I saw my GP yesterday.
She is a lovely woman who's known me for many, many, many years. The time she told me I was pregnant she looked very happy. Today - not so much.
I probably have something called MGUS - monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance. It is diagnosed by eliminating all of the other bad things you could have.
So today I ponied up and had 4 tubes of blood drawn, peed in a cup, collected a big jug for a 24 hour urine (everything you pee over 24 hours goes in the jug) and had a bone scan.
I showed up in nuclear medicine at my hospital and was injected with radioactive tracer - so, just like Spiderman, I have radioactive blood! Depending on how well I hydrate, I'm gonna be "hot" (no kidding - that's the term they use for radioactive) for up to two days - the more I drink the faster my kidneys make glow in the dark pee.
And, no, sadly it doesn't glow in the dark - I shut the lights off and looked just to be sure.
I lay down on a narrow and very hard scanning table. They taped my shoes together to hold my feet still and then I just lay there. On the scale of hard or painful tests - this one doesn't rate as the only thing that hurt was my back from laying on the damn hard bed. They took extra pictures of my feet and then thirty minutes later I was done.
The radiologist saw a "hot spot" on my left foot. This is an area where the tracer is taken up at a higher rate than the rest of the bones. Higher take up means the bone is more metabolically active. Cancerous tissue is more metabolically active and therefore is dark on the scan.
However, I broke my heel in August and that explained the hot spot on my foot. So... clean scan and another bad thing crossed off the list.
FYI - if you dribble pee in your knickers they glow dark on the scan...of course maybe the fact that I didn't have any underwear on explains the no dribble spots! Yay me!
PS - that's a normal bone scan picture up there but its not mine.
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