Today I am RADIOACTIVE!
This morning I was injected with Technetium (some sort of radioactive transition metal* that, oddly enough, inspired someone to write this haiku) so that some nice dude named Karim could take pictures of my bones and the blood flow to my legs. Later this morning I go back to finish the scans and get photocopies of the pictures, and on Monday I take them to my doctor, along with some X-rays that some other dude (not as nice as Karim) took last week. (The X-rays look COOL.) My doctor will tell me if I have a stress fracture in my shin bone, caused by the shin splints that I've had on and off for three years.I have plans to make extra photocopies of the pictures of my legs so that, if I'm really on the ball, I can scan them and put them here on the blog. That way you can all know what I look like on the inside.
In the meanwhile I'm supposed to pee a lot, because Technetium leaves my body through my pee. So I'm drinking green tea and lots of water. I will soon be very hydrated.
It's interesting to actually have all this done to me, partly because I like doing new and different things (as long as the new and different things aren't endangering my life--e.g., they don't involve me flying at top speed down an icy hill), and partly because back in the day I used to teach undergrad Life Science Students about Medical Nuclear Physics.
If I actually do have a stress fracture, I might have to have surgery. I'm not really worried about it, but that might just be because I don't know how much surgery/recovery sucks, because I've never done it before.
I wonder if I'll ever run again.
*For the science geeks out there, the relevant nuclear reaction for my bone scan (as far as I can figure out from the ever-so-technical Wikipedia) is
Tc-99m --> Tc-99 + γ (140 keV)
Tc-99m has a half-life of about six hours. Tc-99 is also radioactive (β- decay), but its half-life is like a kazillion years. After about a few days all this stuff should have left my body entirely.
posted by sue @ 6:26 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
thanks malcolm! i'm particularly glad you liked the science.
here's an interesting follow-up to "after a few days all this goo should have left my body entirely." so you may recall that i'm leaving for england soon (10 days!!). a friend of mine who's a doctor said that he had a patient who had a bone scan two weeks before going to the US, and customs stopped him at the border because they picked up leftover radioactivity on their secret sensors. TWO WEEKS after dude was scanned!
maybe i'll get a doctor's note.
oh! so that's what you were on about last night. i get it now.
Sue is a walking science experiment. :) Miss ya girlie. Hope the results come back without the need for surgery - although - maybe then you would stop having problems. Ugh.
I had a friend who had to drink radioactive stuff once to kill her thyroid (medications were not working). She couldn't kiss anyone or share cutlery for days because she would leave a radioactive residue. :) Funny.
I can't believe you leave so soon. Have a stellar time if I don't see you before you head out to England. We'll all have to party when you return. :)
dude, the students totally had a technetium problem on the problem set last week!
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