healing through words

The second chemo was supposed to be easier. At least that’s what they’d said – the second time, you know what to expect, you’ve got the routine down. You pack your bag, bring your water bottle, a blanket, your snacks. You sit in the chair; you let the drugs drip into you. It sounds so simple when they say it like that, as though your body hasn’t already been through the wringer once before.

But eight days after my port surgery, my chest still looked like a battlefield. The skin around the port was red and angry, puffy with inflammation, and the stitches that were supposed to have dissolved were still sitting there, black and obvious, poking through the half-healed skin. I could actually see them – like little pieces of thread someone had forgotten to snip. Every time I caught sight of it in the mirror, my stomach turned.

I knew it wasn’t right. The area looked wrong, it felt wrong, and deep down I knew it wasn’t healing properly. But what choice did I have? The chemo had to go in somehow. My veins were already thin and bruised from the first round; the port was supposed to make everything easier. That was the whole point of this gruesome little device sewn into my chest – to avoid the pain and scarring of endless needles. And yet here we were, about to stick a needle directly into a wound that was still open.

The nurses gathered around me, a quiet, competent army of women in scrubs and kind eyes. They could see I was frightened – probably more than frightened. My heart was racing, my palms slick with sweat, my whole body tensed as if it could run away even while rooted to the chair.

One of them, a senior nurse with red hair tucked behind her ears, gently reclined the big, cushy chemo chair I was sitting in and raised it up, so it became almost like an operating table. “We’ll do it here,” she said softly. “We’ll be very careful.”

Someone pulled the curtains closed around us, creating a little cocoon of sterile privacy. I heard the metallic clink of instruments being set up, the soft rustle of gloves. Another nurse came to stand by my head and took my hand in hers. “Just breathe,” she whispered. Another rubbed my arm in slow, rhythmic strokes, as if she could coax calmness into me through skin contact alone.

I wanted to believe them. I wanted to believe that this was all fine, that they knew exactly what they were doing, that the pain was temporary and worth it. But my mind was screaming. Every part of me was shouting, No. Don’t do this. It’s not ready. It’s not healed. And yet, I surrendered. Because what else can you do when your survival depends on other people’s hands?

Having the needle put into the portacath on my chest was one of those sensations I would never quite get used to. The port itself sat just under the skin — a small, raised bump the size of a five-cent coin, connected by a thin catheter that ran straight into a large vein near my heart. To access it, the nurse would clean the area with antiseptic, then press a special curved needle — called a Huber needle — directly through the skin and into the silicone centre of the port. It was always a sharp, burning jab, followed by a deep, bruised ache as the needle pushed in and locked into place. I could feel the pressure, the foreignness of it, like being plugged into a machine. Once connected, the chemo drugs flowed straight into my bloodstream, through the port, along the catheter, and directly into my vena cava – the main highway to my heart – from where they were pumped through my entire body.

I could feel it, physically feel the connection being made. The chemo began to flow, cold and insistent. Within seconds, I could taste it in my mouth – a strange, metallic tang that felt like licking an old coin. It spread through my veins, icy and foreign, until it reached my chest, my stomach, my fingertips.

Three hours. That’s how long the infusion took. Three hours of lying there in that reclined chair, trying not to think about what was happening inside me – the chemicals coursing through my system, killing the fast-growing cells, good and bad alike. Three hours of forced stillness, broken only by the quiet hum of machines and the occasional murmur of nurses checking my vitals.

About two and a half hours in, I noticed something odd. My tongue felt thick, almost numb. It tingled in a way that didn’t feel right. I mentioned it casually to the nurse as she was adjusting the drip. “My tongue feels funny,” I said, expecting maybe a sip of water or a pat on the hand.

Her face changed instantly. The calm professionalism slipped, just for a second, replaced by alarm. She grabbed my wrists and pushed up the sleeves of my fluffy cardigan. A violent red rash was blooming across my arms, creeping up towards my neck like wildfire. And then everything happened at once.

Suddenly there were people everywhere – nurses calling for a doctor, someone turning off the infusion pump, someone else checking my pulse, my blood pressure, my oxygen. I could hear the words “allergic reaction,” “anaphylaxis,” “get antihistamine,” all blurring together. The room felt smaller, hotter, spinning with urgency.

