It IS A Tumor

Or was, or whatever. I had this lump on my back, where the neck and shoulder meet, for ages, and I'd asked a doc or two about it. The answer was always, if it isn't growing and isn't bothering you, don't bother it. OK, I can handle that. It never bothered me until this year during all the med school interviews, when I found it to be extremely tender and getting bigger. So I go in to the doc and he tells me all about lipoma, and tells me he can get rid of this thing since its bothersome. Great. He has me schedule an hour appointment for something he says he doesn't think will take longer than 30 minutes or so.

And we arrive at mistake number one. What with the doc making no big fuss and me having had this thing for years, I think its a complete non-issue. Ask any woman in my life their thoughts on that. I think my girlfriend was contemplating homicide when she didn't find out I was having the thing removed, let alone that I had a tumor, until about 18 hours before the scheduled appointment. I didn't tell my mom about getting the thing removed until well after the said event... also dumb.

So I show up to my appointment, with moral support, and think I'm going to go back to work once I'm done. HA! Two hours later, the stitching me back together gets started. Turns out there was not quite two golf balls worth of material hanging out under my skin (and I should have gotten a picture with my phone, but hey, we already covered me and dumb). So if you didn't go to the lipoma link yet, its a fatty tumor. In my case, it had large amount of connective tissue not only attached to it, but interwoven into it. Not really a huge deal, but you know how to get a splinter out, you push at the base of a splinter to get it to start poking its head back out the hole, well the doc couldn't get the thing to poke out of the incision much at all cause it was being held in too tightly. So then she (the initial doc and the op doc are in fact different people) tried grabbing on to it to pull it a little way out, or at least expose the first line of connective tissue for cutting. The tumor was broken up enough by all the connective tissue that every time she tried to grab the thing, tiny pieces would break off from the main mass. Well, it all just amounted to taking a long time to get enough stuff cut away that the primary mass could finally be pulled out. Then there was the encasing that had to be cut away. Then stitching.

Stitching me closed was a bit of an adventure, as in, the doc broken needles trying to stick them through me. I have no idea how this happens, but apparently, I'm tough, like a really bad steak. So eventually, they do get some needles to do what they want and I'm closed up and head home. End of story... I wish. I get a call a few hours later that the needle count is off. Its a weird thing to hear. The doc says that they think one probably got dropped on the floor or something, but since they didn't account for all the needles, they want me to come in for an x-ray. Sure enough, one of the broken needles has a decent portion of it left in my back. So that sucks, but I figure they just cut the stitches pull thing out and re-stitch. Wrong again. They cut the stitches and they can't see the needle at all. They took a little metal pellet and tape it to my back and take more x-rays and use that marker to narrow down exactly where this thing should be. Eventually, to tell exactly how deep it is, they actually stuck the pellet in the hole for relative depth. That all sounds like it shouldn't take that long. Wrong again. Three hours.

So I had felt kinda beat up Tuesday night, once the anesthesia wore off yesterday, I've been feeling more like I got hit in the neck by a semi. If anyone reading this doesn't know me well enough to have guessed this already, I'm not suing the doc. He did offer me compensation for my antibiotics, appointment co-pay, and my time away from work, which I will accept. Long story short, its not a tumor any more, its a big hole.