New plumbing

I had some new, very personal plumbing installed recently. And no, I’m not talking about a bidet.

I wish it had been as simple as choosing chrome or brass fixtures. My new plumbing is so personal that you can’t even see it.

Part of preparing for my cancer treatments included the installation of a device called a port-a-cath. It’s a long, thin plastic tube that’s attached to a silver dollar-sized plastic hub. The tube was inserted into a vein in my neck and the hub was placed in a subcutaneous pocket below the clavicle. If I wear a shirt with a collar you can’t even tell that I have this nifty new plumbing. Which is a shame, because it’s probably quite expensive.

The port-a-cath has proven fairly tolerable. After a few days I could almost forget that I have it.

The other piece of new plumbing was a much different story. My doctors recommended that I have a gastric feeding tube installed, just to be on the safe side.

“I have seen guys go through their entire chemoradiation treatments and never use their feeding tubes,” my oncologist said. “But it would be best to have one in case you start to lose too much weight.”

Darn it! He was using the argument “Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.” That’s the same logic I’ve used to justify some major purchases to my wife. One example would be buying my John Deere “3010” loader tractor.

“Better to have a tractor to move snow than to wish we had one and be stuck at home for days,” I told her. I think I had her at “stuck at home.”

I was given light sedation during the plumbing installation process. I was awake but very relaxed.

Prep work began immediately after I arrived at the operating room. This meant removing the hair from large areas of my chest and tummy.

I felt chatty for some reason and tried to engage the OR staff in light banter. As the electric razor blazed a path across my abdomen, I chanted, “What shall we do with a drunken sailor?” Nobody got the allusion.

“That’s the title of a traditional English sea shanty,” I said. “One refrain goes ‘Shave his belly with a rusty razor.’”

This elicited only a few weak chuckles. A joke isn’t working if you have to explain it.

I felt pretty good in the immediate post-operative aftermath. But the lidocaine and the narcotics were still working their magic. The drugs began to wear off during the ride home and I was introduced to a whole new universe of discomfort.

This should come as no surprise, but Hollywood movies are full of fakery. You know how the hero can be stabbed in the stomach but continues to fight the bad guys as though nothing happened? I know from personal experience that that’s a load.

Not only was I stabbed in the gut but – get this – they left behind the thing that did the stabbing! I was told, “Don’t worry, your body will heal around the stabby thing.”

Having a pierced abdomen isn’t the most fun ride at the carnival. It turns out that you use your abdominal muscles for a lot of things such as settling into a chair, getting up from a chair, walking, and breathing. Don’t even ask about coughing.

Something as simple as bending over to pick up a shoe requires a level of planning often associated with landing a spacecraft on the moon. You have to carefully calculate beforehand to avoid any sudden and painful midcourse corrections.

The main pain faded in a few days, although I don’t think I’ll be doing 100 pushups anytime soon. Then again, I couldn’t do 100 pushups before this.

Toxic compounds will soon be dripped into my veins and my flesh will be zapped with ionizing radiation. They need to kill me a little bit in order to save my life. Such is the state of modern medicine, but it’s still much, much better than the alternative.

I sat on my recliner on the evening after my appointment with the plumbers. It was impossible to find a comfortable position.

A persistent meowing emanated from the front door. Sparkles, our cat, wanted in.

I opened the door, and she casually sauntered through. I went back to my recliner, feeling miserable and sorry for myself.

Sparkles hopped, uninvited, onto my lap. Her therapeutic purr vibrations soon began to reverberate throughout my body.

Cats can sense things that humans cannot. I think Sparkles’ purring was her way of saying that everything is going to be OK.

Jerry’s book, Dear County Agent Guy, is available at Workman.com and in bookstores nationwide.