At this precise moment, I have no medical appointments of any kind next week. I've been trying to get as much of this doctor stuff done by the end of the year because (presumably) my astronomical deductible was met within the first few minutes of my even more astronomically expensive hospital stay. The last few weeks have been just so much fun, I can't tell you.
Today, the last day of the year (2004 can't end too soon for me, I can tell you), was the day of my last medical appointment: an Electromyogram. This test is, in my case, used to make sure that the nerves in my arm didn't get messed up in the accident. I've had a lot of weakness and pain in my shoulder, as if some muscles suddenly stopped working and the others got strained from picking up the slack.
The test begins with some probes being taped to my hand and the nurse zapping me with a little taser-type thing. This is the nerve conduction velocity form of the fun. She measures the distances between the zapping points and the probes. This doesn't hurt, but the electric shocks are startling. All of me jumps, not just the muscles that are being stimulated.
Then the doctor comes in and starts the real EMG, in which he sticks a needle way into my muscles and we listen to the electrical activity on a little speaker and look at the waveforms on the laptop being used as an oscilloscope. This doesn't sound that bad, the needle is little, but he keeps jiggling it around and making me tense my muscles.
"How far in are you sticking that needle?" I ask.
"Oh, not any farther than the hub," he says. "Just think of it as acupuncture. After all, 600 million Chinese people can't be wrong. Sometimes, because of how we're amplifying the signal, we pick up radio. You can't change the station though."
"Ow!"
"There're over 250 muscles we could test, but I don't think we need to do them all. You're going to have to stop bleeding." He presses gauze onto a recalcitrant stick site.
Then he sticks the needle into a muscle that works my index finger and tells me to point at the ceiling.
"Ow!"
Mercifully, he doesn't mess around with that muscle too long. For the grand finale, though, he sticks the needle into a muscle in the back of my neck and tells me to relax, but not to worry if I can't because this isn't an endurance kind of thing. And we'll only do that one muscle.
The neck stabbing actually hurts less than the finger one. And then we're done! The data are collected. I pass the test and my neck is okay, or at least it was.
"Women usually do much better with this test than men. I guess it has something to do with being able to deal with childbirth," he observes.
I enjoy being a girl.
502 words | December 31, 2004 09:33 PM | Miss Trauma