And then sometimes the person injecting me with gadolinium gets it on the second try and I don't even feel it and there isn't even a bruise. Go figure.
And sometimes, there is good news.
Like today.
All appears serene in my little intracranial garden. No recurring weeds are in evidence, and the butterfly hovers above the perfectly blossoming flower just as it should.
(And if you have no idea what craziness I'm burbling on about now, go here.)
Best of all? Barring catastrophe, I won't have any reason to go back and do this again for another year. Yay.
Congratulations! This is all amazing, wonderful news.
Posted by: Jen of a2eatwrite | June 10, 2008 at 05:38 PM
That is now my very favorite species of butterfly. :)
Posted by: Jana | June 10, 2008 at 07:04 PM
Woo hoo! Here's to butterflies in the head, not in the stomach.
Posted by: leslee | June 10, 2008 at 07:15 PM
Hooray for butterflies without weeds! Well, you know what I mean. xo - L.
Posted by: laurie | June 10, 2008 at 10:43 PM
Yay indeed. :-)
Posted by: The Goldfish | June 11, 2008 at 12:26 PM
wonderful news! and yay for no more docs for a year!
Posted by: beadbabe49 | June 12, 2008 at 11:19 AM
Thanks, all.
Jana, mine too, although I must confess I'm a little sad (but only a very little, you understand) that it is not one of the species that "crap[s] sunshine and kittens and rainbows." Just as well, though. Don't know exactly where all that would go.
Beadbabe49: "no more docs for a year" -- OH. IF ONLY. No. I simply don't have to have another MRI of the brain with a gadolinium injection for contrast for another year. Whee. I still have cancer, though, lots of it. So I still have doctors, lots of them. (sigh)
Posted by: Sara | June 12, 2008 at 12:13 PM
Yes. Go, butterfly!
Posted by: Casey | June 12, 2008 at 02:10 PM
Outstanding! Now I'm greedy for good news on the rest. fingers crossed and all that.
Posted by: Leslie | June 12, 2008 at 11:29 PM
oooh, lovely butterfly!
OMG on the pain scale thingie. the exact same graphic was on the wall of my mother's hospital room after her recent stroke, only the poster was directed at caregivers. during physical therapy [for the broken hip that accompanied the stroke], mom scored about a 12, with full audio, since she didn't understand anything about why she was there.
i love your idea about "the anonymous patient!" mom's hospital featured the tommy lasorda heart institute, with baseball photos on the appropriate floor and everything -- but the rest of the artwork was strictly generic art posters nailed to the walls.
i myself would like to sponsor the "broken elevator" sign [should i happen into wealth soon], since that was one of the more memorable features of our sojurn at the hospital. BOTH of the visitor elevators were broken during our time. staff were heard to mutter that maybe the hospital administration should stop buying new hospitals for a while, and fix the damned things. hear, hear.
Posted by: kathy a. | June 15, 2008 at 08:18 PM
Thank you, ladies.
Kathy A, I thought better of taking a particular picture of a related institution (it's a complex of very famous teaching hospitals here in Boston, see, so you visit one and you sort of visit all of them because they are all stuck in together in an approximately 5-block radius). The picture I thought of taking, next to the brand spanking new parking garage being built would have shown a building with several different floors, each labeled from the outside with the names of a different facility or resource named after a different dead rich person. The great thing was how the big machine digging the parking lot foundation also had somebody's name on it, living or dead I don't know. It was like that time about 25 years ago when I was having a bad day on Maui (yes! possible!) and was in such a very foul mood that I almost took a picture of a frog that had been squished in the road by a passing car. Sometimes you just don't want any more souvenirs.
And while I realize people donate things in the names of people they love precisely because they love them and don't want them to be forgotten, or people leave money for things to be named after themselves once they've died so that they are not forgotten, I really have to say that when I go to a hospital, I want everything about my visit to be about me. And no, I do not think that's unreasonable, not at all.
Posted by: Sara | June 23, 2008 at 04:55 PM