Radioactivity

I now make Geiger counters crackle

Fig 27: Yes Ralf, but it might just keep me alive too

So this week had me back in the hospital, this time for the big enchilada, the SIRT procedure.Just to remind you this is the bit where they put these tiny spheres dosed with Yttrium-90 directly into the liver where they should lodge up close to the nasty tumours and zap them with beta radiation and killing them, or at the very least giving them several hard kicks in the nadgers.

Now this is incredibly time critical becuase Y-90 only has a 3 day half life so the treatment needs to be administered whilst its still effective. These spheres are custom ordered from a company called Sirtex in Australia and they are then flown to a nuclear lab in Sweden where they get made radioactive - most likely a process involving nuclear reactors and a moose - then they come to the UK in, I am suspecting, a big lead box with "DO NOT OPEN THIS BASTARD!" written on it in big red letters.  I mention this because as at 4pm on my date of admission the hospital were still waiting on a bed for me.

I made a phone call to the senior consultant oncolgist running the trial.  I had my bed fifteen minutes later.  And as an extra bonus I found when I got in they'd put me in a single side room. Result!

So a good, or at least reasonable, night followed and in the morning after the ritual 6am poking I toddle off for a brew in the day room. On my way back what do I hear drifting down the corridor...

"Nurse! Nuuuuurse! I'm going home now! Nurse!" Yep, it was the man from bed 7. He was still there, still shouting and still giving master-classes in Extreme Gittery. I went back to my room and closed the door.

So let's fast forward to the procedure. Essentially its the same as last week, they thread a wire up through an artery in my groin to the liver but this time squirt in the nasty stuff. I sign the forms and off we go only this time there's a problem as the access artery in my leg didn't like being poked last week and is trying to hide so there is lots of kerfuffle and multiple attempts at wielding scalpel blades, false starts they had to back out of and so on trying to get access.

This hurt. A lot. At one point they must have hit a major nerve as it felt like a flash fire was spreading down my leg. I may have screamed a bit.

However after a few minutes we are awash with local anathetics and the tubes are in position so out come the two boxes of Y-90 spheres. I was rather hoping they would play the incidental music from the Bond movies where the baddie's world destroying death machine is first show but no, NHS cutbacks I guess. The boxes themselves were perspex ones with a couple of knobs on the outside and two small glass bottles inside and from here on it it got all endearingly lo-tech. A couple of needles with tubes attached are poked in connected to me and there's some sort of flush mechanism attached and in the spheres go, helped along by one of the doctors gingerly gripping the output tube with forceps and giving it a gentle shake to make sure it flows smoothly.  One bottle, a third of the total, goes to the left lobe and the rest after a wire reposition goes into the right. The whole thing takes about half an hour and we're done. The doctors are happy, Nuclear Medicine are happy we haven't contaminated the hospital and after half an hour pressing on my groin I'm allowed back up to the ward.

The following day I have a couple of scans to make sure the spheres aren't anywhere they shouldn't be and I'm allowed home. "You may feel a bit flu like" they warn me but actually I feel fine.

Well I did until that evening when I felt I'd been hit by a train. I've been in bed pretty much since then until today with what felt like flu without the fever, that bone-aching tiredness that makes you just want to sleep.

Still I'm here, nothing has exploded and apart from turning into SlumberMan I didn't get any super hero powers.

They do a CT scan in a month from now. Let's hope its done some good.

Anyway here's some more Kraftwerk, because you can never have enough Kraftwerk. Sing along now.

Fig 42: Reisen, Zeit, Medizin, Unterhaltung