Pneumonia?

NIH, day 2. Not so packed as yesterday. First appointment at 8:30 AM, though that didn't help me sleep past 6. Morning tests required fasting again.

They wanted a 24-hour urine test, so I had to drag 4 liters of the stuff around in an expandable brown plastic container. Turned it in at the phlebotomy lab and went off to my first test, an abdominal ultrasound, measuring all the organs and taking sectional views of them, looking for badness.

Onward. Chest X-ray: stand up, face the white board, grab the handles, shoot. Turn sideways, shoot again, you're done. So far so good, but the next test, a CT scan of everything from my neck to my pelvis, was more elaborate.

9:40 AM, drink half of a banana-flavored barium sulfate milkshake. 20 minutes later, drink the rest. 40 minutes after that, into the scanner room in my blue paper hospital garb. They placed a new IV line, then hooked me up to the world's biggest hypodermic, filled with an iodine solution. Into the scanner, laid out like a fish ready for cleaning. The platform pulls you into the scanner, then out again, while the giant X-ray wheel whirs around you. The hypodermic suddenly compresses, fast. The iodine feels cold and metallic on its way in. Tried not to think about all that radiation. The docs call it "taking a picture," which downplays the risk factor way too much — most people's main "optional" exposure to radiation comes from medicine. CT scans give you 100 times the radiation of a chest X-ray, which is already way more than you should take lightly. Think about all those dental X-rays going right through your head. This is not a joke.

Around 11:30, after the CT scan, I finally got to eat. Didn't feel as awful as yesterday since I'd had more sleep and it was earlier, but I was still really hungry.

Last appointment of the day: a pulmonary function test. I huffed and puffed into a little plastic mouthpiece that measured exhaust gases and volume of air expelled, stuff like that. In between huffs, the tech used her cell to call out for some danishes she needed for the next morning. This took several calls, during some of which she directed me to puff, hold, expel by raising her eyebrows and gesturing dramatically with her cellphone, looking like the conductress of a medical orchestra. By the time I left I knew her breakfast menu by heart.

Everything was over by 1 PM. Wiped out, I went back to the hotel, did some email while I waited for the room to be cleaned, fell asleep until 4:30. Took a slow walk around downtown Bethesda.

Around 7 PM, Dr. Kreitman called my cell. Are you still at the NIH, by any chance? They'd found a spot on my chest X-ray that looked like pneumonia. No, I was about to have dinner. But I can come back up there if you want. Back in June, I had a bout of bronchitis — or pneumonia, as it now seems. Coughed a lot for a week or so, I took Mucinex (guaifanesin, an expectorant) religiously for a while, and the cough very gradually slacked off. But that cough never disappeared altogether. This needs investigating. They can't treat somebody with an active pneumonia. When were you scheduled to come in tomorrow? Noon, I told him. That's way too late. I think you'd better get here at 8AM. We'll get an infectious disease specialist to look at this. Maybe do an induced sputum test. OK, I said. We'll be there.

Treatment starts tomorrow. Yow. I am really ready to start shooting hairies.