Hello, I have radioactive blood! It doesn't glow, though. I checked. I have a little wallet card for Homeland Security that tells them the date and the amount I had, with the line at the bottom: "The radiation is allowed by NRC medical use regulations and poses no danger to the public." I have to carry this for three months, in case I set off any of the ultra-sensitive radiation detectors in airports or federal buildings. So I am now a card-carrying member of the radioactive blood community, which I think is otherwise limited to mutants and superheroes.
After a pre-dawn journey through rain and traffic, I arrived at the Cleveland Clinic this morning bright and early. I was not feeling all that great to start with, due to hunger and lack of electrolytes (I had to fast for the test). But I was greatly cheered to be greeted warmly by nurse Mary, who was the boss lady nurse at my tilt-table test a month ago. The preliminaries were quite brief– and I had, as instructed, worn comfortable clothes with a short-sleeves shirt, such that I was allowed to keep them on! (A small humanizing note in a less than humane experience.) Furthermore, Nurse Mary got me as comfortable as possible in a very skinny hard bed, with a pillow under my head and knees and blanket over me, and a heating pad warming up my arm. Also in the room was Nuclear Tech Bobby (Roberta), whose bedside manner ranged from cold to openly hostile.
Luckily I dealt with Mary most of the time. And Bobby, for all of her brusqueness, got a gold star from me for finding a vein and placing the IV on the first try!! This delighted me no end, as indeed the IV-placement part was the part I dreaded the most. WIth that behind me, I felt that the rest was likely to go smoothly. Before they began, Mary asked me if I had any questions. I said, "Well, the brochure says this is safe, but can you just go over that part again?" She smiled and said, "It's safe," with such a firm and decisive tone, in such a kindly sporty grandmother way, that I believed her. (I think nurse Mary is about the ideal nurse, and her apricot-dyed short hair with white roots, and her no-nonsense nurse shoes only endeared me to her all the more.)
I think it's safe because the dose of radioactivity is extremely tiny. However, yesterday's front page NYT horror story about mistakes in radiation treatment made my hair stand on end and worried me a great deal in the lead-up to this.
Anyway, before long they started putting stuff into my veins. I learned that they way the test the blood volume is to add radioactive iodine to your blood, and then after it circulates take some back out and measure the dilution. That way they can calculate how much blood you have over all. This is a lot easier than the way I thought they would do it– take all your blood out into buckets and measure it the old fashioned way…
I did feel pretty weird through a lot of it. Tired and sort of spacey. Now and then I saw pretty green lights converging at far away points inside my dark eyelids. I often felt very sleepy and tingly. They pulled out what seemed a huge number of vials of blood, I think around 30, but apparently I could spare it and I'm doing fine now without it. I noticed that a few of the vials got put in special plastic envelopes with the big orange radiation warning signs on them. Yep. At one point Mary and Bobby got into a very tense altercation about the timing of a certain draw. Apparently Mary had drawn it before Bobby felt was appropriate and they got into a spat right over my head. Really, I felt Mary was in the right and Bobby was just going around with a major chip on her shoulder all morning.
I had expected it to be scary an unpleasant and probably painful, but instead what I discovered was that it was rather boring. I sort of wished for an iPod or something as I just had to lie there in the basically silent room, silent except for the tapping of keys and the hum of various machines.
When it was picture time, Bobby brought this huge round machine way into my personal space until it pressed firmly against my left side. It had a large disc with a red X in the middle, aimed more or less at my heart. She told me to lie very still for 12 minutes and to not hold my breath, breathe too deeply, or move in any way. We went on like that, but since the looming machine didn't make any noise, I sort of forgot about it. I mean, I was lying there for two hours and my attention did wander at times. Unfortunately, I had a run-in with Bobby myself after the first round of pictures. She said, "You can move again now." And I thought– holy shit! Have I been sitting still here or not? Because I was totally spacing out. Bobby said, "I'll just take a look at this first round of images and see if we got what we need."
I confessed, "Okay, great, because I'm afraid I may have jiggled." Bobby stopped in her tracks and came over to me.
