To Bathe or Not to Bathe ….
…. that was our question! The doctor who skillfully inserted the port in the skin below my right collarbone said, “Now, keep that dry for ten days.”
Dry for ten days? Right! So how do you shower and shampoo and keep your chest wall dry?
It took us a few days to make a plan. But we had to figure something out before the house began to smell like a cow stall! So a day or so later we gave it a try.
I knelt on the bathroom floor outside the bathtub on a thick cushion of towels (in my birthday suit, of course). I leaned far forward and Bruce held the hand held shower and drenched my head over the bathtub. When thoroughly wet. I quickly shampooed my hair and he rinsed it.
After a quick towel dry -- thank goodness for short hair! -- I stood up and carefully stepped across into the bathtub. There I knelt on a stack of folded towels again to save my knees from the hard bathtub floor. Bruce quickly scrubbed the back parts I couldn’t reach as I cleaned the front! Not a pretty picture but it worked, and the port on my chest stayed dry.
We perfected this weird routine during the next few days until my ten days were done. Now we’re thinking of marketing the plan as a new exercise program for seniors: Bath-er-cize, we might call it!
10 September 2018 mshr
