The scan was pretty uneventful.
They wanted to give me IV contrast, a dye that’s injected directly into a vein to show up blood (supply) more clearly on the scan. I knew it had a high rate of allergic reactions, but they also warned me that it can cause you to feel a flush of heat after it’s been injected. That made me nervous because I had an injection of magnesium around the time I delivered my twins many years ago, when I had pre eclampsia. The magnesium is to prevent of seizures and also to reduce blood pressure, by causing the blood vessels to dilate. This sounds unalarming, but actually it feels absolutely dreadful, like you’re on fire. I remember in particular my tongue felt burning hot. Ghastly. Anyway, I needn’t have worried because for some reason the warmth from the contrast was quite pleasant (yes, in contrast to the magnesium). It felt like I had put on a pair of fur mittens. Weird. They also said that the warm feeling in my pelvis might make me feel like I’d wet myself, which was an oddly specific warning but I could certainly see why that might cause confusion, and appreciated the heads up. The very young looking radiographer, who appeared to be a student from all the instructions she was getting from her older offsider, also had to put an IV cannula I’m my arm, to inject the contrast through, and she did an excellent job. There’s a bit of a bruise now, but that’ll just be from the aspirin I’m on. It certainly pays to have good veins if you ever need to go to hospital.
I’ve just had a message from my GP to say that the scan is entirely normal, which is great news. No answers about my mystery illness but I’m very pleased to have most likely excluded any too awful pathology, so I’ll take that, thank you very much. Chances are the illness won’t come back, and we’ll never know what it was. I can live with that.
By the way, NAD is a common medical phrase meaning No Abnormality Detected. If you examine a body system and you don’t find anything wrong, you can just write the acronym in the notes. The joke used to be that it really stood for Not Actually Done, as in, the doctor or student is lying about having done a full exam. Unfortunately an old med school classmate of mine didn’t realise this was a joke, and she got taken aside by her very concerned senior doctor many years ago, telling her that it probably wasn’t appropriate to be going vaginal exams on every female patient being admitted to hospital for routine orthopaedic surgery. She’d been writing “pelvic exam – NAD” in the notes.