They injected something cold into the line, then another syringe, then another. I could feel my heart pounding hard against my ribs. The rash was burning, my skin itching and tightening, my throat thick. Somewhere amid the chaos, I realised: I’d probably been reacting to this drug all along. The first chemo, when I’d come home exhausted and dizzy, chalking it up to the anaesthetic and the fentanyl haze after surgery – maybe that hadn’t been normal at all.

The doctor arrived, brisk and frustrated. She wanted answers. “Why didn’t you tell us about this earlier?” she demanded, her voice sharp. I wanted to laugh, or cry, or both. “Because last week,” I said, “I was so high on fentanyl I couldn’t see straight.” She didn’t find it funny. But it was true. That first week after surgery and chemo had been a blur of hallucinations and nausea and half-sleep. I couldn’t tell what was real, let alone that I’d been having a near-fatal allergic reaction.

Eventually, the emergency settled. The rash began to fade, my breathing steadied, the room returned to its usual quiet hum. The other patients had gone home hours ago. The oncology ward was closing for the night. The lights dimmed, the staff clocked off, and I was still there – tethered to the drip, the last patient left.

A single nurse stayed behind with me. She was kind, but I could sense her fatigue, her irritation at the long overtime. She tried to hide it with polite smiles. We sat together in that dimly lit room, the only sounds the soft beeping of the monitors and the occasional rustle as she checked the line.

When the final flush came – a saline solution pushed through to clear the port – I felt it distinctly. A strange, cool sensation shooting straight through my chest, as if I could feel water flowing through my heart. Then the sharp pinch as she withdrew the needle from the rubber top of the port, the little snap of pressure released.

As she cleaned the area with some industrial-strength antibacterial wipe, I saw out of the corner of my eye her fingers doing something quick and subtle. She was pulling at something – a loose stitch, maybe – and before I could say anything, she’d plucked it free and tossed it away, pretending not to notice. Then she patched me up, taped a dressing over the wound, and smiled wearily. “All done,” she said.

I went home that afternoon completely spent. My body felt foreign, invaded, like it no longer belonged to me. My chest throbbed. My mouth tasted like chemicals and metal. My head buzzed from the antihistamines, thick and heavy, as though I were underwater.

At home, I sank into bed fully clothed, too exhausted to move, too wired to sleep. I stared at the ceiling and tried to process the day, but everything blurred together – the needles, the nurses’ faces, the panic, the cold rush through my heart. I could still feel it, phantom-like, pulsing under my skin.

The next morning, I woke up feeling defeated. Scared. Raw. My chest was swollen, the wound angry again, the area around the port tender to the touch. I could still see where the rash had been – faint pink shadows on my arms, a ghostly reminder of how close I’d come.

For the first time, I started to question whether I could actually keep doing this. The thought terrified me. I wanted to live, desperately. But the treatments felt like a punishment, a kind of slow violence disguised as medicine. Each session seemed to take another piece of me.

I thought about the nurses – the way they’d held my hand, the quiet compassion in their eyes. How they’d worked together like a single organism, calm in the chaos. Their kindness had been a lifeline, something to hold onto amid the fear. Even now, as I lay there trembling, it was that warmth I remembered most – their gentle voices, the steady rhythm of their care.

But underneath it all was a growing unease. My port wasn’t healing. My body was reacting badly. I was getting sicker, not stronger. And I still had months of this to go.

That night, as I lay awake listening to the soft hum of the house – my son breathing in the next room, the clock ticking softly on the wall – I realised that cancer wasn’t just a disease of the body. It was a disease of surrender. Every day you had to hand yourself over – to doctors, to nurses, to drugs, to fate – and trust that somehow, they knew what they were doing.

It demanded faith, not in miracles, but in endurance. To keep showing up, even when everything in you screamed to stop. To let them pierce your skin, invade your veins, poison you in the name of healing. To smile when they say, See you next week, even when you want to disappear.

The second chemo broke something in me – not my hope exactly, but my illusion of control. It was the day I learned that surviving this wasn’t going to be neat or noble. It would be messy, frightening, humiliating at times. It would hurt in ways I couldn’t prepare for.

But somewhere in that mess – in the fear, in the surrender – there was also a strange kind of grace. The love in the hands that held mine. The quiet strength of strangers who refused to let me fall apart completely.

And maybe, I thought, as I drifted into a restless sleep, that’s what survival really is – not the absence of fear, but the decision to keep breathing through it, one infusion at a time.