Thursday: "Ah wont yew to go a-pumpin yer fist!"

Thursday (today) seemed so complicated on the calendar, but turned out to be relatively easy. All we had to do was sit in the chemo room for a few hours and get methotrexate dripped in and Vin "The Mighty Thor" Blastine injected.

EXCEPT for Bill having to drink two big bottles of the French Vanilla barium, before the CT scans at 2:30 pm. Oh, he hates drinking that stuff. And what a name: French Vanilla. He said, "Well, if it were just plain vanilla, it would be awful, but since it's FRENCH vanilla, it is sooooooooo delicious." Not. A friend wrote today and suggested he ask, next time, if they have it in Jim Beam. Or maybe in The Glenlivet.

The highlight of his day was that when he left the chemo center and walked over to the CT scan radiation office inside the adjacent hospital, his technician turned out to be, he was pretty sure, a cast member from The Beverly Hillbillies.

First, she asked him what surgeries he had had. She was going to write them down. So he rattled them off, assuming she could spell them or had at least heard of them: A TURB-T, a radical cystoprostatectomy and appendectomy, a hepatic resection, and a cholecystectomy.

No farther along than "TURB-T", he said she stopped writing, and slowly looked up at him with an expression of complete loss. She obviously didn't know what he was saying or how to spell any of it. So she just skipped that part of the form.

Next, she said she was going to inject dye into his arm for the CT scan. He didn't think, at first, that he needed to tell her that the LARGE blue plastic object (impossible not to notice) that was already IN his arm (one inch from where she was going to re-stick him) was a port that was already installed for her, for the dye.

But no. He DID need to tell her that, because she did NOT notice the pre-installed port, and was swabbing down his arm with alcohol and about to jam a needle into it.

He fully realized what was happening when she said--and this is literally what she said--instead of, "Please, sir, make a fist," she said, in THIS accent: "Ah wont yew to go a-pumpin yer fist."

Bill said, "I beg your pardon?"

She said, "I wont yew to go a-pumpin yer...."

Bill suddenly caught what was happening. "I hope you're not intending make a new injection site, as you can see that a port has already been installed for you right THERE."

Oh, she said. She hadn't noticed that.

Then, WITHOUT having him undress (can this be real?), (and with him reminding HER that he needed to remove his jewelry....she said, "Oh, yeah, ye do!") she proceeded to lay him down in the scanner in his street clothes, shoes and all (!) and she went to the control panels and pushed god only knows what buttons and gave him god only knows what kind of CT scan with all his clothes on.

Ummmmmmmmm. What?

First, we've had about 20 CT scans by now at both Duke and Wake Forest. Never did he have to drink barium. And never was he NOT dressed in a hospital gown.

And never was he instructed by any technician to go a-pumpin his fist.

Then again, I suppose it's nice to experience firsts, as we travel along this interesting highway.