Not Dead Yet !: Dances with Porcupines

I'll get to the porcupine reference, eventually.

Chatting with a friend who has more diseases than I have... Well, I only have two forms of cancer, all else is well, that's an easy count to beat. The friend tells me about his second stroke.

Aside: That's two people I know who have had a stroke -- only to be told that that is not their first stroke. Hmmm... Don't have a stroke alone, if the symptoms clear up it's hard to define exactly what happened. Anyway:

This friend knew nothing about his first stroke. Or, rather, he fell over, woke up later, blamed it on... anything other than a stroke.

Second stroke, he is with family. They watch him -- take photos -- rush him to a doctor. The doctor says, Those photos show the classic signs of a stroke. Score one for photographic evidence :-)

So I come back with my own story. I'm told that I also showed the classic signs of an epileptic fit. But no-one took photos! Probably just as well, the classic signs for an epileptic fit are that I wet my pants.

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On that same number one (lol) topic... Here's the pattern of my waking during the night. Every couple of hours:

First, I wake up to have a pee. By then I'm cold, so I pull up some blankets and go back to sleep.

Next I wake up because I'm too hot. So I throw off blankets (after going for a pee, why not) and fall asleep again. Then wake up cold, go for a pee, pull up just one blanket, go to sleep.

Finally wake up for no good reason except that I've slept for six or seven hours. I'll wake up from relatively light sleep with remnants of dreams. A good sign is that this waking up often includes a "piss hard-on". Not that it's good for anything other than controlling the need to go to the toilet. (I go anyway.) Any erection at all is a sign that I am on the positive sign of my varying moods :-)

One dream -- the scrap that I remember -- has me dodging crocodiles. Possibly some reference to being worried about various bodily ills. In the dream, I do avoid every crocodile.

(Why not sharks, the more fashionable water-based threat? Sharks don't worry me: they stay in water, I avoid water. No worries.)

There's an interesting shift at the end of that dream: I'm looking at a block of land that I own, watching as I grow a crop, harvest it, repeat... I think, I only grow enough to get by, never push the land to its limits. I don't consciously think about it but that's a feature of my life: I enjoy what I have and don't work too hard to get more.

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Today is a day for a PET scan. It's five months since the last. I'm not too worried abut this scan: it's checking for new signs of testicular cancer. If it's back, it's treatable and not likely to kill me. So I'm told. The "dangerous" MRI scan is next month.

Today's scan is scheduled for just after 9am. I have time to drop Deb at work in town. This also takes my mind off the fact that I am fasting. I'm in the city with a clear hour to get to SCGH for my scan.

Nearing SCGH I am in the wrong lane for the parking... no time to change lanes. I drive past. Plenty of time.

The queue in the opposite direction is long, nowhere I can do a U-turn to join that queue. No worries, I can park in Kings Park and walk across. Still plenty of time. Take my water bottle... no... I failed to close it, it's now empty.

I park and follow... the wrong path. It adds a kilometre to my walk. I walk past the new children's hospital and find that there is another carpark there -- with plenty of empty spaces and a very short queue to get in. Too late, I'm almost there -- and running out of time.

I get into the hospital and follow signs to the "blue lifts". And miss. An orderly driving an indoor buggy stops, gives me a lift back to the blue lifts. I get there with five minutes to spare -- except that hospital clocks are running five minutes fast.

There has been one no-show. If I had been early I could have been scanned earlier. Oh well.

I need a thumb-prick to test my sugar levels and a cannula to feed in radioactive sugar. The thumb-prick hurts, now I'm still weak from loss of blood. (One small drop.) The nurse aims a cannula at my left arm -- and misses. A crooked vein, she says. She aims at my right arm -- and misses... ouch! I tensed, she says. (Yes, I did.) So she shoves the cannula into my wrist.

I'm clearly tense, I never like the needles going in. You're very tense and clammy, says the nurse. The morning so far has made me tense, the rapid walk to get here has made me sweaty and clammy. Time to relax...

I sit in the lead-lined room while radioactive sugar is dripped into my veins. I enjoy leaning the chair back -- until it hits the wall behind me. I push the down-button again, the brake unlocks with a clunk, the chair move forward, I relax. An hour's rest and relaxation.

Followed by a twenty minute scan. Free sandwiches to break the fast. A quick chat with a doctor to make sure that I am fit to leave. (This is standard for all PET patients.) The doctor has a French accent, I have no idea what she says. I guess it is, Are you feeling okay? I am, so I say I am. I'm ready to leave.

And that's the porcupine reference: four punctures, four small sticking plasters. Hold the last one on firmly, I'm told. Any post-PET-scan bleeding is treated as a radioactive spill.

Outside, the day is warming up. I take the short way back to the car, it's 1.2km. I'm looking forward to a cold coffee at the Park café... can't be bothered. I drive straight home.

Arrive home at noon and email Deb to say it's all done. Deb replies that she is just starting to worry.

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Phew! home at last. I do nothing much. Till the far more difficult task of sending an email to the wife of the cousin who just died.

I declared my terminal cancer before he was diagnosed with treatable cancer. We both treated it as a race to extinction... I'm taking an embarrassingly long time to die, he raced downhill fast. Hmmm... not sure who won that one...