The Report Out from Today's Cancer Marathon, Part 1: The PET Scan

1. Even with a two hour break in the middle, thirteen hours is way (way, way) too long to spend focused on cancer. Props to BIL4 for playing chauffeur and keeping me company for the entire, non-radioactive, parts of the day. 

2. Now I understand the PET scan requirements. They basically want the radioactive glucose sloshing around your bloodstream, not being absorbed into your muscles, hence the prohibition on insulin. Not sure what they do for all you humans with a fully functioning pancreas to keep the glucose sloshing.

3. Today I heard what had to be the dumbest question I think I've ever been presented by a medical provider. The tech explains that they're going to give me the radioactive glucose, it's going to slosh around my system, and my kidneys are going to start converting it to urine. Thus, before I go in the scanner they will need my bladder to be empty lest the glow from the accumulated radioactive urine mask something important. Then I get the question: would I like to stop by the restroom on the way to the scanner, or would I prefer that they insert a catheter. For the record, unless the catheter is the only way to get a really awesome painkilling epidural, if there's a choice on the table I do not want the catheter. 

4. Who in their right mind chooses the catheter?

5. Now I understand claustrophobia. The PET scan is one of these donut-shaped scanners, with a table you lie on that slides in and out of the whole in the middle. Unlike the CT scan, which takes all of about three minutes to finish the job, with a PET scan you're there for a very long time. For a scan like mine, they push you all the way through the donut, then bring you back into the donut up to your pelvis and scan. About eight minute go by, they slide you about ten inches further into the scanner, and scan again. Eight more minutes. Another ten inches. Scan. The complete process in my case took about forty minutes overall. (The things they don't tell you when you're a kid hoping to be tall.) But at about twenty-five minutes your head goes inside the donut. At first that's okay. You try to read the little labels, look through the little windows, listen to the hum of the machine as it spins, and contemplate the universe. At about thirty-five minutes, you stop contemplating the universe and desperately start searching for your happy place. You think about mountains; you think about the Roadster; you think about beaches; you think about naked beaches; you think about anything but the thirty-six inch circle of plastic surrounding your head. And then at about thirty-eight minutes you give up on your happy place -- f'ing naked beaches -- and go completely insane. You wonder if anyone's ever died of a PET scan. You wonder where the tech went. You wonder if the hyperventilating you've started is affecting the scan. You wonder if you got up would they have to start over or could they use the part of the scan that was finished and ignore the blurry bit at the top. You wonder if you started screaming how long it would take someone to hear and come out and extract you from the machine. And then someone does, and it's all okay again.

6. However, if I had known at the time that I was actually strapped to the table that went into the scanner and thus couldn't, in fact, move, and thus couldn't, in fact, actually do anything to get myself out of the microscopic donut, I do believe I would've started screaming at minute thirty-nine. 

7. If they scan your upper body they will ask you to put your arms above your head and leave them there. Should this happen to you and they give you the opportunity to move your arms to your chest while they scan your pelvis and abdomen, take it. Forty minutes is way (way, way) too long to lie on your back with your arms above your head.

All in all, I can't say I'm a fan of the PET scan. But I'll change my opinion if the results show I'm a candidate for surgery to cut out the contaminated parts of my liver.