Testing, Testing

Remember the “good old days,” when the only tests we feared were in 8^th grade math? Those days are long gone, and nobody gets to this stage of life without going through a bevy of tests, some meant to diagnose existing health problems and some meant to figure out what could go wrong before it does.

If you stop by the local radiology place, you can ask to see a collection of pictures of virtually every part of my body. In fact, you could probably reconstruct my body slice by slice from the images gleaned from CAT scans, ultrasounds, etc. I’ve had more Doppler reports than Al Roker’s weather. I’ve even had Doppler ultrasounds taken of both of my shins, one after I fell on the ice and one after this summer’s unfortunate jet ski incident. I’ve had injections of dye and I’ve consumed gallons of chalky white barium, all to get better pictures of my thyroid, kidneys and abdomen.

Sometimes you have to drink copious amounts of water before you have certain tests. I recall getting through one such test and leaping off the table the second it was over to sprint to the nearest restroom. Other times you have to collect samples of bodily fluids and refrigerate them to take them to the lab. I always worry that when I have the dreaded 24-hour urine test I will come in a quart low. And besides, do you want to find a huge orange jug in the refrigerator when you reach for your morning juice? (This story virtually assures than none of you will be staying at my place or dropping by for breakfast any time soon.)

If you have gotten this far in life without a colonoscopy, you don’t know the joy of having a team of people drug you and invade your body with a camera. That’s one photo album of mine you won’t find on Shutterfly. My luck was having the nurse on my last colonoscopy be a high school classmate of mine. “Haven’t seen you in so long,” she said as she greeted me. “Now, turn over on your side.” She got a completely different view of me than she ever had in gym class.

I must add here that having a colonoscopy undoubtedly saved my life, so I encourage everyone to get one after the age of 50. Since I had not yet reached that threshold in 2000, my doctor demurred, recommending instead a sigmoidoscopy to diagnose my persistent intestinal problem. However, having seen Katie Couric’s televised colonoscopy, I insisted, and when the test revealed a tumor that was determined to be malignant, I asked the doctor whether he would have found it with a sigmoidoscopy. No, he admitted, telling me that I had colon cancer. Now I have colonoscopies at the prescribed intervals, and, thanks to Miralax, the prep isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be. Besides, the anesthesia used during the procedure gives me the best half hour of sleep I get all year.

There are the routine maintenance things we have to do, like the annual mammogram and Pap smear for women, and the tests we take because nobody can figure out what is wrong. I get bronchitis in the winter, but I consistently fail the strep test. Now I’m having a problem with my left eye, which led to blood work, an ultrasound of my carotid arteries and an echocardiogram (no problems there to report, I am happy to say). After the latter, the technician informed me that I didn’t have a broken heart. Apparently he had not seen the Yankees lose in the playoff game the night before.

I always ask for a copy of the test results, because that way I can share the report with my other doctors. I’m still trying to get over the report that referred to my kidneys as “unremarkable.” I know that’s supposed to be a good thing, but it sounds a little insulting to me. My kidneys are great – or at least I think so.

When I am at the office of a new doctor or a lab and filling out the forms, it takes longer now to check off all those boxes, since I cannot simply stay in the “No” column anymore. And it is getting harder to remember when I had my last tetanus shot or pneumonia vaccine. I’ve already had this year’s flu shot and I’m now vaccinated against shingles, though the doctor said I could still get it, but the case would be less severe than if I hadn’t been inoculated. I’m sure there is a test for that, too.

Once the doctor suspected a friend of mine might have pneumonia and wrote her a referral for a test that read “Ro-pneumonia.” For years, we thought that she had a form of pneumonia called “Ro-pneumonia.” It wasn’t until years later when my doctor told me she was sending me for tests to “rule out” some condition or disease or another that I finally realized that “Ro” anything is meant to rule it out.

I have friends who have gone for MRIs of their brains and reported that the doctors didn’t find anything. Now, there’s a scary thought. I went for an MRI once and decided that it was actually meant to torture the victim – the patient, that is – with the distracting noise of the loud and annoying machines designed to make you forget the medical problem that brought you there in the first place. Who thinks up these modern-age medieval torture chambers anyway? I remember being in a long tube once for a body scan and feeling like I was being buried alive. At the end, they concluded that I did have a body. And there are pictures to prove it.