I’ve been through quite a few traumatic experiences related to my health in the past 25 years. I’ve been in cardiac arrest, had an experimental open heart surgery, been in ICU with pneumonia and hooked up to more IVs of antibiotics than you’ve ever seen. Of course I also had a heart transplant and then needed a pacemaker, (a fun surgery that you are awake for). It all adds up and you basically go through it all alone, and you get tough. So I thought I was pretty tough. And then I had to have a CT scan.
If you've never had one, it’s basically a three dimensional x-ray. You lay on a table that slides into a giant circular ‘donut’ and this thing pumps you full of several orders of magnitude more radiation than you should receive in your lifetime, and then they make cool videos out of them for doctors to stand around watching and pointing at.
Well as it turns out, nothing in my battle-scarred history in healthcare prepared me to deal with the claustrophobia I would face, and when I had a CT scan at Cedars Sinai for my evaluation, I was overwhelmed with a panic attack that was beyond my control. I had to have them stop, which really pissed me off. I’m tough. After all that I’ve been through, to get here, and be defeated by a fucking donut? How embarrassing. Well thankfully the technician was super awesome and understanding and she made some accommodations to get me through it. And I survived. All in all, it was only like 5 minutes and it was over.
And then they found a thing, and they pointed at it, and i had to go back and have another CT scan.
Well, this time I was prepared and I walked in. I laid on the table, closed my eyes and took some deep breaths and they slid me in the donut, and after a few minutes, the pulled me out and I thought, “aha! I win!” And then the tech said, “ok, we need to do another series of pictures and you’ll need to lie still for about 15 minutes.
And then in the back of my mind, the panic started welling up and I started to worry that I wouldn’t be able to contain it. So I dug deep, and I thought about that fucking donut and how it wasn’t going to beat me again, and before I knew it, 15 minutes was up, and I was out.
And now I have a new arrow in my “dealing with stress” quiver. Donuts.
Oh and btw, that ‘thing’ they found was a small tumor on my adrenal gland which is not affecting my hormone levels in any way, and they are not worried about. The endocrinologist I talked to said “I can’t remember the last time I ever even heard of one of these being cancerous.” It’s like a 1 in a million chance."