Different things

On Thursday I got my third CT scan in less than half a year.  I didn’t receive loyalty benefits, but at least I knew what to expect.  The basic process goes like this.

You’re invited into a radiation-safe room with the machine, a big white torus.  You take off some clothes and remove everything made of metal, and lie down on a narrow bed.  The radiographer connects a pump to one of your veins to inject the contrast agents when the scan is taken.  She then leaves the room to start remote-control operation.  The bed slides into the torus that’s big enough to almost touch the ceiling.  Inside it, invisible to you, an X-ray source and, opposite it, a detector speed up and spin around an axis formed by you lying there.  You keep your eyes shut.  Upon prompting by the radiographer, you hold your breath, and images are taken.  The contrast agent is injected and more images are taken.  The contrast agent heats your upper body immediately and strongly, a feeling that’s not entirely pleasant.  Then it’s over.

This all happened on Thursday, but things were slightly different.  I had to report to the oncology nurses before the procedure.  The punctured my port and connected a bit of tubing.  This would get me connected to the pump by the CT scanner more easily.  Walking from the oncology outbuilding to the radiology department with a foot of clear plastic tubing dangling from my chest was a bit of a strange experience.  Before I was admitted to the CT room, I had to ingest 600 ml of a clear liquid without a distinct taste, a second contrast agent.  I consumed this over half an hour.

The purpose of the scan was to check that no new clumps of transformed cells had appeared inside me since I started chemo.  Remember that I was all clean inside and free of visible cancer thanks to a successful operative resection of the existing growths.  I have no answer as to why they would make an appearance now, halfway through an aggressive chemotherapy program (though the issue of cancer cells becoming increasingly bacteria-like and acquiring resistance would make for an interesting post if I managed to make inroads into the literature), and I’m not worried about a possibly positive result.  On the other hand, a negative result wouldn’t mean much either besides everything going according to plan.

The CT scan went according to plan, and I was released an hour after I had started on the contrast fluid.  The next two days should have been easy.  The second half of the seventh chemo session had started and with it the period of recovery when any remaining discomfort fades away and life briefly returns to a conventional normal.

This time it was different.  Something had hit me.  Maybe it was the contrast agent I drank before the scan.  For two days afterwards, my gut went through violent upheaval.  I was never far from the toilet and frequently produced soundscapes I wouldn’t have wanted to share with anyone.  There was lots of liquid and lots of gas, and no more detail is needed.  It took until Saturday for things to calm down.

Now it’s all good, and maybe better than that.  My nose seems less bloody than in a long time.  The cold might finally be gone.  Tonight I rode the first proper climb on my trainer, a prolonged stretch a nick under 7% steep.  It felt good, and I wished it had gone on longer.  On Wednesday, I’ll start the eighth chemo.  It will be more of the same, but things will again be slightly different.