Ta Da....

Interesting day. Had to fast for the CT scans and awoke before the barium shake at 5 a.m. with a raging head. Didn't take any pain meds as I thought it might compromise the procedure. Negatory, as I found out at the start of the scan. The group doing the scans appears to be a subcontractor at the hospital and they make one fill out the exact same paperwork that one filled out a few weeks before. Clearly inefficient. And with my head--almost intolerable. Did I have a religious preference? No. I say, I told you that nothing had changed: no preference then, no preference now.  Was my address the same? Everything was the same, I said.  I suppose the worker bees are allowed no deviation from script. I guess if this outfit were more efficient these people wouldn't have jobs, and the procedures are unlikely to be their faults anyway. (Tell that to my headache.) On the plus side, their tech guys are very good. I got a call from one of them saying that my upper abdominal/chest scan was fuzzy and would I come back? So, back I went at 3 p.m. thinking that this would compromise the radiologist's reading of my charts. I recalled that in the morning, I didn't hear a second set of instructions from the programmed voice while in the donut. That seemed strange to me. I think I fell asleep and missed the second set of instructions! They assured me that the scans would get read today and by 4 p.m. AbJ called. From his preliminary look--sans radiologist--there is no sign of the original intestinal mass. This is very good news. We'll cut back on the celebrating until after we see that the bone marrow is also no longer compromised. But for now: hip, hip, hoorah! We are scheduled for bone marrow sampling tomorrow at 11:30 a.m. And, of course, all of this is tempered by the fact that it is business as usual Monday with Round 4.