“Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings.”
-- William Shakespeare 1564-1616: “Macbeth (1606)
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
-- Edmund Burke 1729-97: “On the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757)
PET SCAN FEVER
Are less than horrible imaginings.”
-- William Shakespeare 1564-1616: “Macbeth (1606)
“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”
-- Edmund Burke 1729-97: “On the Sublime and Beautiful” (1757)
PET SCAN FEVER
The PET scan has a CT component it. Hence, the need for drinking a Barium beverage, and having one’s blood filtered through a lead-lined machine that introduces a radioactive sugar that permeates every cell in the body. After being put in a comfortable recliner conveniently accessible to the worst of mid-day cable television, a hypodermic port is installed in the arm of choice, immediately after which a straw and styrofoam cup are produced. All right, that’s enough of this claptrap…
I’m talking about me. So I drink the barium and settle in for the 35 minute wait while the malt settles in. I pick out a LARGE PRINT Readers Digest, go right to the “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” section, and promptly score in the 18-20 range, which pretty much puts me in the genius category. I then move to a late nineties Psychology Today with a feature story on why people’s fingers like holes.
Time elapses, the nurse returns and inserts a catheter into the port in my arm, through which the blood flows and is adulterated with the radioactive sugar. An hour later, she's back to escort me into the scanning room, where I am asked to recline on a thin, pallet-like bed. A triangular pillow is then placed under my knees, after which an assisting nurse asks me to stretch my arms over my head and cross them at the wrists. A cocoon-like shroud, having sort of a cottony, canvas texture, is then wrapped tightly around me, after the fashion of a mummy or weird, adult swaddle. I’m told to relax and be still. Yeah, right, like I can do that. The test takes about 20-30 minutes.
The lights are dimmed, and an eerie, soft, whirring sound begins as my pallet is conveyed into a culvert-like tube about 12 feet long. I’m on my back and peering up at the inner lining of the tube, which is marked by a narrow, horizontal row of colored lights. The diagnostic begins in a very medical-science-fiction-futuristic way.
Remember the Twilight Zone with Earl Holliman, “Where Is Everybody?” It’s the episo
de where potential astronauts are tested for their responses to sensory deprivation. If you can’t remember that, recall the photos you’ve seen of the detainees at Guantanamo being escorted around the yard (see photo at left). Notice they are wearing earmuff-like-hat-helmets, oversized mittens that extend to the forearm, and thickly padded boots. What you’re seeing in these photos are men being deprived of their senses -- of sight, of hearing, and as much as possible, of touch. In the 1950s the CIA retained the services of a Professor D. O. Hebb. Dr. Hebb had found that human beings become psychotic within 24-48 hours when subjected to sensory deprivation (see B/W photo). If they are left this way for more than a week, their
minds are irreparably damaged. Back to the scan…
I stared up at the soft, colored lights and gradually became sleepily hypnotized as my body slowly inched in and out of the tube. “That’s not sensory deprivation,” you say. “If it were, there would be no lights, no sensations of movement and such.” Right, you are, I’m sure. But the feeling seems akin to what it’s like to be isolated from one’s senses. Think of “2001 a Space Odyssey,” or “Planet of the Apes,” or “Alien,” and the pods in which the astronauts recline in hyper-sleep.
I experienced a feeling, or state – is there a word for this - of having my senses, in a way, minimalized, followed by a slow, hypnotic drift into a kind of twilight, semi-consciousness where time seemed to suspend itself. After what might have been ten minutes, or two hours -- I lost all sense of time – the lights came up, and I was conveyed out of the tube and into a state of fully conscious reality. Mind you, I was given no medications prior to, or after, the scan.
Whether it be a 3 month, 6 month, or yearly exam, one is always anxious about these things, and I hope it bodes well that this was the least anxious I’ve been yet, going into and coming out of the clinic. But the mind is a fickle thing. It can, at once, conjure up the rosiest outcomes while contemplating the grimmest of possibilities. Questions better left alone, inevitably invade the psyche. If the tests showed the presence of cancer only after its painful symptoms became too much to deny, might they not also serve to detect the pestilence in an otherwise a-symptomatic subject, namely, me? If the reason for regular screenings is early detection, might these “regular” scans reveal the contagion in spite of my feeling well? Is my skin rash a foreshadowing of what’s to come? Yikes, help, and holy shit!
