Never a dull moment.  Early yesterday morning, not long after I woke up, I felt a kind of weakness in my right shin muscle.  I went to flex my foot and found that I could point my toe easily enough, but flexing my foot upward just wasn’t happening.  Note that yesterday was Sunday.  I decided to see what happened over the course of the day and call Dr. B in the morning if it was still weak.

It was, and I did, and he wanted an MRI of the brain, which he scheduled hurriedly and at a location unfamiliar to me.  I found it after considerable running around and being in the wrong place.  (I thought he’d said “St. Luke’s” but he said an imaging center across the street from St. Luke’s.”   Anyhow, we found it and I had the scan.

But that meant I was later than I’d figured on signing the papers for the experimental protocol.  We went right down to Roosevelt Hospital, and sat for about twenty minutes because we didn’t realize we were supposed to interrupt the guy with the papers.  He was very apologetic, got the coordinator of the study (if that’s what the position actually is) to bring me the papers, explain the protocol, and let us read the papers and decide whether to sign.

The papers are very complicated, because you can either be in the two-drug arm of the study or the one-drug arm, and _where_ you are in either arm makes a difference too. So you’re reading four sets of instructions, only one of which will actually apply to you.  They’re similar in many ways, but not identical.

Then it transpired that they needed some additional blood work, a urine specimen, an EKG, a CAT scan (because the one I just had didn’t include the chest or the head), and a test for fecal occult blood.  (Oh, goodie!)  So we were there for another hour getting the test done, that they would do in their lab, and we hadn’t really had anything to eat since the morning.  My sweetie (even hungrier than I) came to the rescue by picking something up in the cafeteria.

When we were through I went to the office very briefly, took care of a couple of things, an left.

I came home to learn that I’m okay for social security benefits but they’re deducting Medicare from the retroactive payments even though I’ve been paying my own Medicare since July 2010.  I’ll have to challenge that, with whatever strength I can find.

The CAT scan is scheduled for early Wednesday morning.  We haven’t heard yet about today’s MRI.

It’s all much too exciting.