Gassy Abdomen

           

            On Saturday morning I had an appointment to get an abdominal ultrasound at Bathurst and Bloor. I had to fast and only drink sips of water from midnight until 10:30.

The yellow form that I had been given by my doctor’s nurse said that it was on the third floor. The third floor hallway was full of Jamaican guys of various ages. I don’t really know what they were doing there. I guess medical imaging doesn’t take up the whole third floor, and these guys didn’t look like they were waiting for a procedure. Anyway, it turned out that I had the wrong floor. The x-ray people told me to go to the fifth floor, but I went to the nearest open room from the elevator, which had nothing but Chinese people in it and Chinese signs on the walls. As soon as I saw the expression on the receptionist’s face upon seeing me, I knew I was in the wrong place. I asked her if this was room 507. She told me it was down the hall. When I went out in the hall, I felt pretty stupid because at the end of the hall was a big sign shouting “507”.

            The only person ahead of me was a woman with a baby carriage. The receptionist took my health card and I didn’t see it until several minutes later when the technician, a middle aged woman with an eastern European accent, called me. She was the first white person I’d seen since entering the building, and I wondered absurdly if white people don’t usually need medical imaging.

            She had me pull up my shirt to my chest and pull down my pants to my groin. She had me lie down, poured a cold, slippery, translucent gel over my belly and began to move the ultrasound wand around, pressing fairly hard as she went. She kept on asking me to take deep inhalations and hold them. At one point I had to face the wall and twist my upper body back towards her, and at another I was on my right side. Finally she had me sit up so she could look at my pancreas. Finally I had a view of the screen. It was like a moving Rorschach test in 3-D or fabric being slowly torn underwater or ghostly images emerging from out of a thick fog and then disappearing again. 

            She commented that my abdomen is very gassy, thus making it difficult to see what’s going on. I asked if it was gassier than average and she laughed and said, “I would say so!” I asked her if diet would cause that but she answered that it’s probably just that I have a slower metabolism and don’t digest food as quickly.

            She said that my doctor would have the radiologist’s report in three business days.

            Shortly after getting home I took a siesta so I’d be fresh to finish writing my prose analysis of a passage from Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows and Amazons”, which had to be submitted electronically before midnight.

            I was done with the assignment before that evening and sent it in. There would have been time to take a bike ride, but I decided to stay home.

            I watched the Roscoe Arbuckle silent film, “The Garage”. It begins with Roscoe washing the windows on the inside of a car and then to wash the outside he simply pokes his head through, revealing that there’s no glass at all. The garage of this small town also serves as the fire station. The garage owner’s daughter is being courted by a young man who brings her a bouquet, but while the guy is holding the flowers behind his back, Roscoe is doing some work that gets oil all over the bouquet so that when the daughter smells them, her face is blackened. She is then mad at her boyfriend and refuses to see him. To get her alone, the boyfriend sounds the fire alarm and so Roscoe and Buster go out looking for the fire. Meanwhile, the boyfriend accidentally sets fire to the firehouse.