Scanner

I walked to the métro stop and took the train to Liège where I walked to the clinic. I got there at about 09:25 where I then waited in a queue for about 15 minutes. Luckily I had arrived early as it took a good 15 minutes to do all of the paperwork and get me admitted. They explained to me that I would have a double room until this afternoon when I would be transferred to my single room.

A nice nurse brought me and all of my paperwork up to my room where she told me to wait while they checked with the scanner. She came back later to tell me that they had no appointment for me with the scanner. This even though I had verified the appointment the day before when I had done the pre-admission paperwork. She said for me to wait and they would make another appointment for me if possible. I explained that if I didn’t have the scan today the entire operation would be postponed for a week. She said she would see what she could do.

Luckily I was alone. Whoever was supposed to be in the other bed was already in the operating room being operated on. I just kicked back and waited. A couple of hours later they came to get me and told me to go right downstairs for an immediate scan. I took my enormous needle package out of my luggage and went downstairs.

It was nice to not have to sit in the waiting room down there. I went in almost immediately. The scanner looks just like it does on television and in the movies. I particularly remember Mark Greene having to go through this pretty often on E.R.. There’s that plank that magically moves in an out of this huge round tubular machine that looks like it swallows you whole. That is most likely the limit of my explanation as I spent the entire rest of the experience with my eyes closed. I laid back and he injected me with the needle. I learned that the needle goes in to a separate machine which they control remotely and which injects the substance in to me throughout the scan when they want to. Quite impressive bit of machinery they have here. I was told it would take about 10 minutes and all I had to do was not move throughout and there would be a few times when they would tell me not to swallow. That wasn’t difficult as I wasn’t exactly gulping non-stop at that moment. I was having enough trouble breathing regularly let alone swallowing. When it was finished I was starting to tremble a bit which the assistant had seen often before and so it had much more of an impact on me than on him.

After the scan they told me to go back up to my room and they would send up the results. I certainly didn’t need to be told twice to go lie down somewhere. When I got back upstairs they had already transferred me in to my new private room. This was actually a bit of a step sideways rather than a major step up. In my shared room the bed had an automatic riser which allowed me to raise and lower the back of the bed with a sort of wired remote control. On this bed I couldn’t change it without a nurse. In my shared room the shower was in the room. In my new private room the shower was down the hall. I knew perfectly well what it was going to be like after the operation and that I was going to be escorting one of the perf machines around and probably not getting a lot of showers. I don’t know if it was the effect of the medication or the scanner substance or the simple emotional drain of it all but I basically passed out for the rest of the afternoon.

I had a reasonable meal in the evening. As reasonable as a hospital meal gets. They gave me a pill to help me sleep and I was out for the count.