Little lights

CT scan last month – mercifully clear results. Mysteriously clear, too, as my doctor could palpate some strange little alien in my belly a few months before, but I’ll grab the mercy. I sneezed when injected for a CT scan in 2006 – radioactive contrast dye shoots into your veins, floods your body, cooks you slightly with a piss-warmth in the groin – just a sneeze.

I smile at the needle-nurse. --Now, is this the stuff that makes me warm all over and sneeze?

Timing, right? I ask this while lying on the table.

Concerned faces. Syringe suddenly held away.

We go ahead with the test, with nurse and attendants cautioning me to speak up if I feel the slightest bit strange.

These people worry too much, I figure, watching the nurse pierce my elephant –hide skin and lose the vein. Always a tedious process. Stab hard, dig, dig, pull out. Stab, dig, dig ...

Prick. Shoot. Flood. Heat. Humming wheel of lasers, instructions: --Don’t breathe. Breathe.

Nausea. Guts wants to explode out my nose. Sweat. Sneezing. Lots of sneezing.

Scan’s finished. Sit up, sneeze some more, wheeze a bit, start to explain I think I’m okay – sudden lisp. Tongue wider than it should be. Lips numb? Surely not. Got to be imagining this. Now I’ve got to hang around this little anteroom, sit right in front of a camera ... lips numb. Definitely. Tongue thick. Head foggy. See a doctor – she’s a lovely woman I went to school with. We chat, I wheeze slightly, she listens to my chest, then she goes away, says she’ll check on me shortly. Meantime I should call out or wave at the camera if anything else goes –

Shots of light. Gold and blue. About nine feet in the air. Drawing me towards them. Perhaps I should wave at the camera now, but those lights, don’t want to lose the lights ...

Whack. Sudden shove back into the hard plastic chair. Lips tingle, sensation returning. Tongue shrinks from jamming my teeth. Twenty minutes later, I’m allowed to leave, with a warning: --You shouldn’t have any more CT scans.

I see different lights when stoned on painkillers. Little flames of blue or pink, usually. No desire to follow them.