Today was the big bone scan day and all went according to plan. Get juiced up at 10 a.m. and come back at 1 p.m. for the scan. Near the end, I asked the technician, “Do you see anything that warrants concern?”

“Nope. Clean as a whistle,” he replied. I breathed a giant sigh of relief.

Of course, the technician’s interpretation is not the official interpretation, but I’ll take it for now.

Interestingly, after getting injected with the radioactive glow juice and before the actual scan, I went down to the urology department to make an appointment with the urologist, and there was this 30-something pregnant woman filled with attitude and for whom empathy was a foreign concept. When I asked to make the appointment, she pulled up the calendar and saw that I was already scheduled for late August. “You don’t need an appointment. You’re already on the calendar.”

I tried explaining that waiting 3 months for the results of a test that I was taking today was NOT going to happen, especially considering those results could show possible metastasis (at least in my mind). She had none of my argument initially, but eventually went off in a huff to talk to the doctor about setting up an appointment earlier. It’s set for 2 June. It kind of pissed me off, but I chalked it up to the kid in her womb kicking her in the kidney. (Way to go, kid!)

But now that I know what the technician told me, I’m going to email the urologist and have her confirm the official results. If everything was clean, I’ll cancel the 2 June appointment and just go back into wait until the next PSA test mode.

After leaving Ms. Panties-in-a-Wad, I had three hours to kill, and I opted to walk a mile and a half to the University Towne Center shopping mall. I figured it would help calm me plus help distribute the glow juice through my body.

As I’m walking along the north side of La Jolla Village Drive, the sidewalk just stopped and a narrow dirt path was all that was left to walk on for a city block. I thought that it was odd that posh La Jolla couldn’t afford 600 feet of concrete for us poor pedestrians.

As I was walking that path with waist-high weeds on either side, I had a flashback to my childhood. A friend of mine and I would play in the “prairie,” which was nothing more than a couple of adjacent, overgrown vacant city lots. There were dirt paths and mounds for our bikes, and the same tall weeds. It was a place for a youngster’s imagination to run wild with adventures.

After lunch, I made it back to the hospital for the actual scan. I arrived about 25 minutes before the scheduled time, and the technician was standing right there when I checked in. “Let’s do this,” he said, and off we went. Fine by me.

As I reclined onto the table, I couldn’t help but notice this colorful butterfly painted on the ceiling directly above the scanner. For some crazy reason, the German word for butterfly, Schmetterling, popped into my head and just stayed there.

Once the scan began, I started emerging from the tube, and the only thing that I could see what that silly Schmetterling on the ceiling. I thought, “Hmm, a metamorphosis? Emerging from my tubular steel and plastic cocoon and turning into a butterfly?”

So that was my day. How was yours?