Well, I didn’t make the deadline for today’s Horrordailies. I had a coronary CT angiogram in the morning and the nitroglycerin left me with a raging headache.
The process itself went fairly smoothly. It’s one occasion being undead all of that Zen practice comes in handy. Your heart rate needs to be below 65 for them to do the test, so they take your vitals when you first get there and if it’s higher than that, they give you a beta blocker and make you wait an hour. However, I had already taken mine in the waiting room, and it hadn’t kicked in yet because my heart was racing a bit from yet another night of lousy sleep.
“Take a deep breath,” the nurse said after the first reading showed a ridiculously high-for-me 78. “That might help.”
“Wait, watch this,” I said. I shut my eyes, went completely blank, and a few seconds later she said “WOW! What did you do?”
“Ha, you saw it go down?”
Here eyes were wide. I had gotten it down to 60.
“Wait until I lie down for the test,” I said.
Then the fun started. It took three tries and two people to get the IV in. The first insert, in my one truly “good” vein in the crook of my left arm, grazed a nerve. Over the years I’ve been stuck so many times that sometimes I feel absolutely nothing, not even the pinch. This time, it stung like a mofo and I made all kinds of monkey noises, “Ooh! OOH! Ah-ah-ah-ah.”
So the nurse took it out and tried the center of my right arm. After a moment she let out a sigh.
“Infiltration. I see it bubbling up. Your veins are so small and deep.”
Yes, that happens with our kind. I much prefer to take the blood.
“Yeah, I know. I don’t suppose you can use a butterfly or pediatric needle?”
“Not with this. We push almost half a cup of fluid through it and it would really hurt.”
“And you can’t use the back of the hand or the wrist?”
“Nope. That would REALLY-really hurt.”
“That explains why it was so awful when I had this done a couple of years ago. They stuck it into the side of my wrist.”
She looked horrified. “Where? Not here.”
I named the radiology practice and she rolled her eyes.
“Yep. We don’t do that here,” she said. “Well, we could do this by ultrasound, but we’d have to reschedule it because I’m not trained for that. But let me see if one of the supervisors can help. We have one guy who has 20 years of this.”
A few moments later a silver-haired colleague of hers came in, tied a tourniquet around the middle of my left forearm and began tapping around. A third nurse took my right arm and did the same. It was like being in some kind of blood-letting salon.
Finally the guy said he had one last trick. He tied the tourniquet high up on my shoulder. I was so engrossed in talking about my job with the two women that I didn’t even feel the needle go in. He got it in just half a centimeter above the first stick, so now it looks like I was bitten by the world’s tiniest vampire in the crook of my arm. Or maybe a hamster.
We went into the room with the big CT scanner, and after a few rather funny moments when the leads kept falling off my chest and they had to use gel to stick them on, they rolled me into the scanner. The hardest part about CTs and MRIs is that they’re so like being in a coffin that it’s very easy for me to fall asleep, so I have to go blank again, which actually prevents me from sleeping. It’s what I call the Zen Zone. I didn’t even feel the contrast go in until the telltale warmth spread throughout my body and I actually felt human for a few moments.
At the end, as the nurse helped me sit up, she said “You were right about your heart rate. It was fifty! So we got a nice, good picture.”
I high-fived her and she sent me on my way.
Now I wait two business days for the result.
I was pretty tired when I got home, so I took a nap before logging into work. Unfortunately, I had to get into the Zen Zone again to calm myself down before I could crawl into bed because I VERY STUPIDLY decided to look at the news and Threads.
I’ll leave you with a clue as to who set me off:
Image: AI-generated by Adobe Stock because all the real snakes on Unsplash were just too cute for this purpose.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year again: Time for Horrordailies! This is the precursor to Holidailies, and while only a few of us have signed up for the spooky stuff, I’m looking forward to it. Check out my nifty bat tumbler:
It goes with my bat earrings, which have purple sparklies:
My plan for Horrodailies is to offer up a dark poem, likely a Haiku, with photos from photographers I think you need to see and, if they’re looking for work, hire.
Unfortunately, I got thrown off my plans already because of the not entirely unanticipated letter that was stuck to my door by my landlord tonight informing me that my lease will not be renewed when it’s up on December 31. It’s a long, ugly story, but the short version is that my apartment has had mold issues for three summers running and this summer they actually had to remove and replace panels from the ceiling and wall. So, rather than do what Virginia law requires of landlords who must do a mold remediation, which is put the tenant up in another unit or in a local hotel for up to 30 days at the landlord’s expense, they’re just not renewing my lease. This way they can take their understaffed crew their usual infernally long fix-it time to correct the moisture problem that’s causing it.
Am I sad? Not really. Not like I was about a month ago when it became apparent that I was going to have to move, either voluntarily or involuntarily. I’ve lost some minor property to mold here, things like a leather jacket that couldn’t be restored (that I didn’t wear anymore anyway because it doesn’t go with my vegetarianism), some old Salomon winter boots that were good up to -20 degrees F, and this summer, an ironing board.
But I also lost something VERY precious to me this summer, which was the box of birdie mementos from Inigo the Nanday and Jimmy the Green Cheek. I had cleaned Inigo’s wood perch after he passed, but one day this summer when I opened the closet in my home gym, I smelled something rank coming from the birdie box and it turned out that the perch was covered in green mold. All of the soft materials, like rope perches and palm and fabric toys, had spots. Then, when I opened the plastic baggies that held wooden toy parts, Jimmy’s old and smaller toys, and Inigo’s leftover popsicle sticks that he loved to chew so much when he was healthy, they all smelled of mold and mildew. I managed to save some of Inigo’s half-chewed toys, but the only toy Jimmy has now is one tiny blue wooden star with one tip chewed off that I put inside the little tin that holds his ashes.
To say I was devastated by this loss would be an understatement. And yet I am SO very grateful that last winter I decided to take the baggies of feathers from Inigo, Jimmy, Louise the Alexandrine (who lives my ex-husband), and an ex-boyfriend’s birds out of that closet and put them in one of my nightstands. The baggies are doubled and sealed well, and I believe my bedroom furniture is made with cedar, which is mold-resistant, so they’re safe.
At any rate, I knew this was coming and I cried my tears over it a month ago—enough so that the problems and annoyances I chose to overlook about the place are now on my last nerve. I even got annoyed that a seam on the light fixture in the dining room is where you can see it instead of facing a corner. I just didn’t expect to get this letter until Halloween, 60 days before the lease ends, but instead they gave it to me today. It threw me, even though I know it will work out in the end. New year, new apartment, and I’ll likely have to cheat on Holidailies and write a few in advance in December.
But first Horrordailies. Here’s an oldie but goodie vamp poem that I originally made with Magnetic Poetry online, titled “Velvet and Cake.”
zenzalei 