About nothing

Everyone seems so impressed that I could get up and walk around and do things like healthy person. "I am a healthy person", I would say. I feel fine.

A perfectly good Saturday being spent bored out of my mind waiting for this MRI that was supposed to happen. Every once in a while a doctor or physician's assistant or a physical therapist of some sort would come in and do that test where I squeeze their fingers and touch my nose and I would of course knock that test out of the ballpark. I exhausted all my social media and caught up on all my correspondence and the reading I had with me and explored the hospital TV channels up-and-down over and over for Olympics coverage that might engage me.

Finally a neurologist named Dr. Santos came in and gave me his version of the battery of easily passed brain damage tests and talked about my upcoming MRI scan (now scheduled for 6 PM) and what else these symptoms could mean. He said it was unusual for a stroke to strike in the same way twice so that my description of having experienced the phenomenon in identical terms played against the idea that it was a stroke. He inquired about the experience of how the experience came on.  I described it is kind of like the John Travolta film called "Phenomenon" where it came on like a flash of light, all at once. He spoke of the experience being somewhat like a migraine and asked if I had any experience with migraine, which I hadn't. Then he brought up an idea that had crossed my mind but since no one else had mentioned it had decided to just not think about it being a possibility. It could be a small mass in my brain.

From that moment on I was quite sure that that was indeed the case. The cancer, I imagined, had metastasized in my brain. I had seen it happen to my friend Bob Russell and now it was happening to me. From here on, the upcoming MRI became a subject of dread for me. Of course. This explained it all. This was the beginning of the end.

At 5:45 PM I was finally fetched by the transpo guy and wheeled down to the MRI room. I smartly chose not to have music piped in this time and they gave me both ear plugs and earphones to insulate from the pounding noise that happens inside an MRI. The guy trie to find a nurse who could access my port for me since they were going to inject contrast but he could not find one to pick up a phone so so he ended up poking new hole in my arm to give me the contrast dye. It's weird that this non-nurse technician is allowed to poke a hole directly into my vein but he can't put a syringe on the apparatus that's already plugged into me.

I kept myself calm by imagining all these noises, those percussive jackhammer booms and ratatat sounds were a form of music. They give you sort of a periscope so that it looks like you're looking straight forward but you're really looking over your body into a window where you can see the technician sitting at a control panel. It was finally over. My whole day, the last 20 hours, was spent waiting for this test.

Mary was waiting for me back in the room. She snuggled with me on the hospital bed, watching Olympics while we waited for the results of the wet read, dreading the worst news.

The news was finally delivered by an African nurse named Michael who was clearly a little bit English-challenged but his news was good; the results were negative. Nothing. Michael went on to read the follow up instructions in broken English. Go home. Call Dr. Santos' office on Monday and schedule an EEG as an outpatient and a follow up appointment in three weeks. Continue life as normal.

Everyone kept saying that it was such a good thing that I came in to the ER when I did but the grand result is inconclusive.  I may or may not have had a TIA. I spent  29 hours of my life feeling perfectly normal in a hospital room, mostly on a bed with commercial TV as a companion. A good thing I came in? Really?