The Great Alana Health Check concludes this morning with various bodily fluids being taken to my local Douglas Hanly Moir, followed by an ECG and blood extraction.
Last week involved a cortisol-raising visit to the radiologist for a mammogram and boob ultrasound.
Mammograms are not my favourite. Just in case you haven’t experienced once, it involves standing half naked while a technician holds your boob and stretches it across a plastic plate. Then they crank down another plastic plate onto your boob, tighter and tighter, as you wince and wonder how much more you can take.
Just when you think it’s all over, you remember they have to stretch your boob out all over again to get the side view.
(Blokes really don’t understand how unpleasant it is to have a mammogram. Oh, they murmur all the right platitudes, but I think if they had their balls squashed between two radiography plates, their empathy levels would increase significantly.)
Because I have dense boob tissue, I also needed to have an ultrasound. I always forget these also hurt. The radiographer presses down really hard on tender places with the ultrasound thingy – over and over again – to get a good view of them.
After the radiographer completed my ultrasound she told me the doctor to check it. Nothing to worry about; she assured me, very routine.
She was gone a very long time. Long enough for me to develop a comprehensive plan for dealing with bad news, who I would call (since my sister was in Melbourne and DD was in Perth), how I would get the dogs fed if I was rushed into surgery etc …
When she finally returned she was accompanied by an older woman, who also reassuringly told me that there was nothing to worry about, but she needed to do my ultrasound again because a few small things had shown up.
There you go, I thought to myself, good thing I developed that emergency plan.
Fortunately, it turned out to be a few benign cysts.
But I still felt a little out of sorts as I trudged to the train station from the hospital … so I went to Pitt Street Mall and treated my boobs to a new jacket from Zara, because paying $650 for a mammogram and ultrasound wasn’t a big enough hit to my credit card.
Once the results for my endless list of tests are ready, I will face the music on my health and what steps need to be taken to improve it.
I have checked everything off my doctor’s to-do list apart from joining a gym. I’ve belatedly realised that he’s expecting me to work out three to four times a week.
I have NO IDEA how I will fit that into my busy schedule, what with my day job, Drinks Digest, social activities and having to playing fetch endlessly with Charlie the Moodle.
Speaking of health … I am obsessed with the hantavirus outbreak on that cruise ship.
Move aside COVID-19, could this be the next – more deadly – pandemic?
The type of hantavirus the passengers and crew have contracted damages the lungs and heart, killing nearly 40% of the people it infects. And there’s no treatment or cure.
Eeeeek!
People are usually infected by hantavirus through contact with infected rodents or their urine, their droppings or their saliva. But the World Health Organisation reckons rare human-to-human transmission took place on board the Hondius.
WHO said it had been reassured there were no rats on board the ship. Its working assumption is that a Dutch couple who joined the ship in Argentina were infected before boarding the cruise.
The ship has been stuck at sea but has finally been given clearance to dock in the Canary Islands. Cape Verde was meant to be the ship’s final destination, but the nation off West Africa has not allowed the vessel to dock or put passengers ashore.
Now the leader of the Canary Island is having a fit about the ship docking there and refusing to allow it.
The Dutch Foreign Ministry has just medically evacuated three sick people – including the ship’s doctor – to the Netherlands from the ship.
The Dutch couple and a German national have since died, while a 69-year-old British person with hantavirus symptoms was evacuated from the ship on April 27 and is in intensive care in South Africa.
The Dutch woman who died fell ill on a plane so now they’re contact tracing all those passengers.
Another bloke who left the ship last month has come down with symptoms in Switzerland and has been hospitalized.
Argggggh.
It’s that terrifying movie Contagion, with Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon, brought to life. Nightmare stuff.
Happy Thursday!
Song of the day: Peggy Lee “Fever”
housegoeshome 
Leave a comment