For the whole stay at the Institute of Hematology and Transfusion Medicine connected with the procedure, from entering the Institute’s grounds to being discharged from hospital after the procedure, you should set aside no more than 3.5 hours.

Admissions Room

On the day of the procedure, please come at the agreed time to the IHiT Admissions Room (Izba Przyjęć), which you can already see as you drive into the car park.

There, please tell the nurse that you have come for a port implantation or removal. Patients coming for port implantation are seen without queuing; a notice about this is displayed at both reception windows. This does not noticeably lengthen the admission of other patients, but it makes the best use of the operating theatre.

Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care

After the formalities in the Admissions Room, which do not take long, you will be taken to the Department of Anaesthesiology and Intensive Care on the first floor. There, at the entrance to the department, is a large, comfortable room with a bathroom and lockable clothes lockers.

In this room you will need to fill in an anaesthesia questionnaire and sign the consents to anaesthesia and to the procedure.

The Institute provides disposable two-piece clothing, so there is no need to bring pyjamas from home. Please bring light indoor shoes from home. I would also suggest bringing a small bottle of something to drink, and perhaps a tasty sandwich. They will come in handy when, after the operating theatre, you are getting ready to go home.
Once the formalities are done and you have changed, you will be taken to the operating theatre.

Operating theatre

Once the patient is lying on the operating table with its soft mattress, we have to “wire them up”: for safety we use various sensors to monitor the patient’s condition: a pulse oximeter on the finger, which shows how well the blood is oxygenated, a cuff on the arm that measures blood pressure, a tube that measures the carbon dioxide in the exhaled air, a face mask through which a mixture of oxygen and air is given, and ECG electrodes. We will do everything to keep the patient safe 🙂

There, as part of the preparation for the procedure, the nurse in the operating room will insert a cannula into a vein, through which we will give an intravenous sleeping agent. Sleep comes within a few minutes.

Next, the area to be operated on is anaesthetised locally: sleep does not provide anaesthesia, but local anaesthesia reduces the amount of sleeping agent needed to keep both sides, the patient and the operator, comfortable. Giving local anaesthesia to a conscious person is painful, which is why our patients fall asleep first and only then do we do these unpleasant things.

I need about 30 minutes to complete a port implantation. Port removals take 15–20 minutes. There are “speed champions” who can implant a port in about 15 minutes or even faster, but in my view that serves only the operator’s interest, at the patient’s expense, and I do not want to be counted among them.

At the end of the procedure we give an intravenous agent that reverses the effect of the sleeping agent, so the patient wakes up within a few dozen seconds. To allow the rest of this agent to be eliminated safely, after the procedure we take the patient to the recovery room on the same floor, within the operating suite.

Recovery room

The time in the recovery room is for getting back to how you were before the procedure and getting back on your feet safely. It does not exceed 45 minutes.

There, in the care of a nurse, you will be safely helped back on your feet. Once that has been achieved, which usually takes no more than three quarters of an hour, you will be taken back to the room on the first floor that you already know, where you can have a drink and eat the treats you brought from home.

This time you change into your own clothes and receive your discharge summary (karta informacyjna), and that formally ends your stay in hospital.

X-ray check after port implantation

In rare situations, e.g. when the port is implanted on the left side of the chest, or if there were doubts or difficulties during the procedure, a check chest X-ray is taken after the procedure. Such X-rays are needed in no more than 6% of all procedures.

Discharge summary

The discharge summary contains various important information, e.g. the access code for the prescription for a painkiller. Port implantation is regarded as a “minor” or “small” procedure, but it is still a procedure. Tissues are deliberately damaged: cut and stitched. These are objective reasons for feeling pain. And when should you take painkillers, if not when it hurts?

The discharge summary will also explain how to use the painkiller to get the best results. If you use other painkillers, that is no problem. I have no emotional or any other attachment to the medicine on the prescription. What matters to me is that you do not feel pain after the procedure.

The discharge summary will also explain how to look after the dressings.

Your stay at the Institute of Hematology on the day of the procedure