But I want an Oompa Loompa NOW!

Well, I’m back from the scan. What a non-stop rollercoaster ride of excitement that was! Basically, it goes like this:

Sign away all human rights and privileges
Get an IV (ouch)
Be injected with a toxic yellow colored liquid
Lie down on the machine
…Forever
Nope, not done yet
Juuuuuuuust keep lying there
Don’t move the torso!
Not done yet.
Keep not moving
A little longer…

This goes on for an hour. Then, the cheerful radiologist will inject you with fat. Yes, that’s right! The stuff my doctor has warned me repeatedly to avoid at all costs. Right into the vein! {schloooooop!} This makes your gallbladder constrict so they can monitor how well it does(n’t) send its payload of bile down the tracks.

Now, before my very good friend Bill injects the fat, he tells me I can expect any combination of the following:

Cramping feeling
Pain
Nausea
Nothing

What I got within about eight seconds of the vile vial being emptied into that IV was a feeling first like someone with a rather large boot on was stepping on my stomach. It got hard to breathe. It got harder to breathe. It got rather alarmingly hard to breathe.

Then suddenly, just when I was about to start babbling incoherently (“Is it supposed to be {gasp} hard to breathe {gasp}? ‘Cause it’s really {gasp!} hard {gasp!} to breathe {gasp gasp!}!”) I could breathe again – and, I had Pain. Holy smokes. It felt like tiny little hot needles were being jabbed into my gallbladder. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow…fortunately, just as my very good friend Bill had promised, it faded to nothing within five minutes and left me craving pizza.

Don’t ask me why. For the last half hour of the test, while the machine monitored how much radioactive bile (which I think would be a great name for a rock band – ladies and gentlemen please give a warm Cleveland welcome to RADIOACTIVE BILE! {the crowd goes wild}) my gallbladder was(n’t) passing along to my small intestine, all I could think of was pizza. With mushrooms. Piping hot pizza, gooey with mozzarella, a bunch of fresh fungus steaming away on top of it.

Anyhoo, I had to lie still for over an hour and a half.

No knitting.
No reading.
Not even a @*^&@ TV (not that this would have made me happy, since I don’t like soaps, daytime “newscasts”, or reruns of sitcoms from the 60s, 70s, 80s…)

It was torture I tell you, torture!!!

Astonishingly, though, I made it through. I meditated (mostly about pizza and why it is such an inherent good and why I believe, as an inherent good, it could not possibly hurt me to get just a wee little tiny 26” personal sized pizza from Big Luigi’s Pizza Joint), practiced ‘just letting things be’, and suddenly it was time for him to peel all the tape off my arm, yank out the IV and send me staggering away. (The IV was no big deal. The tape, however…memo to me: next time, shave your arms before going to the hospital.)

And then, as per usual, when I asked with a positively embarrassingly bad attempt at casualness, “Soooooo…did it look like the old gallbladder was doing anything? There? To you?” I got the usual and customary reply: “Heh heh, I just take the pictures, I don’t do the diagnosis. Your doctor will have results by Monday.”

I resisted the urge to fling Bill onto the ground and jump on his spleen until he told me everything he knew. Or made up something. I didn’t care which. I wanted an Oompa-Loompa now, not freakin’ Monday or on the 4th of Octember. Now, now, NOW!!

After having laid still for an hour and a half, meditating (mmmm…gooey warm goodness…) and otherwise becoming as one with my inner peace, I was halfway desperate for some instant gratification. Could I walk across the hall and sign up for surgery now? Should I start collective surgical resumes? Is the end in sight, or not? Is it the gallbladder, or not? Just tell me!

It is amazing how being sick can shake cowardice off me. In real life, all you’d have to do to make me decide that whatever ailed me probably wasn’t that big a deal would be to say, “OK, so, we’ll just start an IV…hey…where’d she go?!”

But not only was I completely OK with the IV, but I’m anxious to go back to the hospital again and get another IV and let them cut a hole in me and yank out my gallbladder.

So now I’m back to waiting. However, on the positive side…I feel remarkably good. And I have the Whole Entire Day Off Work today. Sure, I could log in anyway and get back working on a few things I’d like to finish up…

…but then again…

See, there’s this yarn store, in Ripon…?