We drove to the Group Health Bellevue Medical Center nice and early; we didn’t want to risk missing the appointment for this test, since it seemed so tough to get scheduled.

Apparently the street address for the facility is so new that online mapping services provide a route that is completely wrong, but with 100% confidence.

Being the adaptable folks we are, we were able to locate the correct location for the location to which we wanted to locate ourselves.

After checking in I was lead down to a mobile scanning truck that housed the $1.1M PET scan machine. They don’t have enough people needing PET scans to buy one for each facility, so they just bought one and cart it around between two facilities.

The technician, Tim, started by briefing me on the process. Next, we moved to one end of the mobile unit where he gave me an IV injection of a radioactive sugar after testing my blood sugar level. Once the sugar was delivered, I was to sit as still as possible for 30 minutes. No reading books allowed, as the repetitive motion of turning the page would draw more of the sugar to my hands.

You see, the preparation for this test is to fast for 6 hours prior. They want your blood sugar to get low. They want the cells in your body to be ravenously hungry. When the radioactive sugar is injected, your cells start to fight over it. Cancer cells, metabolically super-active as they are, tend to grab the sugar more than other cells. The radioactivity is then concentrated in the cancerous areas.

The next step was to lay down on a table that moved back and forth through the toroidal machine that was actually a hybrid CAT/PET scanner. They start by doing a CAT scan of the entire body to get a physical model of the body, and then do the PET scan to get an image of where the radioactivity is concentrated. Put them together and you have a 3D physical map of the body with shiny spots that might be cancerous.

Slick.

We celebrated the completion of the scan by grabbing food and heading south to spend a relaxing weekend with family for the 4th.

We’ll talk to Dr Norman on Monday to see the scan images and get our next steps.