ECHO cardiogram

[Memoires]

I have one tomorrow, they've been doing them to me regularly for about 7 years; these days every 6 months.

When I first started having them, the sonographers all had me lying on my right side, and I could watch my heart beating and the blood coursing around. It was really interesting, and helped me feel less vulnerable, stripped to waist, cold, uncomfortable. A stranger messing about with my tits.

For the last 3 years or so, the sonographers all want me on my left side.

My back is to the machine.
The lights are dim so I can't see to read.
There is nothing to look at except a print of a bad, cliched landscape or the ugly nhs curtain (but the wrong side faces me so I can't even see the pattern well).
A stranger has a heavy arm flopped over my waist/side pinning me down, while they spread cold goo all over my chest, she moves my boobs around.
Boobs! Ah yes. There they are untrammelled, flopping over my chest, getting in the way of my heart so the stranger has to keep moving them out of the way. They are flat and drooping, like a pair of Dali's melting clocks.
This person pinning me down, playing with intimate body parts, she's flashed me a couple smiles and told me her name, but until now that's as intimate as we have got; neither of us want more from this relationshipj. But she's still pinning me down with her arm.

I do understand that sonographers put you on the left side these days, because that's how they were taight to do it. In the 'olden' days they were able to try either side and make a personal preference decision, but if you're really uncomfortable on the left side they would let you lie on the right and were still able to do the job.

It is excrutiating having an ECHO.

I have ms as well as a dickie heart, and a few other things, and it is painful to lie ony left side. None of the new sonographers have given me the option to lie on my right, at most they might ask if I'm OK or if I need a break. (NO, if I move out of that position it will hurt even more when I have to adopt it again.)

There is only one thing I dread more than having an ECHO. It is Urodynamics. The first time I had that, both nurses told me off for not doing my pelvic floor exercises - I had done them, that's why I had no problems until dd was about 3 years old when MS hit hard. I couldn't really feel any muscles in my torso, back muscle, shoulder muscle, arms, stomach, buttocks, anything. I could barely stand and yet they felt that having tubes stuck up my fanny, wiring it up to a machine, filling my bladder, watching the readouts as I peed and all the rest of it, no these women thought that my misery could me completed by shoving me on a bed, sticking a sponge up there and telling me squeeze while both got in for a good close up; and then telling me off again because I had no idea which muscles I was moving because I couldn't feel them because I'd had a major fucking ms attack.

Sonographers doing ECHO these days make me feel vulnerable and scared. I feel like a slab of meat on a butcher's block. I feel like I'm being assaulted, as if I have just been laid out for anyone to do whatever they feel like, and I can't move because that arm is pinning me down.

And I'm cold! Why are hospitals always cold?! Yes, I know it's probably some statistical optimum temperature, but I'm cold. And I've got no clothes on. And the room is dark, the curtain's are ugly, the painting is crap and uninteresting, and I can't even see the person who is picking up my boobs and moving them here and there, and pinning me down with her arm.