Friday was by far one of the most fucked days of my entire life. I had no idea what was coming my way.
So after a night of staring up at the ceiling because sleep and I have a very touch and go relationship these days, I pulled myself together and headed down to the car with my grandma. We drove over the bridge and my phone kept beeping with well wishes and funny anecdotes to cheer me up, but there really wasn't anything that was going to ease my mind. It was a rare morning where I actually felt hungry when I woke up, but due to medical restrictions, there was no possible way for me to eat food this morning. Traffic on the bridge wasn't so bad, and we got to 400 Parnassus Ave early for my first appointment.
The first appointment I had this morning was un ultrasound. I was lead into a dark room by a young Asian nurse, told to take off my shirt, put on a hospital gown, and lay down on a reclining chair. The nurse then squirted warm lube onto my abdomen. Its not uncommon for guys to have fantasies about asian women, dark rooms, and warm lube, but I guarantee that this isn't what most guys have in mind. For the next thirty minutes, the nurse ran a plastic tool with a rolling edge over every square inch of my abdomen. Part of the restrictions for the tests were no food six hours before the test. I hadn't eaten anything but Wheat Thins since midnight, so when the nurse asked If I had breakfast and looked at me funny when I said no, my mind instantly went WHAT. THE. FUCK. However, it is clearly posted all over the ultrasound department that the person administering the test is merely a technician, and they are not qualified to answer anything regarding the results of your ultrasound. Hey UCSF, if you don't want your patients asking questions, tell your lab techs to keep a straight face when they see some weird shit. Dicks.
When we finished at the ultrasound department, there was about an hour and a half to kill before my next appointment. I wrote in my last entry about how I couldn't read my doctors handwriting because it looked like black metal font and there were undecipherable words written on the test order. Well, after taking a second look at the sheet, I was a little wrong. There was one word that clearly stood out that I had either overlooked or blocked out mentally: INJECTION. Seeing as how I actually felt like I was starving, and no matter how interesting Chris Nieratko's Skinema is, waiting in the food court would have drove me insane. Grandma and I decided to head to the other appointment early to see if maybe I could get in there early. It seemed unlikely, but hey, you know never know, right?
We headed to 505 Parnassus Ave and took the elevator to the third floor. Upon going to the third floor, I saw a sign that scared the absolute shit out of me: NUCLEAR DIAGNOSTICS. Let's do the mental math here: nuclear means radioactive elements often used in bombs that destroy everything within a couple hundred miles of where they detonate, and diagnostics are means to diagnose or uncover a health issue. I quickly realized that my morning took a turn for the worst. We walked up to the check in desk and waited as the young, brunette nurse in purple scrubs apathetically argued with a patient over the phone over an appointment time. When she hung up the phone, I handed her my sheet, explained that I knew I was here early, and asked if it would be remotely possible for me to be seen earlier than 11. She told me she would look into it. That wasn't my only question though....
"So what exactly is a HIDA Scan with a CCK Injection?" I asked.
"Oh, um, it means they're going to take a bunch of pictures of your abdomen and kidneys," she answered in an odd, uneasy tone.
Listen lady, you're cute, but you fucking fail at keeping a poker face.
We sat down to wait, and I nervously finished reading Ben Snakepit's new anthology, Life in the Jugular Vein (which is really good). Twenty minutes go by and a male lab tech calls my name, and leads my grandma and I down to another, smaller waiting room. The lab tech, Craig, told me that I would need to be outfitted with an IV, and lead me into a triage station to get me ready. As we are walking into the triage, I figured that this guy would know what the HIDA scan/CCK Injection is. He won't bullshit me, right? So I ask him. I really wasn't prepared for the answer.
"Well...we are going to shoot radioactive material into your blood, which will be absorbed into your liver by the (insert sciencey as fuck word), which is where bile is made. Once its made into bile, were going to track how it gets to the gall bladder. After an hour, we are going to inject the CCK, which is a chemical that makes your gall bladder contract, releasing the radioactive stuff out of your gall bladder. Don't worry though, there aren't any side effects or anything like that. So let's find your vein here...."
Uh...what?
Craig gets my IV in, and walks me back to the waiting room. Seeing as how it had been eleven hours since my last meal of Wheat Thins, I didn't have a lot of gas left in the tank, so Craig had to keep me from falling over three or four times on the way back to the waiting room. I sat back down, attempted to read, but realized I was still too nauseous from the IV and had to put my head between my legs. Five minutes later, Craig came and got my grandma and I, and took us to the testing area.
As we entered the room, to the left was a large, box shaped machine with a bed coming out of the middle of it. Craig told me to lay on the bed, and then slid the bed under the box. He attached a bag of sketchy looking liquid to my IV, lowered the large, square camera down so that there was about two inches of room between the camera and my chest, hit a few buttons, and the party started. I felt every bit of that liquid go into my arm, and I was overcome with this feeling of great discomfort. I instantly had the urge to shift my body as the liquid pumped itself in. It wasn't painful, but it took everything I had to not push my way out of the camera, and I kept writhing and moving side to side the best I could given the small amount of room I had. It was the longest hour of my life. Luckily enough, I managed to fall asleep for about twenty minutes, but was woken up by a family who had a seven year old sun receiving a CT Scan next door. The only solace I had was taken by a poor kid who I'm sure had no idea how bummed he was going to be in a couple of minutes.
At the end of what seemed like six or seven years, Craig came back wheeling a table with a small appliance fitted with a tube of clear liquid in a plunger on top, with a connectable IV tube coming out of it. I am not a doctor, I'm not even a smart man all the time, but my Spidey sense knew enough to know that what was on that table was bad, bad news.
"So I'm going to start the CCK Injection. We are going to infuse the CCK into your bloodstream over fifteen minutes, then observe for another fifteen minutes. Oh, you may experience some nausea or slight pain, but that really depends on how your body is."
By nausea and slight pain, Craig meant severe, shooting pains that I couldn't even react to because I had no room to move. Even though it was only my gall bladder contracting, it felt like my entire stomach was trying to fight itself. The last thirty minutes of that test was abosolutely agonizing. After the appointment, I had plans with my grandma to go out to a celebratory lunch. I quickly realized that any plans I thought I was going to be able to keep on Friday were out the fucking window. My life was hijacked. Again.
Finally, the torture ended. The camera was lifted, the bed was moved outward, Craig pulled my IV out, and my grandma and I were sent on our way. I don't know how I looked when I made that walk back to the car, but I know that I couldn't stand up straight and that I was out of my fucking mind if I thought I was going to be eating at the Cheesecake Factory anytime soon. We eventually got back to the car, drove back to Oakland, and I had a couple of eggs before passing out for hours.
Could anyone tell me what's wrong at that day? Of course not. I woke up Friday night feeling dirty, gross, depressed, and still without an answer. They said the radioactive chemical had no side effects, but I haven't felt off like this since getting this sick. So I went through hell and back and I still have to wait and wonder. I know no more now then I did Thursday night other than the HIDA Scan fucking sucks.
To sum it all up, my body went through hell and I still don't know what's wrong. Yay science.
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