Scanning for signs of life

JON: One of the advantages of finally getting my CPR number a few months ago is that it magically opens doors and lets me go places – not, sadly, places like fancy restaurants or exotic holiday locations, but places like hospitals and consulting rooms where the national experts on PD are said to reside.

This is why we spent all day Friday in pursuit of pictures of the inside of my head.

5:30 am: M wakes up, waddles in to pour a half dozen pills into J
6:00 am: M, now dressed and coffeed, wakes J
6:15 am: M wakes J again, forces J out of bed and into clothes
6:45-7:00 am: J brushes teeth v-e-r-y slowly
7:00 am: M & J hit the road

At that time of day, I am quite a ways from functional, so the best contribution I could make to the drive was to snooze quietly while the radio kept M awake. It’s an hour and a half drive to the hospital (not the nearest, but purportedly the best). Not even I can snooze that long straight on top of a bad night’s sleep, so I also got to do a bit of generalized suffering with my collection of aches and pains. I’ve been told that you get used to the pain after the first 25 years.

The reason my brain scan took a whole day is that I first had to get an injection of some kind of radioactive goo, wait three hours for this to make its way to the furthest reaches of my brain, and then come back for the scan itself.

The goo was delivered by a very large needle, and when I say large I mean HUGE (not that I’m a wimp, you understand). The nurse asked me where I wanted the shot, and I said “in my wife”. We settled on my upper arm, though.

The long wait while goo percolated through me was spent shopping for lamps (no luck) and for goodies at an Asian market. We’re quite ethnically challenged out in our lovely boondocks, but I’ve now stocked up on enough English tea and Indian curry mixes to last me through the next ice age.

Then back to the hospital for the actual imaging, a DatSCAN. All I had to do was keep my head still for half an hour while machines whirred and clicked around me. Last time I had a brain scan, shortly before my diagnosis some five years ago, I had a minor panic attack due to the unbearable pain in my back. Marie was worried this might happen again, but I am happy to report that a) my back no longer hurts anywhere near that badly and b) I’m now so used to being prodded and poked that I was perfectly relaxed throughout.

Now all we have to do is wait five weeks to get the result at my next appointment. I predict they’ll diagnose Parkinson’s disease.

BTW, I just got sent a form from the Dutch pension authorities asking me to confirm that I’m alive. Marie is fairly certain that I am, and she is often right about these things. As further proof, I may return the form with a photo of me wearing a silly hat and holding today’s newspaper.