Dance of the Hours

The bone marrow scan was only the first of three staging appointments this past Friday. Immediately after, I rushed across town for the next step: PET (positron emission tomography)and CT (computed tomography) scans.

At the imaging lab, I was injected with a radioactive sugar solution, then led to a small, birch-paneled room where I was to don lab-provided pajama pants, drink two cups of lab-provided water, and decompress in absolute silence until summoned - talking makes the sugar congregate in the neck muscles, thus disturbing the scan. (The sugar collects in the brain, liver, and in cancer cells; the CT scan provides three-dimensional reference points: together, they accurately image the cancer's spread throughout your body.)

Another young woman hunched gauntly in the opposite corner, silent in her lab pants, draped in a lab blanket, reading a magazine, two empty paper cups on the table beside her.

I looked up and smiled. Apparently the order's Rule of Silence also encompassed nonverbal communication. She carefully focused her gaze on lurid drunk-limo tabloid shots of Lindsay Lohan. She disappeared first.

At last, the sugar having taken root in my cells, I also was directed to the bathroom, then led into a dim room spotlighting a long, towel-draped locker room bench emanating from a luminous Hollywood Bowl halo. I stretched into a rather inelegant balletic fifth position on the bench, my arms extended rather uncomfortably over my head, my lower body twisted precariously on the thin beam.

To the accompaniment only of my own slow heartbeat (metal objects, including earphones and iPods, are anathema during these scans), I slid slowly back and forth through the halo. I was busy calculating walking distances and shuttle times - my doctor had asked me to bring some medical records to my last appointment of the day, and I'd forgotten them at my apartment a few blocks away.

After a while, the tech hooked up the IV to circulate contrast dye through my veins for the CT scan. The contrast dye seeps like slow-boiling water just under your skin, concentrating in the neck and groin and other areas of high blood flow. The heat gradually subsides as the dye exits your body, but a peculiar subcutaneous seared sensation lingers. "People have tried since the Middle Ages to figure a way to boil people's blood in their body - a great medieval torture technique," I told the lab tech. "Yes, they've finally got how to do it," he replied, "and it's a diagnostic tool."

Two down; one to go. I gloss over my high-speed side trip to my apartment to retrieve my medical records, because I probably shouldn't talk about gimping across San Francisco just a few hours after a bone marrow biopsy. Suffice it to say that, medical records in hand and only slightly sheening with sweat, I made it up to the 13th floor (yes, that was the 13th floor) of the hospital just on time for the last appointment of this long and endless day.

The pulmonary function test is, well, rather disheartening. Its purpose is to gauge how deleterious the chemo drugs will be on your lungs, a baseline memory of original function. You sit in an airtight booth and breathe in various patterns into a breathing machine, which I can only describe as french-kissing an athletic mouthguard glued around a plastic paper-towel roll. At times, and without warning, the air stops, leaving you deflated, like someone is testing the air seal on your scuba tank or SCBA.

The over-enthusiastic tech, who was, no doubt, long past ready to begin her weekend late on this hot Friday afternoon, talked me through a number of fancy breathing exercises I was to perform while hooked up to the plastic contraption. The panting; the deep, short breaths; the powerful puffs: I was quickly light-headed and the tech was just as quickly annoyed at my apparent inability to produce the right sorts of breaths. Hell, I'm a swimmer and a singer, not a gasper, Jim! At last, we arrived none too smoothly at the final component, in which I was to inhale deeply, then exhale slowly and smoothly. Now this - this I could do. With great pride, I sustained a prolonged exhalation for nearly a minute. I was ready to start circular breathing when I noticed the tech's angry grimace. "A little faster, please," she spit out sharply. Oops.

Lung function documented, I then sat down (gingerly - sitting was much more painful than standing or walking) for an arterial oxygen count. This pleasant test consists of skewering your wrist with a long metal stylus, then ripping out an artery. Well, that's what it felt like. After my gritted "Owwwww...", the tech stopped, mid-yank, and asked, "Does this hurt?" Immediately estimating it wasn't worth the hassle, she abruptly aborted, brusquely wrapping my wrist in Day-Glo Ace bandages. "If my doctor ordered it, though..." I said, confused. "Oh, no," she replied. "It's just an extra test we're doing for our research here." Yeah, great, thanks. So glad to be at an educational institution.

And, it turned out that nobody needed my medical records after all. So much for my frantic cross-town hobble.

Tomorrow at noon I get the results from my doctor.