended to draw blood for my ongoing lab work (the window into the precise status of my disease - progress or regression), and others are administered to supply my system with the treatments or prophylaxis that I need to keep the disease and side effects at bay.
Despite the sincere efforts of the staff at the clinic to make the situation feel less "clinical" - between the needles and the masks and the rubber gloves and the hazmat suits (whenever dispensing any chemo) and the machines and the specificity of the process - it can feel like a fairly cold and impartial environment. However, there is one particular procedure that I get during each month's visit which leaves no place to run and no place to hide.
I receive a shot of a monoclonal antibody called Daratumumab, which is one of the two main maintenance medications in my current overall regimen. This subcutaneous shot is optimally injected into the fleshy part of the patient's abdomen (of which mine is extra fleshy). The Dara solution is very viscous, and the instructions call for a slow and measured meter of squeezing the plunger of the hypodermic on a staggered basis over a 5-minute period.
I have mentioned in previous blogs that my coping mechanism for dealing with all of the needles is to simply just not look - easy enough and quite common. But when a person is sitting right next to you, with a needle in your stomach, and a minimum 5-minute duration from start to finish, you can really get to know them pretty well under those circumstances - if you carpe diem. I assure you that there is no pain or discomfort whatsoever associated with the procedure, and it is fascinating how talkative I can get with a syringe in my gut (aka: a gun to my head). It actually becomes a chance to get to know the person who is my "nurse" that day; learning something about their past (the patient story is a fairly open book), and momentarily making them the center of attention - not us or our cancer. It's a nice change of pace and the response from each of them has been interesting and appreciated - as I've observed over the past several months of our in-tummy-cy.
