What a pain in the ...

[JohnR]

I've been suffering from some elusive abdominal discomfort for the past few months. Elusive as it never seems to occur at the Doc's office. This has cut into my fishing time too and has kept me home several times that I've had the opportunity to go (as well a few days home from the office ).

Well, yesterday, I had to take an "Upper GI" test (any of you ever have one of those?). Well, it wasn't too bad other than they made me drink a fizzy coctail drink with many solutions ending in "ium". Now I'm thinking back to my chemistray days and I'm thinking helIUM, not bad - used for ballons, and chromIUM - well, dresses up cars nicely, right?

Well, the primary solution was barIUM. They have you drink all this stuff and hop onto this multi-axis x-ray table (a relic by the looks of it) and have you rotate left and right, 20 degrees 45, 82.5 and all this other crappola while taking numerous x-rays... It wasn't too bad really - the hard part was that I was thinking of all the not-so-pretty "IUMs": UranIUM, PlutonIUM, IridIUM... So the question to any of you potential chem-geeks, what the heck is Barium? All I really know is that it's also used in far less pleasant medical tests (that I don't need - phewww)