Ema, darling, dearest mother mine please do tell if there are any other medications on my medical charts from when I was a wee little tiny tot for which we do not know for 100% sure that I am allergic in an “it will kill you” way? Because I can now say for certain that I am NOT allergic to iodine.

So I had to truck myself all the way to Rishon Letzion for this stupid HSG test. The one that I have gone through hell and high water to get set up. I get there and the doctor is like, I can’t give you this test, it could kill you. Your chart (which I of course had to bring along with me) says you are allergic to iodine and that is the substance used in this test…not a little iodine but a whole lot of it …and it seems I should have had massive doses of antihistamines and something else 24 hours before.

I was like oh no, and oh you are going to do this test and you will do it today because I am not waiting another month and I am not going through hell and 50,000 hoops to get another appointment. You will do this test today. I’ll take the risk. Because you see I couldn’t remember if I was given the test when I was hospitalized as a wee thing and had to have blood transfusions and who knows what all and they discovered I was allergic or if it was maybe just my mother’s paranoia because my grandfather nearly died from just such a test (well not the same test but one that used iodine) and she wanted to take no chances with her small darlings and therefore always warned that my brother and I had to tell doctors we’re highly allergic to it.

He did not want to do the test. Then I was like, look your average person who walks in here has no idea if they are or aren’t allergic to iodine, right? Right. So if they have a reaction, I’m assuming you have something on hand to stop it…? Yes. Great, have it handy and if I go into cardiac arrest you have my permission to use it immediately if not sooner. He consulted with another doctor, the other doctor came in to be on hand and we did the test. It hurt like a mother but I am clearly not, Ema not not not, allergic to iodine. I will tell you I felt close to a heart-attack once they started however. And they made me stay there for more than an hour to make sure I didn’t have a secondary reaction to the damn stuff. Grrrrrrrrrrr.

(I should note this was not my fertility doctors fault because he did tell me I needed to get something from my family doctor before the test against the “yod” (at the time I had no idea what yod was –eh, hebrew for iodine) and when I saw my family doctor ‘yod’ had gone totally out of my thoughts and all I remembered was I was supposed to take something a day before. When I showed her all the prescriptions etc and she looked at them she was like no, you take these things after…so clearly I was supposed to tell her this test had yod in it and so I needed the x,y, and zed medicines in advance).