iPhlop

A week and a half ago, I was climbing into bed and dropped my old flip phone to the ground when reaching for it to set an alarm.  Had it been the first, or even tenth time I had dropped this four year old phone, it might have weathered the plummet.  However it was the third time I had dropped it that day, and perhaps its five hundredth fifty first drop in its life time, so it split in two.   

In residency, I never just sat and talked on the phone, time was too precious.  I talked and did the dishes, talked and walked Luna along the creek path, talked and made my bed, and talked and sauteed damn kale and Swiss chard for dinner trying my best to keep cancer away. 

Two days later I was in a sour mood.  A few hours before I had a follow-up plastic surgery appointment at UCSF. I had another 100mL of saline injected into my breast expander, a part of the reconstruction process.  The breast expander is a thick plastic bag with a quarter sized rubber port on the front and a quarter sized magnetic disc opposite the port against my chest wall.  My plastic surgeon uses a magnetic pendulum to locate the port beneath my skin so he can stick the needle for saline injections into the port rather than accidentally bust a whole into the plastic bag-like expander. 

From a scientific perspective, the whole contraption is quite clever.  From a patient's perspective, it feels like a water balloon is blowing up my chest wall.  It is not painful, but it is a lot of pressure and stretching that becomes more acute once I am standing and using my right arm.  The expander is wedged between layers of my pectoralis muscle so when I use that muscle, which we use for most upper body movements, I feel it in my new pseudo water balloon breast.  That expansion plus car sickness in the traffic jam on the ride back to Santa Rosa from San Francisco led to my less than pleased mood on my arrival home.

David said, "You know when you go to the dentist as a kid you get a sticker or lollipop as a reward.  I think that when you are an adult with cancer and you get 100cc of saline injected into your chest wall you get an iPhone."

One hour later, David and I walked out of AT&T with an iPhone in a durable rubber casing typically purchased by construction workers because it can protect the phone from a three story fall. Perhaps the phone can survive living with me. 

I walked to the car thinking, there are some pretty great perks to being an adult.  I also thought, there are also some perks to the urgency created by not having a functional phone in our phone-ccentric world and also having your best friends gently coax you toward smartphone ownership for the last 18 months.  Lynne and Katie carefully collected dry kindling, my phone breaking in half provided the match, and the 100mL of saline was the lighter fluid that together lit the fire under my bum required for me to step into the 21st century. 

Look forward to future posts with action shots and video.