I got to see my skeleton today.. Did YOU do anything that exciting?


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You only get to see the top of the machine
because my phone lost the bottom somehow



So, today I had a bone scan done - it was a pretty cool experience.  I had to go in at 8:30 am, and they gave me a shot of radioactive material (my son is going to be so jealous.)  They then did the scan and at that point they could look at the blood flow.    They had me lay on the little bench, and then they set up the machine just over my shins/knees and took the scans.  Then they told me to go away for a couple of hours.



The screen on the right is where the pictures appeared



Back to work, then back to the hospital at 11:30.  After the required thirty minutes spent sitting in the waiting room (doesn't it always seem mandatory to you?) in we went for the actual bone scan.  Now this time, they actually did a full body scan.  It started over my head with it almost touching the tip of my nose.  For the next 25 minutes it worked its way down my body slower than a Caterpillar could crawl.  I could see the monitor (its blank in the picture, I know -bad timing - but they took my phone away for the full scan) as my skeleton slowly appeared on it.

Now to me it was just a cool skeleton shot - but the tech was able to look at it and let me know that I had pain in my knees - both left and right.  He also asked me what sort of trauma had occurred to my left arm (I don't recall any to be honest, but with an older brother and sister?  Probably..) 



They taped my VFFs together to help keep my legs still.

The guy who ran the machine was also a runner (though to be fair, he prefers biking -so his tastes could be questionable) who owned VFFs.  It suprised the first tech that helped me that not only did I have bizarre toe-shoes, but that his coworker did too - and apparently had worn them to work before!
We discussed shoes - he told me he had seen people come in that were wearing VFFs and switched back with shin splints (both the actual medical issue with the shin bones, and just muscular) from switching BACK to normal shoes. Moving back to the lifted heel and a more heel-strike style of running seems to help cause aggravation of the shin muscles.

The tech also explained how the bone scan works - the radiation they had injected me with gave off gamma radiation. This radiation hit the salt crystals that were in the flat thingies (you can see them on either side of my VFFs in the third picture).  That is what gave them the "picture" - just like a time release photo shot.  He told me that a stress fracture (such as the one he himself had in his thigh bone [though he used fancy medical terminology.. the show off...] shows up as a bright white compared to the greys of the normal imaging.  He explained this to me and showed me the monitor. Now let me be clear - he did NOT diagnose me, or tell me if I had a stress fracture or not.  He wasn't a doctor and could not do that.  But after explaining to me that a stress fracture would show up white - he pointed to the screen for me to look at.

I didn't see any white. :)