The new orthopedic surgeon sent me in for a bone scan today.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, if you haven’t been paying close attention. We know a physical therapist who gave me a once over, some year-plus after my collarbone and shoulder surgery. First thing he did was touch the hardware, which meant the second thing that almost happened was me hurting him back.
But, because he was “a professional” and “just doing his job” we accept that he deliberately hurts people.
I kid. But only just.
So he sends me to a nationally-renowned guy. That surgeon tested my rotator cuff and my nerves and pronounced them good. He took an X-ray and we discussed all of the usual complaints. And, believe me, a year into this stuff I’m tired of complaining about it.
So it is either the hardware, muscular or a bone issue, he said. Let’s schedule you a bone scan.
That was last week, and so today was the bone scan.
This is how a bone scan works.
You fill out paperwork in the ground floor lobby. Then they send you up to a second floor radiology lobby. And there you fill out more paperwork.
Someone comes along and takes you through a second door and down another elevator to the radiology department. The people there have a good sense of humor about all this. They’re in the dungeon. They figure no one will ever find them down there. That’s not a bad thing unless the building caves in, and so on.
You’re shuttled into a windowless room that is 16 x 18. I know this because I was on my back long enough to measure the tiles. They give you a little injection into the back of your hand. This is the radioactive material.
Yup. Stay away from me, kids!
They put you on your back on a narrow curved bench. It gets narrower because it has to move under the Siemens machine that is scanning your bones. In order to move, part of the bench on either side disappears. Now, I have sufficiently broad shoulders that I am hanging off both sides of the bench.
So I tuck my left hand under the small of my back because it has to go somewhere, right? That’s not good, they say. Try your pocket. Also not good, we learned.
They then wrap me in some stretchy fabric to keep me in place. I’m cocooned! And now this large, featureless square of metal with Siemens stamped on the side is descending over my head and upper body. This is a giant, hospital industrial green square. The only thing to look at is a tiny plus sign in the center of the surface area.
This is the quick shot, just to see where the radiation goes in my muscles.
They dismissed me for lunch, where I could do anything I liked, but I had to come back right after that for more extensive scans.
Did I mention they’ve set me lose on the world with radiation coursing through my veins?
So I did everything for the rest of the day with the alias Isa Tope.
After lunch it was back to the radiation lobby, where the radiologist met me once again. Her name is Star. Her last name is not van Allen, but it does strike you as the perfect name for a radiologist. She’s been working there for seven years.
I said I took my wife out for lunch …
“Awww.”
But she wanted chicken fingers and I told her that the radiologists told us I could eat anything but chicken fingers.
“You did not!”
Back on the magically disappearing bench. Back inside the swaddling, which for this much longer scan came to take on the feel of a mummification. And that giant, featureless Siemens square. I couldn’t figure out the sensation before, but I had an hour or more to contemplate it this time. It was like being squished like a bug, only in slow motion.
Star said “It is important you don’t move.” I told her it was obvious she’d not discussed this procedure with my mother or anyone else that knows me. She said I took a nap. Somehow I doubt that.
She turned the machine off and unwrapped the great big stretchy linens that had been holding me in place.
She walked me back to the lobby and said the preliminary examination suggested I had all my bones. (The first small victories are always the sweetest.) I asked her if I would sprout a tail, or turn green.
She said she’d never had that happened, but really wanted to see it, just once.
I figure we give it a day, and if I don’t lose my melatonin or sprout a third thumb by tomorrow evening I’ll be in the clear.
And next week I have to go see the orthopedic doctor so he can tell me if my bones are healed.
My bet: yes.
