A $4,000 Nap

Just got back from getting a PET scan, which sounds like something leading up to a flea dip, but was actually done in an attempt to identify the little alien lifeform in my chest.

The process is the stuff of bad sci-fi movies. We don’t have a permanent scanner in the Permian Basin, so one circulates among El Paso, Midland and Odessa on a weekly basis. It’s housed in a big white semi-trailer, plastered with the requisite “nukes-on-board” decals. You — the patient — enters the trailer via a big gate-lift which takes you up to a powered doorway operated by one of those two-buttons-on-a-thick-black-cord controls like Linda Hamilton punched when she whacked the Terminator the first time around.

I was greeted by a pleasant fellow named Don, who explained the procedure with a faint northeastern (US, not Texas) accent. I think he was pleased when I asked him a somewhat technical question about the radioactive tracer (I took it most people just wanted to know if it would make them glow; I knew better, having paid close attention during the original series of Outer Limits). But I knew we were serious when he pulled out the lead-encased syringe. (Tip to future moviemakers: lead-encased syringes reek of suspense.)

After a heapin’ helpin’ of radioactive sugar water, I laid back in a recliner while the solution circulated. The theory, as most of you know, is that tumors are metabolically-hyper little guys, and they’ll latch onto as much of the sugar as they can, even beating up the poor little geek cells around them for their lunch money, as it were. But what they don’t know is that this is Special Sugar Water, and the radiation will shine a light on their nefarious schemes.

Anyway, in a half hour, the solution has either been absorbed, or has come to rest in, um, the bladder. I had to dispose of that excess according to very explicit instructions administered by a young lady xx years my junior (“sit down, don’t stand; clean up very thorougly; flush twice” — I think the last is a code for something like “no, I didn’t fall in.” And, by the way, I left the seat up, just so they’d understand I’m not to be trifled with.). I was vaguely comforted by the fact that she was standing watch outside the restroom. You get that way when you’re in a cancer treatment facility.

Back into the trailer, where the real test was to come. Lay down on your back. [Check] Pillow under your head. [Check] Pillow under your knees. [Check] Restraining strap across your chest and arms, and another to tie your feet together. [Whoa!] Now, just lay back, relax and enjoy the nice music on NPR for the next 55 minutes.

I think I dozed some, but not nearly enough, and for sure not during the last 20 minutes, which seemed like 20 hours. The fate of the free world rested on my ability to remain ABSOLUTELY motionless. The last time I was absolutely motionless was when Mrs. Buster walked past my desk in the fifth grade seeking evidence of who had just nailed her in the back of the head with a spitwad.

Well, to make a long story a tad shorter, I survived with only minor kinks that I’m sure a few miles on the treadmill will work out later this afternoon. What I really need now is some serious caffeine, as I had to do without this morning.

Of course, the test results will be agonizingly slow in materializing. They tell me it will be next Tuesday before the readings are interpreted in Dallas and returned to my doctor. Stay tuned.

Now, I’ve got to look for that old geiger counter. I know I don’t glow, but I wonder…

Update: The eventual diagnosis was coccidioidomycosis (aka valley fever), which I’m thinking about having tattooed on my chest so I can remember how to spell it. Of course, it would have to be written backwards so I could read it in a mirror, and I’m not sure I trust any of the tattooists around here to spell it correctly frontwards, much less backwards. Anyway, it probably arose from breathing too much West Texas dust over the decades. But it’s really not a significant issue, so yay.