Going for the CT scan of my lower right abdomen tonight.
This is what passes for excitement in my life.
Hell, this is what passes for adventure.
Anyhow, yeah, I said tonight. Got a phone call yesterday asking if I could come into Medical Imaging at Richmond Hospital at 8 pm tonight and I said yes, even though that will be disruptive to our usual plans.
Better a little disruption than to have them say, “Can’t make it? Well the next open spot is in FEBRUARY. ”
So what the hell. Go in there, get’r done.
At least it’s at Richmond Hospital. I am quite comfortable there. I was there a lot when I was going through their psychiatric outpatient “Core” program, which went for five days a week for ten weeks. And I have been there now and then via the ER since.
Including that period where I was going there every other day to get the dressing changed on my wound when I had that big infection on my left knee.
Wound is still there, by the way. Even though the doctor at the wound care clinic told me it would heal on its own and I didn’t need to go there any more.
But in her defense, there was a procedure she really wanted to do on another patient and giving me proper health care would have interfered with that.
The choice was clear.
My point (and I do have one) is that Richmond Hospital is a familiar place to me, and thus will not put as much strain on my social anxiety as an entirely new place.
And I have had CT scans before. That’s the one with the big white ring and the metal slab you lie on that moves back and forth through the ring.
The ring’s a little scary when you know it’s a crazy strong electromagnet. And I don’t care what anyone says, I can feel things like that.
My nervous system is like an antenna and that antenna picks up a lot of things, most of which I filter out, but when I am around strong electromagnetic fields, I can feel a pull almost like gravity on every nerve in my body.
It’s the same feeling I used to get when I passed by a big electrical substation on my way to high school. The kind with a lot of exposed wires that hum faintly.
Sometimes I would lean against the fence looking in and just let that electromagnetic flux wash over me, enjoying the freaky sensations of it all.
But not for long, because before too long some seriously unsane thoughts would start tugging at my mind and make me need to GTFO pronto.
I can totally see how some people become convinced that some form of electromagnetic waves are screwing with their minds.
Seems to me like insanity would find it easy to crystallize around something so freaky and real as electromagnetism’s effect on the human nervous system.
Thank goodness I never went there.
I credit my solidly rationalist mindset for keeping me sane. It shuts the crazier thought right down with cold hard logic.
Still, scientifically speaking, I am quite curious as to what it is like inside a Faraday cage. Would I feel any different? Maybe a little more relaxed, a bit more calm? Like I was in a truly quiet room for the first time in my life?
Probably not. But I would love to find out.
More after the break.
A few milliliters of freedom
Patient readers know I have compulsions.
And not the usual kind, the kind where you might be tortured by pain most people can’t imagine but at least your apartment is clean.
Very, very clean.
No, mine are more a forest sub-major compulsions that never got it together enough to become a diagnosable disability or even a serious issue in my life.
Instead, they just nag and hound me and bend me to their will by sheer persistence.
And to be honest, most of the time, I am still their bitch. I do what they tell me to do both because the stakes are so low that it doesn’t seem worth the effort to deny them and because they make an excellent substitute for having to decide things myself.
That is both pathetic and sad. But it’s my reality.
But lately I occasionally have the will and the timing to defy them. And when I do, it can be confusing, but ultimately very freeing.
For example, when I have the courage to “waste” something.
By far, my biggest compulsion cluster those having to do with resource conservation and its evil nemesis, “waste”.
This set of compulsions demands that I never “waste” anything, even in situations where nothing is actually being wasted and the urge is clearly insane.
For example, if I load a bunch of songs into Winamp, and then I step out of the room and miss one, I feel intense guilt because I “wasted” the playing of the song.
Like I said : clearly insane. Nothing was wasted. The MP3 is still there. I can play it any time I want, as many times as I want. There is not less of anything as a result.
No important numeral was decremented.
You get the idea.
This brings us to the little bit of Diet Coke that was left in the bottom of my glass when I wanted to fill said glass with water to drink.
My compulsion demanded that I drink that last little bit of diet cola in order not to “waste” it. Even though I neither needed nor wanted it.
Okay, said my compulsions, we’re prepared to be reasonable. You could also go find a container in which to preserve this tiny amount of liquid for later.
You know, some later time when only 2 ml of Diet Coke will hit the spot.
But I said no to both those reasonable ideas and poured the Diet Coke down the god damned drain instead.
And even though my compulsions screamed like I had just emptied my canteen into the sand while I was crossing the Sahara, I did not listen to that devil’s choir.
And it felt good.
It felt, in fact, like freedom.
Freedom won a milliliter at a time.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.