A Wholesome Day in Diagnostic Imaging

 

Today I had to go into the hospital for an MRI. From now on October will be the retesting month for any residual metastatic disease and to check on my kidney that is dying (oh yeah, my kidney is dying by the way). So far all the blood work has come back beautifully clean and the imaging is the next step to hopefully get some good news. 

So if you've had an MRI, you know that you can't eat or drink anything before. Which would be fine if I didn't get really bad headaches when I don't drink a lot of water in the morning. So I show up to the scan after fasting overnight and my head is really pounding. I go to the desk and asked the nurse if I can just have a small sip of water to get a headache pill down. She said that it would be okay but I had to go beyond the locked doors to get to a fountain and she would escort me. Cool. 

So we go past the locked doors and we enter into CT. There are people sleeping, people in hospital gowns, IV's being inserted, typical hospital stuff. Then, I see a man walking towards me pushing an empty bed. We make eye contact and smile and he kept walking and I got my water. Suddenly, it was like I time traveled back to September 11th, 2024 and I remembered that man's face. He was the nurse that assisted in my CT guided biopsy last year. The nurse that was there for one of the scariest days of my life and the nurse that took a bad situation and made it not so bad. 

"Do you know that guy who was pushing the bed?" I asked my escort nurse. She said yes and that his name was Quinton. I told her how he was my nurse the day of my biopsy and how he was so patient and wonderful. I hate needles with a burning passion. Like, I know nobody likes needles but I will thrash and cry and hyperventilate and move and it is never a pretty sight. So yes, those things happened when Quinton administered my IV that day but he was calm, cool, collected and calmed me down. I had just lost my pregnancy a few days prior, I didn't know if I had cancer, I had so many questions and concerns and he sat with me, explained everything and did what he could to make the experience okay for Brody and I. The whole day of the biopsy is pretty blurry due to the sedation I was on, but when I saw his face in the hallway, I had instant chills and I knew I had to tell him what an impact he made on me. 

So as I am leaving the locked area, we pass by Quinton at his desk and I ask him if he remembers me. I knew he wouldn't because I knew how many CT guided biopsies this guy has probably done and this was over a year ago. He asked me some questions, he didn't remember me. But anyways, I said something along the lines of how he was there for me on one of my worst days. He provided one of the best hospital experiences I have ever had and I have had many. I gave him a brief summary of my "journey" with cancer and how things got pretty scary and dark for awhile, but that I'm going to be okay. I told him how nurses really make or break an experience and that I wish I got to thank him back then for all he did for me. We hugged, he said I gave him chills, he wished me happiness and health and I went for my MRI.

 Why does this make me teary? Because that was one of the darkest weeks of my life, everything was unknown and I was a wreck pretty much all the time. How special is it that despite the despair during that time, what stands out is a few really good people who were there to make the awful things a little less awful.