You Just Can't Make Up this Stuff!

Cara and I arrived at the KU Medical Cancer Center bright and early this morning to begin her chemotherapy. It felt a little like the first day of summer camp—we had to find our way around, meet new people, and get a feeling for the place.


The first task was to place a PICC line. I now know that stands for Peripheral Intravenous Central Catheter. It’s a permanent IV that goes to the vena-cava of her heart so that the chemo will be pumped directly by the heart to her entire body. The PICC nurse was named Kathy—a lovely lady who inserted 69 of these things in the last month alone—it was not her first time at the rodeo. It’s quite a production that requires masks and sterile gowns and about 20 sets of gloves. They use ultrasound and gps to determine where this line needs to go. She found the vein and it looked more than adequate for what they needed to do. She was able to insert a needle into vein quickly and easily and started to put in a guidewire that leads the way before the catheter is inserted. She was able to get in about 6-8 inches and then the wire just stopped. About 700 tries later, she finally gave up—that wire was just not going to get through the vein to the heart.

OK, so about ten years ago when Cara’s addiction and behavior issues were at their worst, she got shot. In the shoulder. So it appears that the scar tissue from the gunshot was blocking the insertion of the PICC line. So once again, her early days are coming back to haunt her.

They placed a regular IV and they were able to give her the first of her 20 treatments. From that point on, everything went smoothly. We were there for about 5 hours. It was tedious, but everyone is so nice and thoughtful, that it wasn’t really so bad.

We will go to the hospital (the Cancer Center is about 15 minutes away from the actual KU Medical Center) on Wednesday where they have people with more expertise and more equipment so that they can see exactly what is going on with the vein.

She didn’t feel much effect from the treatment right away, so we went ahead and ran some errands on our way home. By the time we’d been out for a couple of hours, she was more than ready to come home and rest. She felt feverish and tired through the evening, but she felt like eating dinner and hanging out for a bit.