Private investigations*

Thought I should do a quick catch up since it’s been a while. Turned out I was still to have a third EUS, this time by the senior consultant. I’d just about recovered from the antibiotics in time to have my tum upset all over again last Thursday. (By the way, talking of unpleasant experiences, there’s enough alcohol in Oramorph solution to trigger the side effect with metronidazole. Found that out the hard way in the small hours of the Saturday morning before last and got through the rest of that weekend just on co-codamol every six hours, which wasn’t a lot of fun.)

I wasn’t too bad after the EUS, just a bit sore and with very limited appetite for a couple of days. I had the PET scan yesterday afternoon, being taken there and back by Steve and Denise who wanted to do some furniture shopping in Nottingham. The Department of Nuclear Medicine is actually at Nottingham City Hospital, off to the NE of the city, not far from the Mansfield road. A 4 o’clock appointment meant nil by mouth except water from 10 onwards, much tougher to do than just missing breakfast for a morning slot, but we made it ok.

It’s a tedious rather than uncomfortable procedure as it takes much longer than a CT scan, twenty minutes in my case. That’s twenty minutes of lying dead still on the quite narrow gurney as it trundles back and forth inside the white tunnel. The injection of special medium an hour beforehand makes you mildly radioactive for a few hours, so the staff stay well away from you once you’ve had it. They can’t even help you get off the gurney when it’s all over: which can be a problem after all that time on your back in a tray with curved sides and your arms out above your head.

It’s only just occurred to me today that if  “InHealth Nottingham” were prepared to shell out for a couple of the fancy lead aprons they all wear in Endoscopy in the Royal when doing an ERCP, the staff wouldn’t need to keep away...

Heigh ho, a few days of nothing much happening now until I’m discussed in the MDT case conference on Friday morning, after which Kate will ring me with what’s been decided.

*It’s one of my favourite Dire Straits tracks, even if some people think it’s the most boring thing Mark Knopfler ever wrote, so there!