Full Frontal Medical (Part 4)

Day 2: (8:35am) Merry Go Round

I kept to the nurse's orders. No solid foods after 8pm. I wasn't sure if vodka jello counted as solid, so I excluded it from my post 8pm menu. Must admit I was impressed with the dinner they gave me at the hotel this time. Delicately prepared dish after dish were carried to my table. Would you like more bread, madam? Would you like some more wine, madam? I constantly had 3 waiters coming up to me bringing me dishes that had a “name” (seasonal vegetables and avocado sashimi with sweet wasabi sauce) and a “theme” (early winter frost in the open plains of Inner Mongolia); every time the waiters brought a dish I was given a lengthy explanation of how it was prepared, where the ingredients came from, and why it was arranged the way it was.

With waiters like that, there is no need for industrial espionage by competitors in the hotel catering business.

I turned up at the clinic a bit after 8:35am. I went a bit easy on the drinking last night coz I knew exactly what I had on the menu this morning: Barium Meal. (Why do they call it a meal anyway? It's a thick, dense, heavy, milky-looking liquid that has the texture and flavour of runny Colgate!)

Anyone who has undergone a stomach X-ray would know that the nurses give you fizzy powder that make you want to burp (but you can't, otherwise they make you drink it again) followed by Runny Colgate while the X-ray machine is rotated up, down, left, and right like a fairground ride. Not a good examination to take if you suffer from motion sickness, or are hung over.

This was the fourth time I had endured these tests (torture), and I know I will have a few more of these "experiences" under my belt by my 40h birthday.

(perhaps I'm a bit of a masochist...)

The other tests continued as per schedule; they put me in a tube and took pictures of my brain, and made me do simple addition, remember a series of words to be repeated backwards, and read out loud. I wondered if Nutts would manifest herself as a shadow activity in my PET scan so I told her to keep quiet just in case the doctors decide to wheel me into the "special" room just as they wheeled that woman yesterday....

(I really wonder what happened to her....)

Nutts must have behaved herself, for after my final test I was told that lunch will be served in an hour, and I was free to get changed, go for a walk -- shopping even -- and the doctor will give me the preliminary results at 1pm.

WOW! I'm free! Done! Finito!

(results of FFM to continue....)