What a disappointment. The FDG preparation for my Pet scan this morning failed. So they rescheduled me for Friday morning. :-(
I was up at 5:00 and made a fruit salad for lunch, and a thermos of coffee. Nothing by mouth, except water, for the last 7 hours. No carbs or sugars for 24 hours. I packed all my clothes I would need during and after the scan. I made sure the Beetle would start, and then they called saying that my FDG production had failed.
This cancer has a very powerful encouragement to learn about things I never even knew existed. FDG is one of them. You can call it 2-deoxy-2-(18F)fluoro-D-glucose, if you prefer.
From this article:
http://mg.co.za/article/2013-08-02-00-sa-corners-radioactive-market
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At the Pelindaba Nuclear facility, outside Pretoria, vast
energies are pumped into a cyclotron — a machine that accelerates
protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter, and smashes them
into a material.
The machine creates beams of these particles that bombard a
target substance, creating fluorine-18 [18F], which is mixed with
fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG). It is quickly packaged and driven to the
nearest hospital and injected into a
waiting patient’s blood stream.
The clock is ticking. Its radioactive decay is measured by its half-life, which is the time it takes for
half of the substance to decay. 18F-FDG has a half-life of 110 minutes
and after that time it is not effective, which is what dictates the
stringent deadlines to get it from the lab into the
patient. From the minute the intimidatingly
named 18F-FDG is created, doctors have less than two hours to administer
the radioactive substance to their patient before it becomes
ineffective.
With it, the doctor will be able to map their patient’s cancer and be
better equipped to treat it using a PET/CT scan.
18F-FDG is a substance that behaves like glucose when
ingested into the body, but it cannot be metabolized. This means it will
pass harmlessly through the system once it has done its work. Although
most of it will be excreted after consumption, after 12 hours it will be
in effect untraceable in your body.
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It hurts my little brain to remember that an FDG PET/CT scan is really a "fludeoxyglucose positron emission tomography/computed tomography scan".
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