Tuesday 6 December 2005

Pic of the day: No, it is NOT the start of the melodrama. It is the end of the melodrama, I hope. (According to the ever helpful Wikipedia.org "a villain poses a threat, the hero escapes the threat (or rescues the heroine) and there is a happy ending.")

MRI

Today was the day of scanning my hypophysis (pituitary gland), which lies centrally in the brain and secretes hormones that control the rest of the body. This all started long ago, but let us start with this summer. I went to the doctor about some heart irregularities: The heart occasionally speeds up to around maximum pulse and stays there a while, then falls down to a level a bit over normal for the next hours. Normally this doesn't happen every year even, but lately it has happened a couple times. I wondered if it was related to my higher level of exercise (or possibly the lower level of fat). The doctor did not find anything since I came there when it was not happening. He did however take an unusual interest in my breasts. This may be because I am a man.

In all fairness, my breasts are rather small. They are certainly larger than usual for a man, especially for a man not overweight. The thing is, they are not covered in fat, it is just glandular tissue. I was sent to a specialist at the hospital, and a blood test showed that I had an unusually high level of prolactin, a hormone that makes pregnant women grow larger breasts and produce milk. Since I am male, the effect is barely noticeable. Swollen and sometimes itching nipples, and small breast buds like a girl who is just about to enter puberty soon.

Even though this is such a small matter, they reserved a magnetic resonance imaging machine for me at 8:00 in the morning today. I guess when it comes to the body's master control hormone center, nothing is too good. To be honest, I don't expect them to find any tumors, because I have been this way since I was 13. Also I don't have any visual symptoms like you get when such a tumor presses on the optic nerve. (It goes right through there.)

***

Since I was told to show up well before the session, I would have to leave my suburban hideout around 6 in the morning. Since I normally to to bed around 2-4 AM, I just didn't go to bed. Luckily the buses were more or less chaining, so I spent very little time out in the biting winter cold which for some reason found this to be a good time. (It hasn't been serious winter so far, thank the Light, and it wasn't snowing even now.) I amused myself by reading, even though I had brought with me my Nintendo DS. Of course, no one was around until near 8, so I could have spared myself being there early as they told me to. Even in health care, only emergency staff is present before 8.

Everything metallic, including my belt buckle and of course the wrist watch, had to go before I went to the magnet room. The magnetic fields are supposedly quite strong. I had read in various places that strong magnetic fields applied to certain parts of the brain can cause religious hallucinations, so I was a bit curious. But either they avoided those parts, or the atmosphere was just not right, because no such thing happened. (The latest report I saw, incidentally, said that the hallucinations did not coincide with the time the magnet field was applied if the field was controlled by a computer rather than by a human operator. That is, if neither the test subject nor the researcher knew when the field was active, there was no causal connection between the field and the quasi-religious experience. I am so not surprised.)

To my surprise and dismay, however, the young woman (I did not ask her title) insisted that I would have contrast fluid added in the middle of the process. First two scans without it, then fluid, then two more scans. I tried to explain that there was no reason to use contrast fluid since this was a magnetic scan, not x-rays. But she stuck to her guns, as if she knew more about this than I... Just because it's her job... Anyway, it probably can't do any harm. It was just a drip in my arm, no spinal taps or anything like that.

The actual machine made quite a bit of noise, but I got two soft ear plugs which helped a lot. And while I may have a slight claustrophobia, it is not of clinical proportions. The tunnel in which I was placed also had room enough for substantially more substantial patients than I, to put it that way. While Norway is quite a bit behind the USA in the obesity epidemic, that part of the population are at least as likely to frequent our hospitals, so these have had to invest in pretty solid equipment.

Despite the warning that it could take up to a couple hours, it did only take half an hour. I was however very tired after the night of no sleep and after the excitement wore off, so I went home and slept through the workday.

The results will be sent to my regular (state-appointed) doctor as well as to the endocrinologist at the hospital, the one I visited last time, the one who thought we had met before when we hadn't. I assume I am going to hear from my regular eventually. But all these things proceed over a time scale of months, so I don't expect to hear from them this year. I am also quite glad it isn't cancer we're talking about here, because "months" and "cancer" don't really go well together in the same sentence. Kinda like "army" and "undead" or "horde" and "robots".

And on that positive note, I end this part of the story... for now.