DanaFarber: Gentlemen’s Club

Today was a long day at D to tha F. I got all my "pre-testing" for the transplant done. Pulmonary function, heart function, etc etc etc. As does any hospital procedure worth the name, each of the tests involved either some kind of needle or some kind of nudity. The real fun ones required both. Not X-rated nudity or anything. More like Girl's Bone Marrow Gone Wild-style nudity. A boob flash here, an a** cheek there. You know, nothing that would get the joint closed down by Vice or anything. Just some good old-fashioned American T&A.

My favorite part of the day went like this:

DF Lady: I'll be doing your chest x-ray today.
Me: Nice to meet you.
DFL: You can go in here and remove your clothes from the waist up, then put on this robe so it opens in the front.
Me: Okay.
DFL: Have you ever been x-rayed here before?
Me: No.
DFL: Well, in that case, (goes to small closet, pulls out small piece of paper with two--stickers?----on it) put one of these on each nipple, please.
Me: (Looking at the round silver/metal things in the center of each sticker)--What? No tassles?
DFL: (No reaction). I'll be in the room across the hall when you're ready.
Me: (Alone in the room attaching my pasties and laughing at the bizarre hilarity of it) "Dontcha wish your girlfriend got a transplant like me?! Dontcha?! Dontcha!?" [for our older readers, that is a cheeseball stripper song made famous for reasons we will never know].

I could not stop laughing. I must have looked unhinged to this woman, but I literally could not stop thinking the entire time she was x-raying me that I had STICKERS ON MY NIPPLES for reasons I could not begin to fathom. Would the person looking at the x-ray have some additional knowledge of my lungs and pulmonary capacity as a result of being able to say, "Oh yes, I see the alveoli now that I've located the nipples..." Like, without pinpointing my...er...pinpoints they somehow would lack an essential baseline measurement of my...lungs? I guess I don't have enough of that there booklarnin' to help me understand the desperate importance of Nipple GPS to the transplant process.

Anyway, as I said, I was laughinglaughinglaughing. Until, of course, it came time to remove the stickers. If you've never removed a sticky object from your nipples (and those of you who have, you know who you are you dawgs), you ought to try it sometime. Be sure to take some Tylenol first. Because (and here is the first of what will I'm sure be many Public Service Announcements throughout the course of this transplant) nipple skin is not meant to meet an adhesive. Really.

Next time I'm gonna demand the tassles.