Progress!

I finally had a phone call from the hospital on Monday. I was offered a timeslot for my overnight stay and all the various tests they want to do on the 2nd-3rd of July. Alas, they can't do the PET scan on that day because the tracer they use comes in batches sufficient for two people, so they have to match you up with someone else who needs the same scan before they do it. So we're looking at doing the PET scan on the 10th July instead.

Good news!

It was a slightly disconcerting phone call; the endocrinologist asked me if I could confirm that the dates would suit me on the spot, and I said that I was pretty sure they would be fine but that I would need to check it out with work before I could be 100% certain. This seemed to genuinely confuse her. Equally strange was when she asked me if I was on any medication; I replied that I'm on propranolol, a beta blocker. She said that it could interfere with the tests and I would have to stop taking it for three days; so I said that although I was willing to give it a go, I would probably find it quite difficult to not take any for three days. This really baffled her - she asked me what I was taking it for. I said tachycardia (fast heartbeat) - but I'm pretty sure if I had said that I was taking it to keep the little green men out of my ears, she couldn't have found that more peculiar. It was strange, because this was something I had already discussed with the endocrinologist who originally asked me to have these tests - and he said that if I found it difficult to get by without it then they'd just not do some of the tests.

Ironically, my heart tends to operate on a bit of a timelag and takes a while to show any effect from my thyroid levels either increasing or decreasing, and it has only started to really go a lot faster in the last two weeks or so - which means that if they'd just organised the damn tests when they said they would, I might have been able to cautiously get by. However, I will be travelling through London on the 1st July with heavy bags and that is stressful enough even when your resting heartrate's not 120bpm.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that she said that these dates "still need to be confirmed" with the clinical research facility place where I will be going (how exciting) and that she would call me back and let me know when they're definite and also tell me more about what exact tests they will be doing. That was on Monday. Today is Thursday. I am really hoping that doesn't mean there is a problem with the dates.

Awkward Turtle

I may or may not have mentioned (who knows?) my crack team of endocrinologists* who seem to be as numerous as the autumn leaves.** On the one hand, I enjoy meeting new people; on the other, I have an incredibly poor memory for names and consequently can only remember the names of two-and-a-half of the endocrinologists who've actually treated me.***

For the first four months or so of my treatment I consistently saw the same doctor when I went to the hospital; then, for reasons never specified he disappeared. Since then, I've seen different doctors every couple of months. I can only presume that I'm committing some kind of hideous endocrinological faux pas without realising it.

Anyway, the other weekend I was at the local train station, and joined an epically long queue to buy a ticket. As I was standing there, I suddenly became aware that in the queue in front of me was.... my original endocrinologist, Dr ---!

I had to make a choice: say hi or stand by? And obviously I went for the stand by option - because when you're a doctor, I imagine it's very annoying to have former patients come up to you in a public railway station screaming "WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME? WAS MY HEAD TUMOUR NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH FOR YOU?" and wailing and gnashing their teeth. Also, he looked somewhat stressed and was doing that peculiar leg-hopping thing that means somebody's either running late or desperate for the loo.

Unfortunately, when I said that this was an epically long queue, I was exaggerating only inasmuch as the fact that, although it was extremely long, no-one had actually written a poem about it. To my knowledge. After a few minutes of trotting through a winding s-shaped queue, I think Dr --- may have recognised me, but by then the English Acknowledgement Horizon had passed and, having not acknowledged one another before then, it was officially too late to do so. Because I am English (well, English-ish). And those are the rules we live by.

So it was a somewhat awkward queueing experience.
If only I had defused it by means of the awkward turtle.

Inicdentally, I feel like what I had intended to be a short, short post about a very brief and really-not-that-exciting occurrence has turned into an alarmingly long and overinvolved essay. I promise, next time I will attempt to write about something more interesting.

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*N.B. that here that I use the term "crack team" in the sense of "expert professionals", not in the sense of "drug dealers".

**Or maybe it's just one guy with five masks. And a pair of fake boobs.

*** If you're interested, the half is for one guy whose nickname I remember, but not his actual name, which had about eight times as many syllables.