Soon, You Can Track Me with a Geiger Counter
Today was the day for my MUGA (multiple-gated acquisition) scan. It's a heart scan that takes a color movie, in a sense, of your heart working and assesses how well it pumps blood. They do this before chemotherapy because some chemotherapy drugs are cardiotoxic and they need to monitor your heart.
My appointment was at the Parnassus campus of UCSF. The comprehensive cancer center is at Mt. Zion, another UCSF hospital, so I don't spend much time at Parnassus. At Parnassus, you know you're at a teaching campus the second you get out of the car, what with all the students running past you to get to class or grabbing a quick bite at one of the restaurants at the student union.
I checked in at the hospital for the test and they had me wait in one of those oddly-placed waiting rooms where it is unclear what it is even for. After a while, someone came and took me up an elevator and down the hall to another waiting room, this one across from the nuclear medicine dispensing room.
This waiting room was much smaller, with dingy white walls that weren't helped by the greenish fluorescent lighting. The chairs were mismatched and sported disturbing stains on their worn upholstery. Faded art posters hung on the walls from exhibitions dated 1978. It was a hospital waiting room equivalent of the Probe Plant literature office from the movie Joe vs. the Volcano. To cap it off, of the people waiting with me, two spoke Russian, two spoke Yiddish, and one just scowled furiously. I wasn't going to be making any small talk.
After about 45 minutes, they called me to the dispensing room. A man had me sit in a chair while he prepared to take my blood. I was next to a Dutch door that led to the nuclear pharmacy, where I could hear a Geiger counter rattling away. Radiation signs surrounded me. He took my blood and hooked up one of those temporary things-I don't know what it's called-so they could access the vein later. He said to give him 35 to 40 minutes and he'd give me my blood back.
I knew what they were going to do: mix some Technetium-99 (a radioactive substance) with my blood, then inject it back into my bloodstream. After this and the sentinel node biopsy, I tell you, when the aliens come, they are going to find me first. They can problem see me glowing from space.
As it turned out, it was an hour until I was called back and they gave me back my blood, completely with icky sound effects that I didn't want to hear.
Shortly after that, I was escorted to the scanning room. The technician had me lay on a narrow plank that was drawn into a donut-shaped scanner that housed the gamma camera. This part was easy; I just laid still while it photographed my heart. Afterwards, as they drew me back out and I was able to stand up, I looked at the technician. He had very little hair. I smiled and said, "You know, in a month, you will have more hair than I." He told me not to worry, he's known many people who have been through chemo and and they usually get twice as much hair afterwards.
Okay, well, I don't know any of them, but it was nice of him to say.
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