"What do you mean, jiggled?" By her tone I could tell that she was pretty pissed, so I started back-peddling.
"I don't know, maybe just shifted my weight or something." And I'm thinking– crap– did I sit still or not??
"Do you mean shifted your TRUNK? Because if you shifted your trunk, that's going to really compromise my data."
"Um… no, no, nothing like that. I just … don't know if maybe I moved a little bit."
"Because your trunk has to remain COMPLETELY STILL. Understand?? STILL!"
"Okay, okay, I'm sure it's fine. I just… wasn't sure for a minute but now I'm sure it's just fine. I really don't think I jiggled at all. I've just been lying here and…"
"Because if you moved your trunk, I mean, all the data will be worthless! So you have to keep still… especially your trunk." I sensed that she was actually clenching her fists over me and winding up to strike. With this I resolved to never tangle with the evil Bobby again. And for the next several endless 12-minute takes, you bet your britches I was still as the grave!
(I read online this post by a fellow POTS sufferer who had been beset by restless leg syndrome during the hemodynamics test, and although it's an international support group online, this guy had actually been at the Cleveland Clinic for it. And he was really upset… I'm pretty sure he had to deal with the wrath of Bobby himself, poor man!)
Eventually I was done with the hemodynamics lab, and sent next door for the Autonomic Function Testing, what they called the Heart Rate Variability Test. Good nurse Mary brought me some cranberry juice and crackers to have between tests, and so I had a little snack while talking with the autonomic testing technician, an older gentleman named Ray. I will say that Ray was also a grandfatherly presence in a good way. He had a good balance of straightforward, but not cold, as he explained the testing plan. He was tall and lanky, with a gray fringe of hair around his bald pate, and the most remarkable, protruding Brillo-like ear tufts I've ever seen on anyone. Ray explained that the test was in three parts, just lying down and breathing for most of it, occasionally sitting up and breathing, and breathing into a little device. The test would monitor my reflexes and see whether my autonomic nervous system (how my brain was controlling my heart and so on) was working normally. If I passed the first part of the test normally, I would be free to go, as parts two and three were only to investigate any abnormality they might find.
He had the radio on, so as I went through this test I had a chance to review some great pop hits from my high school days. There was "Take Off, You hosers!" and of course the vegemite sandwich. All I had to do for most of it was lie there with my chest covered with EKG monitors, a big breathing monitor around my waist, blood pressure cuffs, one normal sized one on my arm, and one tiny one around one finger. All this went fine until he asked me to sit up and true to form I nearly blacked out. But I got it together quickly and we were able to continue. Just as I sat there for a five-minute silent monitoring of my vitals, I found myself to be facing a big landscape photograph of some mountains and a river at twilight. At that moment, the radio changed to a lone female voice singing amazing grace. I felt that I was now in a made-for-TV movie, mother of two draped in medical wires. I listened to the entire song as Ray stood there quietly watching the clock and all the monitors.
Then I had to lie back down and breathe into this little tube, keeping the gauge at a certain mark for 15 seconds. It was sort of hard and made me light headed. But the upshot of it was that I was normal. Ray said, "This is a hint: you are free to go." I said, "You mean I passed? I'm normal?" He said, "Well, I can't tell you that. But I can tell you that I don't need to do any further testing today, and so that's a hint." He smiled at the cat and mouse game of it as he undid all the wires and unstuck all the sticky pads that were all over my "trunk" to use Bobby's term.
So.. I was free to go. I was glad to have passed the autonomic testing with flying colors, because, although this is not based on facts so much as intuition, I would rather not have that. I feel that Western medicine is better at dealing with mechanical problems of the human body, rather than the mysterious chemical and electrical processes of the brain. So I'm pulling for some sort of blood-related problem, rather than a neurological one. Anyway, I felt sort of woozy, starved, and thirsty, but I had brought a snack that was migraine-friendly. After some nourishment I drove myself home, whereupon I slept for two hours. (Ben took the day off work to cover for me.)
Now it will take 7-10 days to get the results. So now, on with Mothering While Dizzy (MWD) as we wait for what I hope will be the denouement of this story, the cause and the cure revealed!
Commence waiting on my mark.