As anticipated, we drove to St. Louis yesterday -- because today Bookworm had a slew of tests.
We entered St. Louis in a brutal storm. At first, it was just a little cloudy, then it was like driving past a curtain -- it was light, and then it was not. I turned on my lights, and watched the trees whipping around in the wind. After several miles, it started to rain. And then ... well, the sky just fell in. The rain was coming down so hard that I couldn't see to drive faster than about 35. That's not a good speed on the highway -- especially when you really do need the signs to tell you where to go. Others seemed to see better, but I knew that even with my flashers on, I was moving dangerously slowly -- so I pulled off to the side at an on ramp, and waited for the rain to back off just a little. The prospect of crossing that bridge into St. Louis in that was just too scary.
Eventually, though, it calmed down. We found our hotel without much fuss, got checked in, and then wandered down to the restaurant. While I'll be the first to admit that Applebee's is not my favorite chain, it does fare better when you're not trying to eat a healthy low-calorie diet. By the time our meal was served, it had become down right pleasant outside again.
The wait staff here is great. The hotel is one that is connected to the Barnes/Jewish & Children's Hospitals by one of those habitrail things (it brought back memories of another such walkway from Stitches a few years ago). This means that the wait staff wind up serving folks who are staying in the hotel while a loved one is staying in the hospital. They get to know folks. This is Shannon.
While we were there, a woman came up with her two kids to say hello, and to thank Shannon for taking such good care of them while they were there 2 years ago -- her husband had some bone related thing going on. Shannon was our waitress too.
When she greeted us, however, she had help from her co-worker --
Kellen is quite the ... vibrant fellow. He loved Bookworm's outfit, and has opined that she'll be "make it big" someday. He could just tell by her flair for the original. He had flair too...
We had to pry him off that table to get the "saner" picture with Shannon.
Gotta love staff with a positive attitude like these folks.
After dinner, we went back to the room, watched a movie or two and went to bed... to prepare ourselves for the day.
So... I armed myself with three projects this trip. I worked on Must Have at the Hotel, and am now a the bust darts for the front.
I tried working the 9 - 5 socks. After several rounds, it looks like this:

Frankly, the pattern here is a bunch of fussiness. Not bad, but
fussy. And all the pretty twisted stitches that it creates are pretty
much invisible here. I've decided not to play, and pretty much put them away after one other pattern attempt. I've frogged this bit, and am going to start on a variation
of the Feather & Fan pattern to see if I like that more in this
yarn.
Today, however, I spent most of my knitting time with Chrysopolis.
I've fixed the original problem and made some progress. Mostly,
however, I spent time with Bookworm and the folks in the "imaging"
department at Children's Hospital in St. Louis.
First, we went for a sonogram, where I couldn't see to knit, and didn't take any pictures. It was interesting watching a sonogram of something other than a baby. Bookworm didn't want to see a thing.
Then we went for Nuclear Imaging to get the Meckel's Scan. (Warning, very soon there will be "medical pictures" If you get squeamish about that sort of stuff, bail now). During her scan, Bookworm got to watch a movie while they took a sequence of images spaced five minutes apart for half an hour. I knit, and took a couple of pictures of the stuff I could see on the screen. It was actually pretty cool to watch the dye progress through her body.
Here, you can see her, all settled in watching Sinbad while the stuff works its way through
And once it had done its job, the dye made stomach tissue show up really clearly... (that's a front view and a back view -- evidently they take both simultaneously).
Then, they turned the machine on it's side to get a different view
And then, we were done there... and went back out to the waiting room. The cool thing -- I got to stay in the room with her for every part of this. I like that they find ways for the parents to not have to leave their kids during these procedures.
Especially the next part. She had to have an Upper GI Flow Through test. The key element here -- barium. While they've made drinking barium better than it was when I had to do it in 1978... it's not that much better.
First she had to drink some, and they had her roll all the way over (back to side, to tummy, to other side to back) and they started taking images -- watching it go through ... and yes, I got to watch the screen.
They "filmed' a bunch, then had her drink more so we could watch it go down her throat...
And then, after making her drink a ton of the stuff (which made her want to throw up, but she somehow managed to keep the crap down), we waited for about an hour, and they came to take more pictures. This time, they employed a strange "balloon" to push on her belly to sort of spread out the views...(she claims this did not hurt)
they took several more images,
(one more)
(Don't you wish you could see YOUR intestines like this?). Then finally declared that the barium had made it through her entire small intestine, and we could go!
Yahoo!
Only AFTER all this crap did we see what I think is the best view in Children's
It reminds me of a restaurant at Epcot (it's near the end of that post, or you can just look here)
We passed this on our way out.
Despite ideas about going elsewhere after the morning's ... er .. events, Bookworm wanted to just come home. So we gathered our stuff, and headed out. She slept most of the way home. (The drive was wholly uneventful).
Now all we have to do is wait for results.
Tomorrow -- the last day before school starts.
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