Scanned again

A mix of sunshine, intermittent showers and drizzle all day, with the wind blowing cold and warm in quite a random way. I woke up at seven and was driving to the UHW Radiology Unit by twenty to eight. The whole place was quiet, with few people around. By five to eight I reached the reception desk and after a short wait was ushered into the MRI scanner area and prepared for the half hour session, enclosed in this huge noisy machine, making an assortment of rhythmic mechanical sounds, which made me think of some kind of techno sound track. I think that's at least the fourth scan I've had. Two or three when I was being treated for the anal abscess, possibly one when a large stone was making its way out from my kidney and now this one. Must check in my blog archive when I get around to it.

With the job done, I was on my way back to the almost empty car park by a quarter to nine. I met Diana from St Catherine's in the corridor, going into work. She's a pharmacist, taking her turn at a Saturday morning duty.

Clare made pancakes for breakfast as it's a Saturday. That's how I know I'm at home again! As a result of a promotion email from the Oxwich Bay Hotel, I booked a three night stay, from tomorrow afternoon until Wednesday. It won't matter if the weather is lousy, just to be in one of our favourite places is what matters.As a matter of urgency, during the day, I got on with recording and editing Morning Prayer and Reflection for next Thursday and uploading to YouTube, so I have no work to think about while we're away.

I cooked sea bass with veggies for lunch. After a siesta we walked together in Thompson's Park. I then went for a longer walk around Llandaff Fields on my own, dodging showers, as I needed more exercise, despite being tired after getting up early. After supper, the last pair of episodes of 'The Sketch Artist'. From the ending, it's clear there'll be a third series. Now a night's sleep without having to think about preaching or taking a service tomorrow.

And now a festal season lockdown

Pancakes again for breakfast today, plus a couple of rashers of bacon from a packet opened a few days ago, an extra treat! There were more outbreaks of heavy rain, plus enough respite time to have a good walk in the park. I've been trying to figure out a setting in which to video the next batch of Morning Prayer videos. It's rather tricky to set anything up that looks good in the favoured portrait display mode, due to the phone camera's field of view at close range. I've cleared Clare's desk to make space for an icon, a big candle in a red vessel and an open bible. but positioning the phone to block avoid home office-like surroundings and having room to show my face as well is really frustrating. I have to record on the phone in one take so distribute via What'sApp. Anything edited on another device or taken with a proper camera doesn't render correctly when transferred back to the phone and I can't figure out why. You have to work with what you've got, however. And I can, with a bit more patience.

At tea time I had my appointment at the Heath Hospital, driving over there in the dark, and parking at the house of Vanessa and Keith, friends from St John's City Parish, to walk into the campus rather than risk not being able to park. I could have chanced it as the hospital turned out to be pretty quiet at that time of day, and during a pandemic. I was twenty minutes early and ushered in straight away. I had to change into a clinical theater gown, before going into the scan room for a briefing, and kitted out with  ear defenders, as the equipment is very noisy. The twenty nine minute sequence of scans, pairs of three, then four five and six minutes at different frequencies is a strange sci-fi like experience. Amazing imaging technology, invented and developed to a high degree of sophistication from scratch over the past sixty years. What a time to be alive.

When I returned to get my my car, I chatted with Vanessa and Keith on the doorstep for five minutes. It had just been announced on the phone that the lifting of meeting and travel restrictions for the Christmas feast has been cancelled nationally, because of the rapid surge of infections caused by the new contagious variant of covid-19. The changes come into effect at midnight tonight. I'm not surprised. Fortunately, church services haven't been cancelled, yet. This could have been foreseen a few days earlier. Such short notice will be create havoc, not just for families planning Christmas gatherings, but also for businesses which are already in an advanced stage of preparation and delivery of Christmas dinners.

Not much of interest to watch on telly this evening, so I worked on my New Year's Eve reflection and Morning Prayer combined video script. Very hard to keep within the optimum eight minutes. I tried a few experimental recordings, but wasn't satisfied with the result, and went to bed, not quite as late as usual.

MRI dismay

On the way to her morning study group, Clare dropped me off at Llandough Hospital at a quarter to ten this morning for a MRI pelvic scan. At half ten I was escorted to a mobile scanner unit located in the yard outside the Orthopaedic Unit, and subjected to five scans over the period of an hour. The last time I had this procedure was when I was about to shed a kidney stone, at New Year in 2009. Then I had to undress completely and leave outside any metallic objects. This time I wasn't required to undress, just uncover my pelvis to make room for a device which fitted over the area to be scanned, possibly to focus the magnetic field that generates the resonance images. 

The scanner made five passes. Three with the machine making one frequency noise, then two more in a slightly different position at another. I think the second two were directed at my liver and right kidney to probe the anomalous signals registered by last week's ultrasound. I asked the scanner operator how long it would take for the report to reach the surgical team who had commissioned the scan and was disappointed to hear him say four or five weeks. Not much urgency there, I thought. I must ask my GP to chase it up. A long wait isn't improving things and may be taking its toll on me.

I walked out of the hospital an hour later and within a few minutes boarded a 95 bus. This dropped me at the end of Lansdown Road in Canton, a fifteen minute walk home. It conveniently offered an opportunity to do some shopping and then cook lunch in time for Clare's arrival. The inflammation today was worse than usual and I had to rest and recover after lunch. Then I wrote to my GP and took the letter around to the surgery, to get some exercise. Then, another evening in front of the telly with unseen episodes of NCIS and Bull. Rather too much of Michael Weatherly for one evening to be honest.