Ginger Snaps - The blog of Jayne Hawkins

Go Sober!

Right, all this toxic medicine has clearly affected me more than I ever thought possible and as a result I appear to have gone off the old vino! So I have decided to make something good come out of this disastrous occurrence and go on the wagon for October to raise some money for Macmillan Cancer.

Go Sober for October!

I would really appreciate it if you would kindly donate the price of a bottle of wine or the cost of a drink or two to this fantastic cause!

The tests

19 Sep 2013

I was booked in for four scans – CT scan, bone scan, MRI scan and a heart scan, all routine in the circumstances to give the hospital a clear indication of exactly what they were dealing with.  The bone scan was first and was pretty interesting.  Walking into the “Nuclear Medicine” department at the Freeman was a bit scary I must say but that’s where we went and I was injected with radioactive dye!

As you can imagine I was obviously disappointed not to glow in the dark at bedtime!  A few hours after being injected I returned and had to lie still for 20 minutes whilst a clever machine scanned me from top to toe to produce a picture of my entire skeleton!  That night I wasn’t allowed near the kids for very long as I was still radioactive, that was tricky as they still didn’t know what was going on but we managed. 

The following day the phone rang just after 8am, it was Amanda to say the results of the scan were clear, fabulous news but we still had the CT to go the following week on the 18th. 

Now that was a fun scan I must say!  You lie on the bed with your arms above your head and they whizz you into a giant donut, the machine tells you to breathe in then it whizzes you out again.  All straight forward but the real fun starts on the second go, as they inject you with a special dye before they whizz you in and out again.

Now the nurse was kind enough to tell me that I’d either experience a hot flush, feel like I’d wet myself or have a metallic taste in my mouth.  I thought the hot flush sounded awful so was most concerned about that one!  The nurse put the dye in my arm above my head and ran out of the room and within 3 seconds of her injecting it I felt the sensation……..of wetting myself! 

My first thought was how on earth had that dye got from A to B that bloody quickly and my second thought was that I hadn’t brought spare knickers!!!!  Luckily after about 10 seconds the sensation passed but I did have a chuckle to the nurse about it when she came back in!  When I left the bed the poor student nurse got a view of my backside too but we won’t talk about that!  So that was quite an adventure really.  

  • The tests - Picture 1

The next day was a heart scan first thing in the morning.  Simon had been by my side throughout all of this but this was simply a baseline test for one of the drugs I would be having which is cardio toxic so I made him stay home and work as it was nothing really to be worried about.  The scan itself was uneventful and fairly quick so I was soon on my way home.  When I got home the blinds in the living room were pulled back (Simon would sit all day with the blinds shut) so I knew he had been looking out for me and sure enough he was there as soon as I opened the door.  Amanda had rang when I was out, the CT scan was clear.  Well I’ll admit to falling to pieces at this point and I collapsed into Simons arms.  Quite hysterical I was!  I’d spent the past week trying not to think of anything at all, but then I started thinking positive thoughts that everything would be clear, but then I had to tell myself to stop thinking the positive thoughts in case it was bad news.  So then I thought about getting bad news and how Id handle that but then had to tell myself to stop doing that because that was really scary to think about.  So I was left with no choice but to not think, which I could do for all of 10 seconds and the whole “thought” thing started again. 

I sat down and set about telling people who knew what we were going through, ringing my parents first in tears and I knew they were crying too which was awful.  I’m not sure at this point how much my entire family knew about what was riding on these results, Simon admitted he hadn’t fully understood but I hadn’t been able to bring myself to mention the whole curable/incurable thing to any of them.  Once Id sat down I’m afraid I didn’t move for the rest of the day, everything had just caught up with me and I was absolutely wrecked.  I stayed where Id collapsed until it was time to head off that afternoon for my last test…….an MRI. 

Another fun test where I lay face down on a bed that took me into a big long tube to be scanned.  Now this bed has two precariously placed holes side by side each other and I was lying face down, I’ll leave that one to your imagination!  Again this scan was to provide the medical people with a base line so they can see how treatment is working in the future so nothing to worry about really.  It was however the noisiest piece of equipment EVER!  My ears were ringing after I came out of it, how such a complicated, advanced piece of medical equipment can make such a racket is beyond me but unbelievably clever nonetheless!



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