Skip to main content

Scan


I had a CT scan today. I had to be up early to drink dye (two delicious cupfuls) and report to the hospital at 8:30. I was asked to change into one of those gowns that do up at the back, and which are branded Property of Otago District Health Board against the truly absurd possibility that someone will want to nick one. A shunt was put into my arm. I'm good at shunts. I've had a few of them lately so I was able to comment positively on the nurse's technique as she poked it in and flushed it with salty water. This one was for more dye, which was pumped in by a mechanical injector, just like the one they used in Dead Man Walking - made me feel quite the movie star. Then I was passed through a large circular machine which spoke to me in an elevator voice, telling me when to hold my breath and when to breathe out (I was going to write "expire" , but thought it in bad taste, even if it was witty and opened up a whole gamut of dark cancer type humour. See how gentle I am on your sensibilities?)

It was all quite matter of fact and straight forward, except for one curious and incongruous detail. The CT scanning machine had a brand name. The scanner is a big greenish thing with a suitably inscrutable instrument panel and meaningful looking numbers picked out in orange lights. It has warning LCDs and a buzzer. It has a ring thing that circles around in a most impressive sci-fi sort of way. And there in the top right corner, its brand name: Somatom Sensation. It seemed odd that it should have a brand name, especially one that was so obviously the product of a marketing department...but... why not? I suppose someone (The Somatom corporation, scanner makers of distinction since 1973) makes them and someone else (Bob's Scanner Emporium. See us for all your scanning needs) flogs them off. I suppose there's a young man in a suit who visits the hospital with brochures.

"Make your hospital the style leader of the Health Board district by installing one of our exclusive new range of up to the minute scanners. From the economical but robust Feeling to the discreetly upmarket Sensation - your choice of Somatom ushers you into that elite circle of discerning radiologists envied in 59 countries."

And then, presumably, the old ones are all lined up in a showroom somewhere in Anderson's Bay Road.

"Got just the thing for you sir. This '04 Sensation. It's got the 75 Kw positron and a real leather gurney - Feel the quality of that! Only had 15,000 bodies through her. Yes, sir, that's genuine. Only one owner, and I guarantee, never raced or rallied. Nice green casing, but if you want to wait, I've got a blue one arriving next week. And yes, we will trade your X-Ray unit, but not your dialysis machine. As you can see, the yard is full of dialysis machines at the moment."

The nurse took out the shunt and put on a plaster. I went downstairs to the cafe and had a coffee and a sandwich. Now, even as we speak, somewhere in the hospital, an augur is reading the entrails - my entrails - and soon I will soon be given a prophecy of my future. I'll keep you posted.

Comments

Alden Smith said…
I think the vernacular thing for me to say at a time like this is "Snap".

I was at Whangarei Base Hospital this morning at 8.30am ("please allow 30 minutes for parking")for a 9.00am appointment. I was seen straight away and was out by a bit after nine.

I had a number of X rays taken of my right knee. It all went smoothly except for the first bit where the nurse muddled around and asked me the regulation 'please tell me your birth date Mr Smith'

I told her, and then a little later she asked me again adding "I've already asked you that haven't I? sorry, just having a little senior moment".
I felt a bit alarmed about having all that tonnage of machinery and atomic potency guided over my good person by someone in the throes of a senior moment, but by the time you could spell 'human daily radiation limit exceeded due to senior moment' it was all over.

I went back to the little cubicle feeling a little guilty that I had lugged my wallet all the way with me (what trust was I showing there! might explain the senior moment remark) changed out of the nifty little gown that had made me feel dependent and vulnerable and went home and had a good steaming cup of English breakfast tea.

My Doc gets the results and it might mean a knee replacement - if so I'll leave my provacative wallet at home.
Brian R said…
Glad you can see the humour in the experience, prayers the results will be positive.
Kate said…
How's the drawing going Kelvin?
Anonymous said…
Many of the elevators I have seen here in NZ are made by Schindler company. Am I the only person who stands in the corner silently imagining a lisping German who thaves people from the death campth via his lift?
Kelvin Wright said…
An elevating thought.
Anonymous said…
Schindler's Lift?

Your post reminded me of a line from the Neil Young song 'Living In The Free World':
"We got a kinder, gentler machine-gun hand."
Kelvin Wright said…
And Katherine - fine thanks. I have a book called Drawing On The Right Side of the Brain. Audrey recommended it to me, and it's very useful indeed. Get in now, and you can purchase some of my early works at very reasonable prices. Don't wait til you're bidding at Sotheby's against some oil Sheik.

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old