Takes a Lickin' and Keeps on Tickin', Pt. 1

The nurse walked around the corner toward me, carrying a metal cylinder stickered with radioactive symbols. She cautiously slid a syringe of clear liquid from the cylinder, removed the needle's cap and inserted the tip into my IV. "You may feel a little cold when the isotope enters your bloodstream." Will I feel anything else: nauseous, shaky, a third nipple sprouting from the middle of my chest. "No. This is a fairly harmless stuff," she said, quickly slipping the empty needle into the cylinder. "Now, we have to wait for about an hour for the isotope to work its way into the heart muscle, and then I can take the first images in that room over there." She pointed to an open door across the hall. I saw the head and shoulders of an elderly man lying on a table, tousled hair, arms stretched and crossed above his head, apparently asleep while a machine gently whirred. "Let me take you to the waiting room where you can read or watch TV, and I'll be back in about 30 minutes with some water."

As I stood from the chair, the Echo tech arrived ready to whisk me to the other side of the building for an ultrasound of my heart. "You've already injected the isotope." It sounded like a half-question, half-statement.

"Yes," she responded, "he's got to wait a while for the stuff to get to his heart so I didn't want him to wait."

The tech hesitated. "Okay.... Well, the doctor ordered a ultrasound and a cholesterol screening so that should have been done first." He seemed a bit flustered.

"That's okay. He's all set." I gathered my bag and shirt and followed the tech past the older folks waiting in the lobby who stared at me. I'm sure I made an awful sight, carrying a bag and shirt in one hand while an IV dangled from the elbow of the other arm. He lead me through a heavy down, down a maze-like corridor to Treadmill Room #2. "Set your stuff down on that table, and then take off your t-shirt." I looked down at the IV tube then back at him. He was busy typing into a computer so I began by retracting my right arm through the sleeve brought the shirt up and over my head and stopped. The tech looked up. "Ah, let me help you with that." Together, we carefully slid the shirt over my left arm and the IV tube. "Up on the table and lay on your left side." With my arm sticking straight out, I watched as he squeezed some gel onto a soft-tipped tube -- I thought of a bingo dauber for some reason -- and pressed it against my chest. I gasped a bit at the iciness. While he moved the tube and I shifted as he asked, I watched the monitor as a gray and white mass appeared. With every thump of my heart, a tiny flap raised and lowered on the screen. It was a bit mesmerizing, seeing my own heart beating in front of me. The tech said the occasional "good shot" or "hold your breath" while he captured a few screen images then pieced them together, telling me that he was figuring out the size of my heart.

Once we were done, he helped me into a front-closing gown so I wouldn't have to keep removing my shirt then handed me over to another tech to draw a blood sample for the cholesterol screening. He took one look at the IV in my left arm and said, "That's going to hurt when she pulls the tape off. She should have used this." He showed me a roll of blue material tape. "It only sticks to itself. A lot less painful to remove." I thought back to the hospital a few weeks ago, when the nurse used a clear sticker to hold the IV in place. That felt like my skin was being shaved off as she ripped the sticker away, and I cried for the one and only time that day.

The tech sent me back across the staring lobby to the waiting room by the lockers. I changed from my jeans into my gym shorts and realized that I left sneakers at the apartment. If worse comes to worse, I could always do the treadmill in my socks. I slid the locker key around my wrist and sat in the tiny waiting room, trying to read the book I'd brought while the folks on TV panned for tourmaline in San Diego.

...to be continued...