Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I had my CT scan (with contrast) of my head done today as part of figuring out what tissue affected by my genetic calcification disorder and what the cause of the neurological problems including central apnea are. I have no idea if it will tell them anything useful or not, since when they were diagnosing the muscle, everything was inconclusive until they actually cut a bunch of flesh out of me and stuck it under an electron microscope (at which point it was very obvious).

My favorite thing about these scans is that if you pay them $10 for the CD, you get to take home a copy to look at on your computer. When I got home and viewed the data, I almost had a heart attack when I saw a bunch of white bumps in the middle of my brain! Yikes! A tumor? Calcification? Doesn’t look good! But I did a little poking around and viewing other people’s scans online, and, whew, I’m quite certain that these are perfectly normal images of blood vessels that are supposed to be there. Feel free to scare me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that’s how things are supposed to look.

Oh, and you can see my earrings and stretched lobes in the scans, check it out:

Finally, I uploaded the whole thing to YouTube as well.

Oh and the IV injection of the contrast dye is a really neat feeling — intense warmth spreading through your body. As it collected in my pants, I had a moment of terror in which I thought I’d “wet the bed”. It’s a very strange sensation. They told me there might be a metal taste, but I don’t think I noticed any of that… The effect for the scanner only lasts a moment, so at the end of your scan (at least in my case), they hit you with the dye, you feel weird for a moment, they fire up the machine, and a couple seconds later you’re done. I didn’t know this, and had assumed that the with-contrast scanning would be the majority of what they were doing rather than just a reference frame (or something). So when the tech nurse came out almost immediately, I was quite confused and thought that perhaps I’d blacked out when she told me we were done. But no, I just didn’t know the schedule.

I did some jewelry work yesterday and pushed myself a little too hard and my hands are aching — I can hardly close my left hand, it’s like some whithered claw from a Gypsy curse or something. But I did make some great progress so after a little luck and a lotta pain coping I will finished off the pieces I was working on and will be posting them here and to Etsy later today, so check back if you have the time. I have a couple nice new items that I think people will quite like. Oh, and all the orders I had pending from the holiday sale went out in the mail yesterday if for some reason I missed emailing anyone to let them know.