PET / CT Scan at St Georges Hospital

Now that I have been on steroids for a while and my mobility has improved, I had this 3 monthly PET Scan at St Georges rather than the Royal Marsden. The reason why, well I can now get half way up a staircase and the St Georges unit is out in a car park, in two connected container units on stilts.

It was a little worrying when not being able to find a vein to fill me with the radiation that the nurse said they had none of the smallest cannula's and he also moaned that the gloves they have been provided were sub standards, and could see that as they were split and falling apart and looked well past their sell by date.

They did however have a robot that would administer the radioactive material rather than a nurse doing it manually, this saves the nurses from being exposed to the radioactive material too much. Never seen this for the last two years I have been having the Pet Scans every 3 months at the Royal Marsden

Yep that little robot that was a little too big to get into the broom cupboard with me, did all the work via the small tube linking me to it via the cannular, it was nicer feeling than being injected manually. 

I sat in a Captains Chair straight out of Star Trek, in a broom cupboard sized room with images of forests on the walls in an attempt to make it feel bigger, with a flat screen TV that only had BBC iplayer. I was left to marinate in the radiation for an hour before going in the PET Scan machine. It's 23 minutes for a full body PET Scan in one of these boys a few minutes faster than the Royal Marsden's machine. 

I get the results in about 3 weeks and hopefully I will still be stable from a cancer and a rheumatism point of view, and they will not find any other nasties.