Needles

It’s five am. I’ve been writing since two. But it’s not been posts I’ve been working on. It’s my “other project.” And I find it’s frustrating. When I first started writing, there was an urgency, and I scrambled to get the words on paper. Now, after these months of writing and a long-term project, I find that it takes determination to keep going, and I don’t have words for full blogs and full pages for my project on the same day. So I decided to write something short to tell you what’s happening: I’m writing, just not for you.

And God has put a thorn in my side, a little one that is not life threatening or even painful, but just a nagging inconvenience. It involves a new medical term I learned and researched yesterday: seroma. I’m going to take a wild stab that I haven’t researched and say it’s related to the word serum. Because what I have is a build-up of serum in my side over the incision, making my side hard to the touch and tight and sore, It's difficult to stretch my arm up.

At first I was afraid it was something serious and I might have to go find a doctor here (no thank you) or even fly home early. So I started researching. I called my pharmacist in Canada, who said to contact her if I saw signs of swelling, but she said to call the cancer clinic. I tried that, but the nurse wasn’t in, and I had to wait til she called back. That nurse sounded a bit impatient with me; why wasn’t I calling my breast surgeon ( who hadn’t told me to contact her if there were signs of swelling)? So I tried that, and of course, her office was closed. Sigh. Thankfully, Robert has a cousin out west who is a breast surgeon, and I emailed her, and she responded immediately giving me my vocab word for the day and assuring me I wasn’t going to die or land in Emergency if I waited to get back to Canada before having things looked after.

I should have stopped there. Silly me. I did more research online and found that the remedy surgeons go for, if you insist, is to stick a needle into the sore area and drain the extra fluid by hand. Right. More needles. And this doesn’t necessarily just happen once but can happen several times a week over months. Right. Hmmm.

So life threatening or not, I’m praying God will take away this thorn in my side. You all keep praying for the big stuff, like my staying alive and all that, but if you find an extra spare moment, ask him to take the swelling away without the needles. There are some vocabulary terms I don’t need to learn. 

I don't need to know what this is called