Britt's Blog

I am slightly radioactive!

I have a tummy ache that isn’t going away, which has led to an Exciting Battery of Tests.

My gluten-free friends will be disappointed to hear, incidentally, that I officially do not have celiac disease. Bummer.

Today I had a gastric emptying study, which is to find out whether my stomach is, uh, emptying right, i.e. not too fast, or, particularly, too slow, a condition called gastroparesis which, I gather, can lead to tummy aches, and sounds much cooler than gastritis, which is the term for a plain old persistent tummy ache caused by inflammation of the stomach lining.

The upshot is that I ate a plate of radioactive scrambled eggs and then laid in a machine that measured gamma rays for two hours.

Yes.

The eggs were laced with technetium, which, at an atomic number of 43, is the lightest artificial element. It has no stable isotopes, so if it is created in nature, it doesn’t live for very long.

^99mTc is produced artificially for use in nuclear medicine. It’s a good isotope to use for radiological imaging because it produces beta rays (which are electrons) at fairly low energies, plus gamma rays at 140 keV. The beta rays don’t go far, but gamma rays can travel fairly well through body tissues. ^99mTc also has a half life of about 6 hours, so within 24 hours, only 6% of the original dose remains.

Gamma ray images of the body can then be used to locate the technetium in the body. In my case, we got lots of purty pictures of eggs getting squished up in my stomach and then proceeding to my small intestine. Awesomely enough, I was able to watch this in real time on the screen of the imager. It was very cool and scintillation-y. It was super awesome to feel my stomach rumble and watch a glob of technetium omelet get injected into my duodenum. According to the screen there were something like a 3000 photons recorded by the imager each second.

My stomach seemed to be mostly, but not entirely emptied by the end. I have no idea if that’s normal; I guess the results are going to be interpreted for my benefit by a radiologist and/or my gastroenterologist.

As we all know, radiation causes superpowers, so what with the beta rays and the gamma rays (HULK SMASH!!!) my digestive tract must be getting totally min-maxed. Here are some powers I expect to develop any time now:

1. The beta radiation injects chicken DNA from the scrambled eggs into the cells of my stomach wall, creating a muscular pouch where I can store small pebbles. I now have the power to digest whole kernels of corn and unground flax seeds.
2. My duodenum can see into the future. Sadly, there are not a lot of exciting events going on in the duodenum, and its ability to communicate about future events is limited.
3. My jejunum is now invisible. This will certainly come in handy should my small intestine ever need to employ stealth.

Ultimate verdict: This was the best medical test I’ve had this year, next to the CT scan of my head^*.

Because, dude, three-dimensional computer model of my skull.

^* Nothing scary, folks, just checking whether a sinus infection was cleared up.

A statue of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder/mascot Colonel Sanders was found in a river in Osaka.

“He was apparently found standing upright, which is fitting, because although he was a nice man he could also be very strict and demanding,” said Sumeo Yokakawa, a spokeswoman at the chain’s Tokyo headquarters.

I feel like this should give me some kind of insight into Kafka on the Shore, but, alas, I am just as confused as ever.

An interesting article on interruptions in the NY Times.

Turns out that interruptions in a pleasant activity (like commercials during a TV program) actually enhance your pleasure. ( I suspect that part of the reason why may be that TV writers deliberately use commercial breaks as part of the pacing of the show. I also have a bare-brained theory that you should wait a week between watching episodes of, say, Babylon 5 or Lost so that you have a week to mull over and savor the episodes, which is how the writers have intended you to appreciate the show. )

Also, note the continuing theme: We don’t know what actually makes us happy. Nobody says, “Having my programs interrupted every 8 minutes so that Pizza Hut can try to sell me something with more mozzarella and saturated fat in general than I normally eat in a 6 month period really enhances my viewing pleasure.” But, yet, we are happier people when our enjoyment of a fine situation comedy, satiric current events show, or quirky alternate reality drama is disrupted by that guy from Fuccillo Auto Malls telling us that “it” is “huuuuuuuuuu-juh.”

Anyway, the article on interruption says that an annoying experience that is interrupted only becomes more annoying.

Interestingly enough, I read this article while taking a “break” in the middle of a pile of papers that I was grading…

Hmm…