Doctor Part 2

So, on the day of my scan, I mosey on over to the hospital without eating breakfast because I can't each six hours prior. The doctor takes me into a room with a bed and a circular scanny thing, typical hospital stuff. Then he says, "Let me go get the injection." What? Come again? Nobody said anything about an injection. I thought this was just going to be a quicky; in and out in like half an hour. But, since I'm a pro at needles, I just roll with his, somewhat nonchalant, confession of my impending death. So, seeing my confused expression he asks, "Have they told you anything about this scan?" No, no they haven't. "Well," he continued, "I'm going to inject some amino acids laced with radioactive tracers into your body. Then it'll take about a half hour for the tracers to reach the gall bladder, a half hour for the gall bladder to fill, and half an hour for it to empty, and that's what we'll be watching. So that's about an hour and a half." Awesome! So he slides me on under the scanner and lowers it down. When I look up there is a TV perched, conveniently, above my head and I pass the time watching the food network. About half way through, the doctor makes me get up and walk around for twenty minutes because I'm taking too long. Finally, they inject some saline and hormones into me to mimic whatever hormones food produces or something like that, whatever. By the time I leave I'm starving and sick, either from whatever he injected into me or because I was having massive cramps and couldn't take any medicine. But, all in all, a good experience. A few days later (can you believe this post is still going?) I get a call from the nurse and she tells me that my scan was normal. So it's not my gallbladder, I just have crazy, unexplained pains every few months. OK. But the nurse is not done. "You had a high amount of creatinine in your kidneys. We'd like you to take a 24 hour urine test." My first thought is, "Crap." The nurse has me come into the health center and the lab hands me an enormous, for lack of a better word, jug. It's the size of a Costco maple syrup container. They even give me a BYU bookstore bag for a "disguise". I decided to start the day after finals because I didn't want to have to worry about carrying around a jug of my urine while studying and taking finals. However, I had to finish up some research for my professor so I ended up carrying my backpack, filled with only my urine, to school that day. Also, the bookstore bag came in handy whenever I had to use the jug. It was kind of fun, I enjoyed laughing to myself every time I went to the bathroom and listening to the swishing as I walked around campus.

The best part was when I went to turn in my jug of urine. I went back to the health center lab and gave them my jug. The guy said "Oh yeah, the 24 hour urine test, the test loved by roommates everywhere." I had no idea what he was talking about, until the other guy said, "Oh yeah, I forgot you have to refrigerate it." Oh crap... No one told me that. I just sat there like I had done everything right, hoping that my test would come out ok anyway. However, when they tried to look up my test they couldn't find the original order for the test. The lead to them asking me questions such as "Did a doctor tell you to take this test?" and "Did we give you this jug?" No, I just thought it would be fun and so I procured a large jug in which to pee for 24 hours and then give it to you guys... Anyway, they got it all sorted out, took some of my blood, and I left there with high hopes that my un-refrigerated urine would give them good results.