Well you might have but I didn't. Sunday found me back in hospital as for some reason that's when my CT scan was scheduled - rather a surprise as I figured the NHS wouldn't work weekends. The hospital was a bit of a strange place on the weekend, none of the frenzied activity when I was there the previous week for the colonoscopy, just a few people milling about and of course nobody on the reception at the CT suite.
The Radioactive Doughnut of Doom
(your actual NHS model might be a bit older and more tatty)
(your actual NHS model might be a bit older and more tatty)
However after tem minutes or so someone rocked up and I was sat down with a big jug of water and told to drink it slowly over the next hour. They didn't tell me what it was but being of a scientific bent I figured it was some sort of barium solution or something similar. I was rather expecting it to taste foul but it just tasted of water. I was surprised how busy the CT suite actually was with a steady stream of people from the wards and A&E trundling through for scans including one poor old sod who was having a full body scan "so we can see what's making you go all wobbly Mr Smith" - honestly if* I ever get old and they patronise me like that they're going to get both nostrils set to "crispy"**.
Anyway after an hour of glugging my show up on the machine drink and chatting to Mrs Miggins and her sister who'd come in for a look at her dicky bladder it's my turn in the doughnut of doom. Again, as seems to happen these days every time I enter the gravitational field of a medical professional, they stick a needle in my arm but this time it's connected by a long spiral tube to a pointy-nosed drug dispensing robot. This was easy according to the technician working doom doughnut as I have "good veins". Well at least there's something on the dragon that works.
So after that the tech dissapears and the doughnut of doom slides me into itself, whizzes its internal mechanism round for a quick look and then winds itself up into a spinning frenzy like a cross between the Stargate off that show on the Sci-Fi channel and my washing machine on a fast cycle; an american voice tells me to hold my breath and then I'm shot through the machine. This happens a couple of times and then the beast starts to spin down (without having fired me to the far reaches of the galaxy to do battle with the Goa'uld - bit of a dissapointment that)
So that was that, relatively painless and the scan itself was done in a few minutes.
And now it's back to waiting.
There seems to be a lot of waiting.
* big "if" at the moment I guess
** I can breathe fire you know, proper dragon here, not like those wussy Chinese ones that just make it rain.
Did you get that feeling like you are about to wet yourself when the drug first flushes through your veins? I did. It was quite alarming! They were checking out my liver, gallbladder and pancreatitis!
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