When my first wife was struggling with terminal cancer 20 some odd years ago, she had a doctor while in the hospital who was given the task of determining if a port she had installed in her chest should be removed. It had been there for over a year to assist the doctors in their efforts to pump what eventually added up to many gallons of various chemotherapy drugs in an effort to stop the rampage of her disease (don’t go there, I’ve heard it enough, and I agree). This doctor was an old guy (about where I am now!) and had practiced medicine even back in the old days before fancy computers and imaging machines that can penetrate into the deep, dark, mysterious recesses of the human body.
Janice (my wife) had just had a cerebral bleed show up in a CT scan from one of the many lesions present in her brain. She was scheduled for surgery in a few hours to remove the port because a blood clot had formed at the end of the tubing. She had been put on blood thinners to assure the clot dissolved a bit before removal. Now that a brain bleed was detected, her doctors were suddenly worried that the blood thinner would cause her lesions to bleed and not properly clot. A typical catch 22, double bind, situation.
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