Please, IPU, let the X-Ray tech simply have a warped sense of humour.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Or, Three Words You Should Never Say In A Patient’s Hearing.

Okay, over the decades I’ve gotten really good at ignoring pain until it goes away. This has always allowed me to work through stuff without being pegged as too much of a whinger. All to the good – until now.

I’ve been ignoring groin pain for a coupla few months now, I forget how long – and for the last little while I’ve just been too busy to do anything but ignore it.

The last week, I’ve felt old. Hobbling along like a decrepit old bastid. (I’m thirty-six.) Friday, after I finished working through it, I partied through it. Then I rushed around doing last-minute holiday stuff, and then suffered through Christmas. Had to go in to work Boxing day, and it nearly killed me – but I was the only one who could get what needed to be done done, or a $30,000 order (and in all probability the associated account) would be lost.

So yesterday I finally drag my ass down to the doctor, it being my first “free” day in donkey’s years. Every step is fricking agony.

I go through the usual office tests, and my doctor is very reassuring. He’s awesome, really. Still not sure what’s up – he gives me a course of antibiotics just in case it’s a prostate infection or summat. Says he doesn’t think it’s a hernia or cancer, but let’s just take a closer look to be sure. Off for X-rays.

X-ray tech arranges me as a tableau with my left nut perfectly in frame, does his thing, and tells me to wait for him to make sure it turned out before getting dressed. Okie-dokey.

So, as I’m sitting there in one of those nifty pink gowns, gamely waiting, when I hear the tech call over to another guy: “Look at this.” A couple of beats, and then: “Oh my god!”

WTF?

I sit there for a few more seconds, and then buddy sticks his head in the door and says, “Okay, Mr. Mudd, you can get dressed and go.”

Okay.

Thanks for the buttload of anxiety, buddy. I hope you were talking about something else. Goatse on your PDA, the standings in the lab hockey pool, anything.

Eesh. Hopefully the ultrasound guy will calm me down a little bit tomorrow.

Dudes, don’t say things like that!

2

I’d call and have a polite chat with your x-ray tech’s supervisor. Editorial comments like that (within the patient’s hearing) are massively unprofessional. On the plus side, it sounds like they’ve found the cause of your pain. :slight_smile:

3

It probably doesn’t help much that the google ad for this thread right now is for Neulasta, which is an rx drug designed to treat low white blood cell counts due to chemotherpy :eek:

Good luck!
-foxy

4

Or chemotherApy, however you’d like to pronounce it. Though “chemotherpy” does have kind of a shorthand ring to it…

5

Sorry to hear they freaked you out like that. If it’s any reassurance, try to look at it this way: even if the x-ray tech was actually talking about the x-ray, that’s only part of the story, and the doc was in a much better position to know what’s really going on when he told you it probably wasn’t any cause for alarm. I’d bet that they were talking about something else, though.
Anyway, hope you start feeling better soon. :slight_smile:

6

I hope all is well with you! The X-ray should have been much more careful with what s/he said is earshot- that is scary!
Our flip side story is when I was preggers with my daughter and apparently there was cause for concern on the ultrasound (she’s fine). We were happily chatting away about how beautiful she looked, how she perfect and how great the pictures were on the ultrasound, lalala, while the tech never gave away that she saw something possibly amiss. Looking back, I would have liked a warning of some sort to be prepared, I felt so foolish and blindsided.

7

Damn, that was unprofessional. Hope things turn out well.

8

Unnerving as the tech’s comment may have been, here’s hoping you simply have Monks’ Disease.

When the boys don’t get emptied out periodically, they can get a bit backed up, and I’m told the left one often feels worse for some reason I can’t begin to fathom.

9

There have been a couple of time when, after processing the X-ray, the image has popped up on my screen and my first thought was, Holy Shit!

But at least I haven’t exclamed it. You had a very naughty tech.

If it’s any consolation, I would certainly hope that the tech has the same instructions we do: If you see something emergent, dangerous, life threatening, etc., come and get a Radiologist…but don’t let the patient leave!

There have been a couple of times when the patient was ‘done’ having pictures taken and was ready to go home when we’ve asked them to stay for a minute “while I get a doctor to review the pictures.”

I’ve personally seen guys with:

A. Broken humerus (“I thought it was just tendonitis.”)
B. Cervical vertebra fracture (nondisplaced) (“I’ve had a stiff neck since hockey practice.”)
C. Something that looked like a 1-inch broken off tip of an ice pick in the chest wall (“Lately it hurts when I breathe.”)

…all ready to go home after having the X-rays taken.

Anyhoo…I’m hoping that, just maybe, the tech was impressed by the massive size of your cojones rather than anything pathological–otherwise you would’ve been speaking with a doctor before leaving.

BTW…I ain’t never X-rayed no testytickles. Ultrasound is better for imaging the boys.

All that said, if someone comes into Radiology with a foreign object in their butt, they shouldn’t be surprised to hear at least muffled guffaws when the picture pops up on the screen. There’s ‘professional’ and there’s human, after all.

10

I’m sorry your nuts hurt. I’m also sorry you didn’t tell the tech that he shouldn’t have said that - I would have, if I’d just had my nuts x-rayed.

Odds are pretty good, though, he couldn’t have said a damned thing to you, because he’s not a doctor. Same thing I ran into with ultrasounds I had in Canada. Here, they’re a little more lax, which is rather surprising due to the litigation nightmare that saturates the medical profession.

11

Maybe you just have a really amazing left nut?

:cool:

12

Have the antibiotics helped at all or does it still hurt quite a bit? If they helped some I wouldn’t worry about the exclamation of the tech, but if they don’t feel better I would possibly worry a little bit. Of course if it was really serious they wouldn’t have let you leave so you can at least take some comfort in that.

13

Yeah, maybe they just saw something really amazing in there like an absorbed twin or something.

14

Ah yes. Breast Ultrasound Day. Happy, chatty tech. Chatting about how lumps in bosoms are pretty much always nothing to worry about (yeah, I knew that). After which she pauses and gets visibly less happy and chatty, does another pass over one spot. And says ‘I’ll have to get a doctor to look at this’. Mmmmmhmmm *that *makes for a lovely bunch o’ minutes lying prone with ultrasound goop all over thinking ‘o cripe now what’ :eek:’.

Doc has a boo and says the professional equivalent of ‘meh’. Nothing to worry about, praise be. It sure is disconcerting, though. May yours turn out fine and ever be thus.

15

Thanks for the reassurances, folks.

What’s the internet for if not to vent about stuff that’s not quite right around the water-cooler? (When a well-meaning co-worker asked today if it was my leg or my foot that was bothering me, I could only bring myself to indicate “fairly high on the leg.” Heh.)

Wile E, you’re freaking me out. Earlier today I was thinking about that horror story with the absorbed twin’s hand around the living twin’s throat, imagining a supernaturally malign hand giving my nuts a twist. That’d rate an “Oh my God!”

I don’t know if the antibiotics are working or not – it was worse than ever today. Begged off work at noon.

16

Is there something that you would like to tell us?

17

Yes, I thought your gender was female.
Must be the cooking thing.
:slight_smile:

18

Cheer up, Dude. He probably just found that celphone you lost.

19

Fortunately, supernatural malignancies don’t show on our puny X-Ray equipment. You’d need an Ectoplasmograph for that, and they won’t break that out until they’ve ruled out a garden-variety absorbed twin.

Seriously, though, hoping everything is okay enough.

20

Oh sorry, I was trying to reassure you that it wasn’t necessarily something bad, just weird … I guess I need to work on that reassuring people thing. :stuck_out_tongue: