The Chocolate Scan

Huh! You tell everyone your sad medical misadventure story and someone has to trump it.

Di, a Wellington friend, tells me that while she didn’t have a scan for kidney stones, she had one for gallstones.

She also didn't, she tells me, have to store the Huka Falls up her kilt until some sadistic son-of-a-so-and-so told her she could take a pee. She had something worse happen.

Now Di has always been a lover of white chocolate. Lots of women are. I’m not sure whether it’s a racist or a purity thing but some women seem to love white chocolate even more than they love the brown stuff.

So Di says that she thought all her Christmasses had come at once when, at her Ultrascan appointment, a radiographer handed her the largest block of white chocolate Di had ever seen produced and said they wanted a "before" and "after" shot of her insides.

“So,” said the radiographer to Di’s delight, “would you please eat the entire block after the first set of scans have been taken?”

As is to be expected, Di quickly agreed to do this.

So Di got kitted out in what she calls her flour sack gown and was led into the scanning room like the proverbial sheep to slaughter. She lay on the bed, had her tummy attacked with a scanner head and then led, as happily as the Vicar of Dibley, out to the waiting chocolate.

In gourmet heaven, Di started chomping her way through the white delight. Yum, Yum!

Before you could say weight gain, one row of the chocolate had disappeared into Di’s stomach.

Di licked her lips and started on the next row. It, too, disappeared into Di’s innards and another row was started.

But, by halfway through the block, Di’s stomach was starting to object a little. But it was just the odd rumble, Di told me, nothing a trooper like her couldn't cope with.

All the same, after another couple of rows of that sickly white substance, the gluttony was having its effect and Di almost felt like gagging.

Another row and she WAS gagging.

By now there were only three tiny pieces of chocolate left. But to Di, who had now gone a sickly green colour, they looked like a four-course meal of barf-inducing sweets and she started looking around desperately for somewhere to hide a mound of warm, regurgitated chocolate.

She had just spied a promising looking pot plant when what Di describes as a distressingly cheerful woman stuck her head out into the waiting room and said: " Cooee, you won't need to eat the chocolate after all - we got everything we need in the first set of xrays!"

The ultimate result of that experience, Di says, is that she has never been able to eat white chocolate again. Now, everytime she sees it, her stomach turns.

But she’s pleased to advise that she can still manage the brown chocolate! I must send her a very large bar…

--
Allan