I had my PET scan last week. It was actually a combined PET/CT scan, now my third. They want you to drink contrast medium to help visualize the intestines, and you actually have to drink quite a bit of it. They say "two cups" but the cups are the size of McDonalds milk shakes, so when you're trying to get the second one down, it feels more like two quarts.
My old oncology clinic made me drink this nasty white stuff that had about the consistency of 90 weight gear oil. At first the light blueberry flavor tastes pretty good, but the stuff is slimy and nasty and in the end the blueberry flavor becomes unpleasant. It takes some work to chug that stuff down, and it isn't always inclined to stay down, if you know what I mean.
The stuff at the hospital is different. It looks like, and for all the world tastes like, extremely weak strawberry-flavored Koolaid. It's easier to drink that the gooey stuff from the oncology clinic, but much messier on its way out of my system. Machs nichts, I guess - it's all ugly, just ugly in different ways.
My wife tells the story of when she and the kids were driving through South Dakota looking for the Badlands and they stopped to ask a highway department employee where the Badlands were. "Lady, it's all bad land," was his laconic reply. Quite. It's all bad land; the only question is whether it's going to be bad up front or later on.
Lately I've been having troubled dreams about an ugly brown Oldsmobile 98 with no visible driver trying to run me over. I don't think you have to be Freud to figure out what that dream means, but it does highlight the fact that my body has recovered from chemo sufficiently that I can at last actually achieve REM sleep. For several weeks I couldn't sleep for more than about ten minutes at a time, and that's not hyperbole, that's the actual fact. It's difficult to get much of a dream going on in ten minutes and the REM deprivation reaches the point that you'll do anything to knock yourself out for a while, including drinking half a bottle of Old Grand Dad. At least these days I'm not half-crazed by REM deprivation. I'm just half-crazed by dreams of ugly brown Oldsmobiles.
It's all bad land.
Is That All?
11 years ago
1 comment:
Don't know if you have the interest, but there's a really great book titled Bad Land about the last homesteading push in Montana right around the turn of the century. You could check it out while you're in isolation if you felt like it.
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