…you’re sedated
A PET Scan - at least the one I had today (which is my very first) - is like a CT, only much, much slower.
First the techie showed me the PET Scan machine, and explained that it would take about 20 minutes. One look at the machine and I knew I’d need medication to survive. Ah but I found I had to have gotten the stuff from my primary care MD.
“Well, maybe I can put up with this shit,” I thought.
So he put me in a room to lie down for an hour, during which time I wasn’t allowed to read, even. For very goods reasons, I suppose, they want the patient to be very calm, very laid back. Hell, I wasn’t supposed to exercise 24 hours before the scan!!
Anyway before I nodded off (hah!), another techie injected me with a radioactive substance which for diagnostic purposes, causes some of my tissues to glow during the scan.
After that I lay back and tried unsuccessfully to snooze. About an hour later, the techie came in and put me on the machine’s roll-in-roll-out cot.
He went into his office and hit a button that rolled me into and out of the machine, partly, I suppose, to get me used to the idea.
After that, I lay there waiting for I don’t know for how long, then found myself rolling through the “doughnut” (like a CT scan) to the far end of the machine with my head and chest outside of it.
Five or ten minutes later I rolled in a bit and stopped and got scanned. (I didn’t ever course through the machine continuously. It was more like fits and starts.) The machine scans that segment of the body so I lay still. This move, stop, scan continued and continued and continued, until my head was totally enclosed in the doughnut.
At some point I began to panic. So, I shut my eyes and intensified my Hail Mary recitals, listening desperately to my own voice whispering the prayers to help drown out the “I’m being buried alive!!” syndrome.
But there was one point when I thought I just couldn’t take it any longer. Without moving I yelled, “Help! HELP!” There was no response, so I reached down somewhere inside of me for strength, and to my utter surprise, found it. I shut my eyes, continued to pray nonstop, and eventually emerged from the machine.
It seemed a hell of a lot longer than 20 minutes.
The techie checked the pictures and they were fine, and I went to join my wife who was baby sitting the grandkids at our daughter’s house. I was exhilarated to have gotten through the scan alive and sane.
There’s a Moral to the Story: Have your primary care write a prescription to get you through a PET Scan.
I had an MRI at this same hospital and the hospital provided the necessary sedation. It was a huge help that enabled me to waltz through that procedure.
Oh. If you’re being sedated, work it out with the PET Scan people as to when to take it. And if you do get sedated, you might need to have someone along to drive you home. Hospitals can be very insistent on things like that.