Day 11, Friday, February 8th, 2013

Five fifteen AM is a time that I feel you should only ever stay up until, never a time that you should choose for waking, or being awoken. No alarm is cheerful or gentle at five fifteen. They are all jerks.

I was scheduled for a Positron Emission Tomogrophy (PET) scan at six forty-five. Well, the procedure was set to start then, but the actual scan wouldn't be for another couple of hours. I had to get an IV installed, drink a science drink, and wait for said science drink to kick in, which took some time.

Typically, for a PET scan, the patient is fed a radioactive analogue of glucose. As this radioactive form decays, it emits a positron, which is detected by a set of detector rings that your body is passed through, creating a real-time, three-dimensional recording of your body's use of glucose. All of the parts of your body that use loads of glucose (like your brain, or fast-dividing cancer cells) light up in pretty colours on the image. They use PET scans to get an extremely accurate picture of any cancerous activity in your body.

In short: They give you a really sweet drink and then an hour later, you take a nap in a big science tube for 45 minutes. Afterwards, they give you a snack.

Further afterwards, you are radioactive for a while and are not supposed to be around pregnant women, or children, for fear that you might give them super powers. I elected to keep the super powers for myself and spent most of the rest of the day playing games with friends through the magic of the internet.

We cooked codfish for supper and it was tasty. We also met some Albanians.

I popped in a blank tape, cranked the volume, and pressed play. The mime next door went nuts.