Mmm, banana barium...

So here I am, alive and well after my CT scan. I arrived at the hospital admitting department at 8am, and was then shuffled down to the proper office so I could start the "preparation." A nice woman appeared with two bottles of barium.

"Are you allergic to bananas?" she asked.

"Nope," I replied. She then handed me the bottles of banana-flavored barium sulfate. It was a little like a smoothie, and a lot more like banana-flavored Maalox. Both bottles were 450mL of joy. And by "joy," I mean "nausea-inducing goop that was never quite gone from the bottles." It was nasty to drink it for two hours. I got through one bottle in an hour, and then nurse at the desk said, "Are you done now?" I said, "With one bottle, yes."

What they had not told me was that I should've finished both bottles in one hour, because it takes another hour to work through your system enough to do the CT scan. Hmph. So I chugged the other bottle. Chugged 450mL of thick banana-nausea in about five minutes. That's chugging to me.

Then I was done with the sludge, and I sit in the waiting room for a bit. Another older gentleman walks in and sees the empty barium bottles next to me and says, "That stuff tastes like crap, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, but today it's banana-flavored crap," I said with a laugh.

He smiled. "Yeah, they'll flavor it, but it still always tastes the same." The nurse then came in and handed him two of the same bottles, and he grumbled. His wife scolded him, and then me for telling him it tasted bad. He just laughed and asked her to drink some of it so he wouldn't have to drink it all. She rolled her eyes.

About 15 minutes later, I'm escorted back into the scanning room, despite them telling me that I'd have to wait an hour.

The nurse tells me to lay down on the table before the giant donut-looking machine. At this point I have to pee like a race horse, but I'm already on the table, so I didn't want to interrupt anything. Plus I wasn't sure if I was supposed to feel like that on purpose, you know, to help the machine read my innards better.

The nurse then starts to insert an IV into my left arm. During the scan, they have to inject silver iodide into your blood stream as another way to help light things up. I giggle because silver iodide is also what's used in cloud-seeding to cause rain (again proving my meteorology nerd status), but this revelation would be even more appropriate considering how I'd feel once it was injected. She told me I'd feel warm all over once it went in.

In any case, that wouldn't be injected for a little bit. She says she's going to leave the room now, but the machine will tell me when to breathe. So, I'm slid back and forth through the donut hole a few times while a voice that sounds like The Computer from 2001: Space Odyssey tells me things like, "Okay, take a breath and hold it now, good. Now let it out."

It's all I can do to not laugh, thinking that The Computer will soon tell me to stop moving so much because, "That's not a good idea, I wouldn't do that if I were you." Also at this point, I start again thinking about the CT scan machine looks like the dimension portal thingee from Stargate. And so each time I slide back and forth on the table, I start giggling about how some other dimension is seeing my feet dangle in and out of the portal on their side.

Then comes the silver iodide. The nurse turns on the IV, and I instantly feel like I have just peed my pants. I'm warm all over as well, as she told me I would feel, and it's a little like being drunk. But I can't focus on that because I'm convinced that I just peed my pants and The Computer is going to be angry. "What are you doing?"

The nurse asks me how I feel, and I tell her it feels like I've just peed myself. She says I haven't, that's just another side effect of the iodide. See, now that's a side effect I wish she would've told me about before-hand, so I wouldn't have had that 30 seconds of terror where I thought I'd just rained all over myself and the Evil AI Stargate Computer.

Anyway, the whole test took about five minutes. Yup, two hours of prep for a five minute test.

And I'll get the results later today, so we'll see. I am a little tired of being poked and prodded so much in all these tests, so I'm hoping this will find something.

Thanks for the good thoughts, folks!