Today was cholesterol testing which involves fasting. You all should feel bad for my mother right now. She gets texts like this while I ride the bus:
What the above picture does not show you is that I then sent her 4 more rapid fire text asking her questions before she could respond. She loves when I do that. Especially at 6:30 am.
So while fasting and clearly a little grumpy about it I waited in line for the blood lab. Knowing that I am a hard stick, as I can only ever have blood drawn from my left arm, adds to my morning crankiness. However, I was instantly disarmed when by luck of the draw, a breast cancer survivor is slotted to draw my blood. She takes one look at my left arm and retrieves the best stick in the unit. She made sure I was only stuck once. Thank you! Four tubes of blood at 15 minutes later I am happily united with my oatmeal.
With food in the belly I went to work on the day until it was time for my MUGA (heart) scan. As my ejection fractions have been slightly trending down since I started the vaccine trial I have started to become a little unnerved by this benign test. I lucked out again as the best stick in Nuclear medicine was the guy putting my IV in (one shot) and gave me the PYP prep to make my cells sticky for the technetium. After sitting in the waiting room for 45 minutes {side note doing work with an IV in your hand makes typing on a computer slightly more difficult} it was time to lay down and be scanned. I got hooked up to some leeds to have the electrical system of my heart monitored.
Here's where my brain became an enemy of my heart.
The first scan I am able to watch my heart waves and my heart rate. While watching the heart waves I notice that there are a couple of blips. But, I know nothing about PQRST things beyond that I know the parts of the wave are named based on the letters. And because I know nothing, my first thought is this can't be good. When the tech comes back into the room, my heart rate is at 60 bpm. He asks me "Do you have a prosthetic in?" Me, now at 120 bmp "Why does my scan look wierd? And holy crap are those numbers accurate". The tech assured me that he just forgot to ask me if I had a prosthetic boob and it was something he is supposed to ask every person with a history of breast cancer. And that my elevated heart rate was from me now moving around. He did not say panicking. But I'll say it. It's because I totally panicked. Which is exactly what you want to do during a heart test. You want to obsess over every beat and blip especially when you have 20 more minutes of scanning where you have to keep still. Thankfully, I got a grip 1.5 seconds later looked at the monitor, took a deep breath and my heart rate slowed back to my normal 60 bpm. The tech asked me if I was feeling ok and asked if I wanted a blanket. I told him cold was my friend and that I was currently HOT. I assured him that it was an internal issue not one that would be fixed by lowering the external temperature.
The remaining 2 scans (10 minutes a piece) don't allow me to watch my heart waves or see my heart rate. To relax I try to figure out how many seconds I'll be scanned. This leads me to singing "Season's of Love" from Rent in my head , you know 525,600 minute. This leads to a random sampling from Rent on shuffle in my head. The remaining time passes quickly without any further panicking. It does however confirm that I have put on my crazy pants. The radiologist reads it and sends a report to my oncologist. We'll discuss it a week from Wednesday.
My mother asked me not to obsess about the test. This blog post totally demonstrates that I am not doing that. Totally.
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