Stay Tuned (in every sense of the word), I get the results on Tuesday.
Peace - Randy
I’m talking about me. So I drink the barium and settle in for the 35 minute wait while the malt settles in. I pick out a LARGE PRINT Readers Digest, go right to the “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” section, and promptly score in the 18-20 range, which pretty much puts me in the genius category. I then move to a late nineties Psychology Today with a feature story on why people’s fingers like holes.
Time elapses, the nurse returns and inserts a catheter into the port in my arm, through which the blood flows and is adulterated with the radioactive sugar. An hour later, she's back to escort me into the scanning room, where I am asked to recline on a thin, pallet-like bed. A triangular pillow is then placed under my knees, after which an assisting nurse asks me to stretch my arms over my head and cross them at the wrists. A cocoon-like shroud, having sort of a cottony, canvas texture, is then wrapped tightly around me, after the fashion of a mummy or weird, adult swaddle. I’m told to relax and be still. Yeah, right, like I can do that. The test takes about 20-30 minutes.
The lights are dimmed, and an eerie, soft, whirring sound begins as my pallet is conveyed into a culvert-like tube about 12 feet long. I’m on my back and peering up at the inner lining of the tube, which is marked by a narrow, horizontal row of colored lights. The diagnostic begins in a very medical-science-fiction-futuristic way.
Remember the Twilight Zone with Earl Holliman, “Where Is Everybody?” It’s the episo
de where potential astronauts are tested for their responses to sensory deprivation. If you can’t remember that, recall the photos you’ve seen of the detainees at Guantanamo being escorted around the yard (see photo at left). Notice they are wearing earmuff-like-hat-helmets, oversized mittens that extend to the forearm, and thickly padded boots. What you’re seeing in these photos are men being deprived of their senses -- of sight, of hearing, and as much as possible, of touch. In the 1950s the CIA retained the services of a Professor D. O. Hebb. Dr. Hebb had found that human beings become psychotic within 24-48 hours when subjected to sensory deprivation (see B/W photo). If they are left this way for more than a week, their
minds are irreparably damaged. Back to the scan…I stared up at the soft, colored lights and gradually became sleepily hypnotized as my body slowly inched in and out of the tube. “That’s not sensory deprivation,” you say. “If it were, there would be no lights, no sensations of movement and such.” Right, you are, I’m sure. But the feeling seems akin to what it’s like to be isolated from one’s senses. Think of “2001 a Space Odyssey,” or “Planet of the Apes,” or “Alien,” and the pods in which the astronauts recline in hyper-sleep.
I experienced a feeling, or state – is there a word for this - of having my senses, in a way, minimalized, followed by a slow, hypnotic drift into a kind of twilight, semi-consciousness where time seemed to suspend itself. After what might have been ten minutes, or two hours -- I lost all sense of time – the lights came up, and I was conveyed out of the tube and into a state of fully conscious reality. Mind you, I was given no medications prior to, or after, the scan.
Whether it be a 3 month, 6 month, or yearly exam, one is always anxious about these things, and I hope it bodes well that this was the least anxious I’ve been yet, going into and coming out of the clinic. But the mind is a fickle thing. It can, at once, conjure up the rosiest outcomes while contemplating the grimmest of possibilities. Questions better left alone, inevitably invade the psyche. If the tests showed the presence of cancer only after its painful symptoms became too much to deny, might they not also serve to detect the pestilence in an otherwise a-symptomatic subject, namely, me? If the reason for regular screenings is early detection, might these “regular” scans reveal the contagion in spite of my feeling well? Is my skin rash a foreshadowing of what’s to come? Yikes, help, and holy shit!
Stay Tuned (in every sense of the word), I get the results on Tuesday.
Peace - Randy
2 comments:
Everything will be fine. Sense deprivation and kissing pigs, wow, scary. See how easy it is to jump hosts and don't forget your anti-bacterial gel or was that genetically engineered. Welcome to the grave new world.
Love
gl
sensory deprivation has left me in an Altered State from which I have never recovered.
yours truly,
William Hurt
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