An Hour in a Shaking Trailer

The back of the trailer

A PET scan is a picture with a bunch of bright dots on it. The dots represent high metabolic activity, which means cells that are wolfing down glucose (sugar). Also the digestive tract will show up clearly in the picture because of the barium banana drink. (Some doctors want you to have the barium, some don't.) The scan itself takes about 25 minutes, after allowing the radioactive tracer they shoot you up with to circulate. Being in the donut tube is actually pretty relaxing after you get over worrying about moving.

When I was sitting for half an hour letting the stuff circulate, all there was to look at was a machine of unknown function, and an EXIT sign on the door in front of me. I thought it strange that there was an exit sign in a room no larger than a closet. Probably a law? I remembered the signs in the London underground - they say WAY OUT, which is a much older way of saying it in English, whereas EXIT must come from Latin. It may seem like, and no doubt is, a strange thing to think about. For some reason I am interested in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) words.

Anyway now that PET scans and CT scans are done at the same time, the collection of bright dots comes with a kind of map. One gets the impression that before this development the PET scans were rather hard to interpret. Also according to the self identified technologist, exploratory surgery was much more common before CT scans. It was the only way they could see what was going on.

These days, people seem to have a lot of faith in pharmaceuticals, beyond what the chemicals might be capable of delivering...but for certain aspects of modern medicine, I am intensely grateful. At some point in the not too distant past, the medical response to my condition probably would have been to surgically remove the tumor, along with some of the rather important contents of my pelvis. Whatever health problems I have now, at this point they do not involve carrying around pee and poo. Allah be praised!

The donut tube in the trailer

My health plan does not have a PET/CT scan machine in San Francisco. So if you get it done in San Francisco it's contracted out, and you have to go outside to a trailer. From inside it seems to be in one of those San Francisco wind corridors, you could hear the wind howling, and, stepping outside onto the little platform that lowers you down, feel the blast of an arctic gale. I'm going to cross that off my list of places I might like to end up working!

My confidence about positive results of the PET scan is waning a bit...The aches and pains in my lower gut and back, can I really know that the cause of them is not cancer? Ah, one more day to find out, I hope...

P.S. Since my last post, some folks have kindly reassured me about my own sexiness. In that post (about not being sexy), I was writing not about how I think I look or am being perceived, but about how I feel on the inside...