Medical Monday

 

  Well, I finally had my long-awaited CT scan today, no thanks to me.  When my nurse called a couple of weeks ago to tell me of the schedule, it was early in the morning, and I was sound asleep.  She gave me all the proper instructions about the medications to take leading up to the test, as well as where/when to pick up the contrast liquid to drink before showing up for the scan.  As it turns out, the only part I remembered was about the medications.  In my defense, though, that’s the part that gave me a better chance of not having another allergic reaction to the dye and subsequently dying, so you can see why it was the part that sunk in.

But, when I got to registration this morning and read over all the papers, that’s when I had the flashbulb go off and I remembered she’d distinctly told me I had to drink some nasty-tasting stuff to get ready for the scan.  Oops.  The registration lady was certain I’d have to reschedule, but, thankfully, I’m not the only person to ever have this problem, and the technician was kind enough to let me drink the stuff then, though that meant I had to wait another hour and a half before getting the scan.  Not the way I wanted to spend my whole morning, but my own fault, so what are you going to do about that?

Of course, I was already a little worried about having the scan with the dye, so I wasn’t thrilled with delaying it, since the meds I’d taken had been on a very precise schedule based upon the time of my test, and now I’d screwed it up.  But the technician assured me she had a five hour window while the medicine would still be effective, so not to worry.  Easy for her to say; she’s not the one who’d been previously told to NEVER take this stuff again, on fear of potential death.  It’s the sort of thing a person tends to remember. 

But, as you may have deduced by the fact that I’m writing about the event, I did manage to survive.  No hives like last time, or the breathing or heart problems that the medical folks list as the most serious of the possible side effects.  But I didn’t escape entirely without problems; the stuff gave me an immediate and fairly severe headache, along with puffy-feeling eyes, and a warm, flushing face.  That worried the folks, but all my vitals were fine.  They had me hang around another half hour or so to make sure nothing was going to get worse, and it didn’t, but the symptoms haven’t gone yet, even after a day of lounging, napping, and even eating sensibly.  Seriously, I don’t know much about iodine (the main ingredient in the imaging dye), but it and I clearly do not get along very well.

But after all that, now I’m back to waiting.  I’ve got my follow-up appointment Friday, which will hopefully be a clean bill of health on everything, leaving the GYN solution as the most likely to resolve my issues.  Of course, like I said, it’s still a couple of months before I’ll be able to do anything about it, which means another couple of months of putting up with the constant pain, but I’ll just be glad to have a plan of action in mind. 

Image courtesy of renjith krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net