Taking Out the Port

Three months after my last infusion, my oncologist said it was time to take the port out. I remember the specific flavor of panic that sentence set off in me, because it wasn't the panic I would have predicted. I thought I'd feel relief — one less piece of hardware in my body, one more visible sign of cancer gone for good. Instead my first thought was: what if I need it again?

A port is not just a medical device

For anyone who hasn't lived with one, a port is a small device implanted under the skin, usually near the collarbone, connected to a vein, so that infusions and blood draws don't have to go hunting for a new vein every single time. Mine sat just under my skin for the better part of a year, a small hard bump I could feel with two fingers if I pressed. I hated it, in the ordinary way you hate anything medical and permanent-feeling. I also, it turned out, had grown strangely attached to it, the way you can grow attached to things you resent.

Because the port wasn't just a device. It was a guarantee. As long as it was in, there was a direct line back into treatment if I needed one — no waiting, no new IV placement, no delay between "something's wrong" and "we can act on it." Taking it out meant giving up that guarantee. It meant trusting that I wouldn't need the fast lane anymore, in a year when trust had been in short supply.

The fear had its own logic

I sat with my oncologist and asked her, probably three different ways in the same appointment, if she was sure. Not because I doubted her competence — I trusted her completely by that point, she'd walked me through the worst year of my life with more steadiness than I could have managed in her position. I doubted the universe's track record with me, honestly. A year ago I'd been a healthy person who didn't think twice about her body, and then very suddenly I wasn't. Once you've learned that lesson, it's hard to unlearn it. It's hard to trust that "you're fine now" is a stable state and not just the quiet part before the next bad turn.

She told me, plainly, that the data supported taking it out. That my scans were clean, that the relapse window where a port would matter most was behind me, that keeping it in past its usefulness came with its own risks — infection, clotting, the ordinary cost of leaving foreign hardware in a body longer than it needs to be there. She wasn't just being encouraging. She was making an actual clinical argument, and I could tell the difference, because she'd never once minimized the hard parts of this year to make me feel better. If she said it was time, it was time.

Choosing to trust someone else's confidence when I didn't have my own

This is the part I keep coming back to, because I think it's the real lesson, more than the port itself. I didn't feel confident. I felt terrified, right up until they wheeled me back for the outpatient procedure to remove it. What I did have was someone else's confidence — earned, clinical, hard-won across a year of her watching my body respond to treatment in real time — and I made the decision to borrow hers when I didn't have enough of my own.

That's not the same as blind faith. I'd asked my questions. I'd made her explain her reasoning more than once. But at some point, the decision came down to this: I could keep the port in indefinitely, driven by a fear that had no actual clinical backing anymore, or I could trust the person who'd spent a year proving she knew what she was talking about. I chose to trust her. It's still, months later, one of the harder trust falls I've done in my life, and I did it with my body cut open on an operating table, which feels like it should count for something.

Where I am now

Months out, and I still don't have my port. No infections, no complications, no moment where I've needed the fast lane back. Every so often I catch myself running two fingers over the spot where it used to be, out of habit more than worry now, and there's nothing there — just a small scar, already fading, and skin that's slowly forgetting it was ever anything else.

I think that's what healing actually looks like, more than the dramatic version I used to picture. Not a single moment where fear disappears. A slow accumulation of small proofs — the scan stayed clean, the port stayed out, the fast lane stayed unused — until one day you realize you've stopped bracing without noticing exactly when you stopped.

💜 Kayla