The Irradiated Man

My PET scan today was interesting. It turns out that I have an inflamed schnauzer.

Mostly it involves a lot of lying around. Lay in a dark room and rest for an hour as the material works its way through your body. Lay on the PET scan table for a half an hour as the table moves back and forth in little jerks. This was a combined CT scan/PET scan, so the ring-shaped CT scanner was spinning around me, uncannily like the rings on the space portal machine in the movie Contact.

PET scans make you radioactive. When I had the nuclear stress test, the technetium-99m tracer caused me to emit gamma rays at about 105 keV (kilo-electron volts). But the fluorine isotope in the radioactive sugar for the PET scan causes one to emit gamma rays at 511 keV - five times the energy of the nuclear stress test, and hot enough that the technicians had no desire to be in the same room as I. Later I sat in my cubicle at work and realized that never once in my entire life did I ever imagine that I would end up intensely radioactive...

One more test out of the way. All that remains now are the two biopsies. I'm in something of a hurry to get started, because when I bend over I feel a strange sensation in my chest that I think is an enlarged lymph node pressing into my lung. It's deeply disturbing and I'd just as soon it was taken care of immediately. But there's a disconnect and the only hospital that the insurance company will authorize is heavily backed up...

That's what happens when you've got an inflamed schnauzer and a dawg that smells like Beef-a-roni.