I'm up, I'm down. I'm up, I'm down. I'm up, I'm down.

I went to the hospital today to have the test done to find out where the hole in my dura is. I got there at 8:30am, check in, the nurse says, "We have an order to put an IV in". I say, "I've been poked so many times that my veins are really bad and so I've been trying to avoid any unnecessary pokes and the problem will just get worse and worse everytime I get poked". The nurse says she understands and she doesn't think it's necessary but she has to check with the doctor first. So for about 2 hours I'm thinking, yay, no IV! And then she comes back in and she says she's really sorry but the doctor says it's absolutely necessary to do the IV in case there is some sort of emergency. So I let her poke around in my arm until she finds a good vein. She finally finds one and as she pulls her hand away, her sleeve gets snagged on it and it gets ripped out. She screams, "Shit!" and I look at my arm and there is blood all over. She feels awful and then has to start poking around again. Finally she gets the IV in and it stays in. (BTW, they never used the IV).

So then around noon I go in for the procedure. The procedure involves putting a needle in my lower back and injecting a dye. I don't really care much about this because I can't feel it anyway. The doctor warned me before though that it might not be successful because I have so much hardware back there that they might not be able to get around the hardware to inject the dye. He said if they aren't able to do it that way, they'll have to inject the dye through my neck. Oh god, I freaking HATE anything touching my neck. My hands immediately protectively go to my neck and I tell him I have a huge problem with anything touching my neck (especially a needle!). So he says we'll just have to hope that the injection in my lower back works. I lie on the table and they start the procedure and I'm perfectly fine. I feel no pain what-so-ever. Then I get good news - they got around the hardware and got the dye in! I'm thinking, aweseome, maybe my luck is changing! They finish injecting the dye and then they tilt the table so that my feet are higher than my head so that the dye runs up my spine. Then they take an x-ray to make sure the dye has gone up and nope, I have a stenosis that is blocking the dye from going up. (A stenosis is an abnormal narrowing in a blood vessel). They take me to CT scan anyway just in case some of it trickeled up that wasn't seen in x-ray. CT shows no dye. By now it's about 2pm. They say I'll have to come back and do the same damn procedure only this time they have to inject it in my neck and then tilt the table the opposite way so that the dye flows down instead of up. Then I get another CT scan and HOPEFULLY they will find out where the leak is. This is just ridiculous.

Oh, and then I had another "oh yay" moment only to find out later that it wasn't an "oh yay" at all. I was lying down all day long and I was finally ready to go home around 4:00. So I was sitting starting around that time. By the time my ride picked me up and I got home it was about 5:00 and I noticed that I didn't have the headache that I get after 45 minutes of sitting. So I'm thinking that maybe the hole healed itself. I try really hard to not get too happy, but I can't help but get excited. By 5:30 I still didn't have a headache. That means I was vertical for 1.5 hours! And then around 6:00 the headache came.

My day in summary:
No IV - YAY! No wait, I DO have to get one. Actually, I have to get two because the first one gets ripped out.
Successful injection of the dye - YAY! No wait, the dye went in, but it didn't go up. I have to get it injected in my neck afterall.
The hole has healed itself because I've sat for 2 hours without a headache - YAY!. No wait, the headache came, it was just delayed.

I was telling my nurse today that I must have done something really bad in a previous life. I'm an atheist and I lean toward being agnostic, and although I wasn't really serious when I said that to the nurse, I've been thinking a lot lately about why I've been having so much bad luck. She said she thinks it's just the opposite. She thinks that I was a really good person and that I told God that I could handle it and that's why I've had to go through so much shit. I'm surprised I'm feeling this way, but what she said was comforting.