The Mark Of The Vampire

I'm three years into treatment for lymphoma (chemo, radiation and the rest), and I'm just emerging now from a particularly nasty few months of heavy chemo and a stem cell transplant. My strength is just starting to return, and it feels great. All this shit has kept me from writing as much as I'd like to recently, and I'm hoping to start posting more frequently again until my next round of treatment begins.

I want to show off a gory bit of medical tech that I had to wear around for a couple of days recently. It's called a Vas Cath, or central venous catheter. It's a "port" that is stitched into the neck and connected to an access tube that runs directly into the Jugular Vein, on down through the Superior Vena Cava and into the heart. In spite of the fact that it sucked having it in, a perverse part of my sci-fi horror lovin' mind couldn't help but appreciate it's similarity to some cool biomechanical imagery in some of my favourite flicks:

unfortunate Max Renn's Videodrome-tumour induced episode of a gun assimilating itself into his "old flesh" via a series of gorily tunneling conduits...


... and even more so, the disgusting Harkonnen "heart plugs" from Lynch's Dune.


Finally, much to my amusement, after having the device removed, my doctor described the hole left in my neck as "the mark of the Vampire". Groovy.