A CT and PT

I went to my first session of outpatient physical therapy yesterday after getting a CT (pronounced "cat" of course) Intravenous Contrast scan of my head on Monday. Today is more blood work. The pricks in my veins are never-ending, apparently. No reading on the CT, which I take as a good sign. Here, according to the technician or nurse who prepped me and the discharge sheet, is what I could have felt as a result of the x-ray dye in the intravenous contrast: a warmness as the dye enters your vein (nope), a metallic taste in your mouth that some describe as tasting like cheap whiskey (check, though I wasn't lucky enough to have it taste like whiskey), the sense of peeing on yourself ("don't worry you're not," check and I wasn't), and -- the really serious ones -- hives, difficulty breathing, shortness of breath (nope, those would have involved a trip to the emergency room.) Sliding on the moving bed in and out of the tube and watching the lights in the tube turn red, green or orange dredged up another memory from the lost days of January -- I was in one of those and seeing those lights at least one other time. The PT was fine, first of eight or so. I always like PT -- it's just hard enough to make you work, and effective enough to make you feel progress. There's already progress of course from the work at home and just time since my discharge (now over two months). My therapist, J., said I was in the best shape of any of his patients all day, i.e. the least problems. Of course, he is going on vacation next week, but he plans to hand me off to one of the other therapists who specializes in exercises for leg edema. I got to drop a few exercises from the regimen, but added a slide stepping one that took me right back in an instant to high school basketball drills.