Looks like I don't have bladder cancer, which came kind of as a surprise to me since, despite leaving the house an hour early, I was five minutes late to my appointment as I had to stop twice to pee. Afterwards, when the doctor was out of the room and I was sitting and reading as I waited for him to return, I got to thinking about why the doctor had even wanted to do the cystoscopy in the first place, and I remembered how alarmed he'd seemed when I told him I never sleep through the night. So I asked him about it when he came back in the room.
"It's definitely a dysfunction," he said.
"Could it be psychological?" I asked.
He nodded and smiled in a way that indicated to me he was just about certain this was it.
"Oh, good," I said. When he seemed puzzled I laughed and added, "So long as I'm just crazy, it's fine."
So we can add this to the chest pains and the teeth grinding to the list of wonderful things my mind has started doing to me regularly over the past couple years. Is it any wonder Vertigo's my favourite movie?
Anyway, in case anyone's wondering, having a camera snaked up your penis is in fact uncomfortable. I think I took it pretty well, though. In a weird way, I was even looking forward to it. It was like a challenge. I fare these sorts of things better than ongoing ambiguous pain. Want to pull out my teeth, stab me in tender spots? That's fine. Give me local anaesthetic at most, if even that, and I'm good to go. It's the quiet and the questions that get me. It's a shame I live in a world where people think it's vulgar to be direct about anything serious or embarrassing.
I even had a female nurse applying the anaesthetic to my penis, a nervous middle aged blonde who gave me an obviously rehearsed line about the camera "gliding" through the urethra. I was cool as a cucumber, so to speak. While the doctor was in the act of getting that camera into me, the nurse wanted to know the fax number for another hospital that had my old X-rays.
"It's on a printout, in my jacket hung up on the wall," I said. "Folded up in a copy of Alice In Wonderland."
More than for just something to do while waiting, I always like to have a paperback book with me as I tend to shove receipts, business cards, et cetera, into them. Since the book I ended up starting was Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South on my Kindle (where it was free), I reverted to my more than decade old little paperback of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. That little book's kept me company on many experiences.
Speaking of cancer, I couldn't help being amused yesterday when I read that Ann Coulter was trying to put a positive spin on radiation levels in Japan by saying that, "excess radiation operates as a sort of cancer vaccine." More and more I get the feeling the Right thinks they can make things true just by saying them.
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