Medical Trauma #412

I composed an entire post about my family's latest medical trauma while waiting for my sister to get a CT of her head on Friday.  I was in Chicago, where she lives. Of course, between that time and now, there have been a lot of wardrobe and suitcase changes, and I lost the whole thing. Lately she's been hearing her heartbeat in her ear, a swooshing noise. This is called pulsatile tinnitus.  Kind of like ringing in the ears, but swooshing instead.  Apparently this can be caused by nothing serious, or it can be caused by myriad horrid things too scary to write about (because if I write about them, it might give them secret powers).

Anyway, she was so nervous about the test that she forgot some important things, such as the doctor's order for the test.  We finally got it figured out, after hearing a story about the receptionist Matthew's St. Patrick's Day incident with his expensive Italian cell phone.  (Apparently he'd been drunk on margaritas and threw it at someone after only six days of ownership.  It was shattering to him to lose it. It was also shattering to the phone.)

In order to do the scan, they had to pump some sort of dye, probably radioactive, into her blood. They wouldn't let me go back there with her.  They claimed it was due to the radioactiveness of it all.  I think they just really don't like visitors in the medical world. Anyone care to comment on that?  Visitors just seem like more people to freak out and/or hold down. I could be wrong.

Sister Little said the dye made her super hot, like she was breathing fire.  It also gave her the disconcerting sensation that she was peeing.  They warned her this would happened and reassured her that though she would think she was peeing, she was not really peeing.  I guess she did well. The nurse told her afterward that about some women like the peeing sensation so much they want to do it again (gah) and some people are so freaked out they jump up and flee from the room, screaming, and have to be hunted down.

After all this, they burned her head images to a CD (which took, like, so much longer than it takes me to burn a CD, even when I have to use iTunes).  I asked her if we could play it in her car.  I wonder what it would sound like. Probably The Cure, or maybe the end of a Prince song.  She said no, she didn't really want to hear her brain on radioactive dye. I thought the little angel might like it. Touche.

So now we wait four business days to find out if she has any aneurysms.  It's sort of scary, so we're both trying not to think about it.  I told the mother of one of my childhood friends (I was also in Chicago this weekend - we all were - for a baby shower of yet another childhood friend) about the whole thing, this woman who has known me almost my entire life, and she said, "Don't invite trouble."  This particular woman has been a widow for at least ten years and has a daughter, one of my best friends, who had meningitis to the point where half her body was paralyzed and had to relearn to walk, was bitten by a brown recluse spider and has always lived on the edge.  Her other daughter, the organizer of the shower, had many medical problems of her own.  So I figured if anyone knew what she was talking about, M. did.  And so, I'm going to try really hard not to invite trouble where there currently isn't any.  At least not any bona fide documented trouble.

So there.