My radiologist and I recently celebrated our first and only anniversary. Though I had to go under the knife to meet him and see him again, he put my port in last October and took my port out a year later. We vow never to see each other again, but I’ll remember the laughs we shared.

Just call us bosom buddies!

So to humor him one last time, I decided to be a radiologist for Halloween and write this muse about him.

Though I can never give his wit the honor it deserves, I’ll pay homage to the time we spent laughing together the best I can.

We met again under eerily similar circumstances. I even recognized the same man behind the desk who asked me to sign some documents last year, cracking the same joke about Santa is coming soon. (Christmas in October still makes no sense).

Then I got escorted to the recovery/waiting room across the hall from where I waited to get my port in last year. I could almost see my old self crying and explaining to anyone who’d listen that I had never been in an OR before.

And just like last year, the same radiologist from New York walked in. It wasn’t even his day to work, but there he was! I recognized him not by his glasses or his scrubs but by his sense of humor, of course. Yep, the same guy!

I reminded him I was the crazy patient crying and carrying on a year ago, doubting that he’d recognize me in my calm state.

When we met up in the OR, the music was playing again. Oh, how I missed that music in my other two operations since then. Breast surgeons don’t play music or tell jokes the way my radiologist does.

Happy Days are here again!

So I got wheeled to the OR, my port got numbed, and we had thirty minutes for it to take effect. The radiologist said, “So when we talked last time, what exactly did we talk about? Like how’d you know I was from New York?”

Lying on a gurney with a silver coat rack and a sheet hanging overhead, I got him up to speed and recapped all that he had missed over the past year of my life. Meanwhile, the nurse cut a rabbit hole out of the side of the sheet so I could breathe.

But then I had to turn serious when I said, “I can’t wait for this port to be out. I think it got embedded in my peck muscle. But you’re sure that I’m not going to feel any of this since I’ll be awake this time?”

He reassured me I wouldn’t feel a thing.

So he put the knife to me, and I said, “I feel that. You’re cutting me.”

“Let me try to numb you some more.”

“Maybe it’s because I lost so much weight.”

“Yeah, probably. How about now? Did you feel that?”

“Of course I felt that. You’re cutting me again, and I can even feel the blood running down my neck.” Yeah, I could feel it all right.

“That’s not blood.” He wiped it away. “Well, mostly it’s not, mostly it’s just the numbing medicine.”

“Your port seems to have moved. I’m going to have to cut more than I did the first time to get to it.”

I didn’t process what he was doing before I felt him yank my port right out of its resting place. “Owwwww!”

He said, “You felt that?” Hmm. So weird.” (Beat). I don’t mean to be unsympathetic. Wait. That didn’t come out right.” and yes, it’s not funny in print, but the way he delivered the line like he was on stage, I laughed for 5 minutes straight.

He said, “At least you’re not crying this time. But you’re not supposed to have felt that.”

“Well, I did.”

“Okay. Let me numb you some more. Maybe it’s because you lost so much weight. There’s nothing there to numb. This doesn’t typically happen.”

Then he dug and dug and dug inside my chest. But again, he entertained me, so I mostly pretended I didn’t feel it.

He talked about how he needed to get 30 infusions, “But I didn’t bother to get a port. I have good veins.”

Though I was shocked, that wasn’t the point of his story.

“That’s how I found out that we had really bad snacks in radiology, they have great snacks over there in chemo. How is that possible?”

And I wouldn’t let him finish. I had a hunch we were talking the same language. “Sunchips, right? I never knew about Sunchips until chemo.”

“You know about Sunchips. So I had to get them over here. We’re part of the same hospital, we have the same catalog, but it was just a matter of figuring out how to order them. So now we have them here.”

It was a good time for me to mention, “What are you doing digging around in there? I can feel everything.”

“I can’t find the port.”

“What do you mean you can’t find it. How long is that thing? I thought it was supposed to be short.”

“It’s pretty long, but I’m trying to get to the end of it. It’s just wrapped around in there really tight. Maybe it’s because you lost so much weight. This is going to take a while. It was supposed to be easy. But you won’t feel this.”

“Oh yes, I do.”

“Okay, you shouldn’t feel this.”

“Oh no, he found the end. “That’s that weird rug burn feeling I hate.”

So he told me about getting a colonoscopy and how he was supposed to be asleep, but he could feel everything. He yelled out the name of the drug that he needed more of; he’s a radiologist even when he’s not working, after all.

“Okay. It’s out. I’m sewing you now.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“So I got these infusions, and I got impatient because the machine was beeping–you know at the end how it beeps.”

“Yeah, of course, they need to get out the last drip.”

“Right. So I didn’t want to wait for the nurse to come. It was taking too long. So I started trying to do it myself and wound up getting my blood in the bag instead.” And then he added, “I was not their best patient. They were not happy with me.”

“Well, I could see why.”

“So now I’m putting the glue on.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“You’re not supposed to feel it. Yeah, you’re gonna have an indent. It might go away, it might not. You might need plastic surgery, you might not. You’ll just have to wait and see. If you weighed more, none of this usually happens.”

So afterward Alex and I were leaving, and we saw my radiologist come out of a door. I said, “There you are again.”

He smiled, “I hope I never see you again, and I mean that in a good way.”

And remembering all of his stories and how it makes us bosom buddies, I said, you never know the weird places we could bump into each other: standing in line to buy Sunchips, getting a colonoscopy, visiting New York.

But yesterday, my glue strip finally fell off—the last remnants of the radiologist. Maybe next Halloween, I’ll be a glue strip. But today, I humor the radiologist who helped me leave the port behind. Oh, and he had a way of telling me stories and knew how to make me laugh instead of cry.