So yesterday I went in for a CT scan of my neck. I arrived at the hospital about 20 minutes early and sat in the waiting room reading a magazine. At some point I noticed someone come out as if looking for a patient, then go back away. I went to the receptionist and asked what’s up. She said the person was looking for me. I guess she wasn’t looking that hard. The waiting room had about 15 seats. Anyway, the nurse or whatever she was came back and got me. She said that they’d be giving me an IV to inject me with some iodine for contrast right before the scan.

She first tried to get my left arm set up for the procedure, but failed after poking me a couple times to get a vein. Then she switched to my right arm. She got a vein, but didn’t seem that confident. I go into the CT scan room and lie down. They all walk away and while the scanner is revving up I notice my arm start to hurt and keep getting worse. I say something, but nobody does anything. After a few minutes, they come back in and say, "So your arm hurts?" "Yes," I say. And then they say, "Hmm…" and walk out of the room again.

Back comes a doctor and he says that it appears the IV came out of my vein and so they ended up injecting the iodine contrast agent into the tissue of my arm. I finally look at my arm and it’s freaking huge (100cc bigger than normal in fact). The doctor says, "So what you need to do is keep your arm raised up over your body for the next 24 hours or so. You should also keep it iced as much as possible." And now the best part. "And if your skin starts to break apart, go to the emergency room immediately and you’ll need to see a plastic surgeon." WTF!! My skin break apart? "The contrast agent is slightly toxic and you just received a concentrated dose to your arm, so it may cause the tissues to break apart. Your skin might slough or fall off."

Great. So I spent the rest of the night with my arm raised up and iced. What a pain. It’s still not back to normal size, but it’s close. And because I didn’t have the contrast agent in my vein the CT scan didn’t get a good picture.

So I went back tonight and the procedure went much better. And the guy there said that someone should have monitored the contrast agent being injected. Nobody did. Man, I would have had a killer malpractice case if my skin had fallen off… But it didn’t.