ADB*

*Another Desperation Blip

Keeping to the now familiar routine, I was back up at Beaumont Hospital yet again. First time was to return the heart monitor from yesterday, which I'd been told to do before 9.30. Hopefully there'll be some useful information for the cardiologist in what's been recorded over the past 24 hours. One of the contacts came undone last night while I slept, but I connected it up again. Also, the clock on the monitor was still on winter time, which I only spotted well into my diary-keeping procedure, so I pointed this out so they'll be able to make sense of the relationship between the blips and bumps and what I was up to at the time.

The radiology oncologist wasn't happy yesterday when I told him my bone scan appointment wasn't until 31st May. He said he wanted this to happen sooner, but there's no way I was expecting what actually happened, which was that I got a phone call yesterday afternoon from the X-ray department in Beaumont, telling me that my bone scan had been brought forward to this morning at 11.30! So I made my way back home and then back again to the hospital to be injected with my dose of radioactive isotopes. It takes a few hours for things to make their way into the bones, so I was left to my own devices and told to return between 3.00 and 3.30. I did that, stopping off at my favourite vegetable shop to stock up on healthy food.

The scan took 12 minutes or so, and was no great hardship (though having the camera so close to my face at the outset gave me some idea of the claustrophobic feeling I can expect when it comes to the MRI). When I was done and told I could get down from the table, the radiologist asked me if I'd recently had a fall and hurt my ribs. I told him I had, during the snow and ice at the beginning of the year, and he was able to tell me that I had indeed cracked a rib. He said it must have been very sore at the time and I agreed that it was, but that it had sorted itself out after six weeks or so.

Not much else to report for the rest of the day, really. The blip? I was struck at some stage on one of my to- or from-the-hospital trips with this tenacious little growing thing, happy in its crack in the wall and showing up nicely in its patch of sunshine. For some reason it gave me a lift, and reinforced the slightly more upbeat feeling I came away with after yesterday's meeting with the radiology oncologist.