Pre-Admission

April 24, 2012

Today I went in to Sunnybrook for the MUGA scan. Arrived about 7:45 for the 8:00 o'clock appointment, just as the reception desk in nuclear medicine was opening up. I gave in my card, as usual, and then waited until 8:25. Pretty good compared to previous experience.

I was then taken in to a room with a couple of chairs and received an injection of something. Then I went back to the waiting room for twenty minutes. After 20 minutes (on schedule - woohoo!) I went back to the room and got hooked up to a small IV.

This was connected to a plastic collecting tube, and at the side of this was a separate connector to which a larger metal cylinder was attached. Some blood (about a vial or two) was drawn into the metal cylinder, which was then disconnected an placed inside what looked like a lead crucible for 10 minutes. The point of this was to irradiate the collected blood with radioactive Technetium 99. After the ten minutes, the metal cylinder was connected back to the IV and the blood was re-injected into me.

Next, while I was trying to figure out how to shoot webs out of my wrists and swing from building to building, I went to the scanner (maybe a cat-scan maybe something else; I have no experience of these) where I had three electrodes hooked up to me, and then had to remain still on my back for two 10 minute periods while the images were collected.

The MUGA scan measures the Left Ventricular Flow (LVF) which is the percentage of blood that is pumped out of the left ventricle on each contraction. Higher is better. The point here is that this is a baseline taken before the chemotherapy starts, because some of the chemo drugs can do damage to the heart and lower the LVF. They want to know that it is healthy to start with so they can monitor it as the chemo goes on and adjust as necessary.

Technetium 99 has a low radioactivity and is generally harmless, other than the web-shooting thing. On the other hand, it has a half-life of 211,000 years, so by the time it has all decayed the Leafs may have won the Cup.