I’m Radioactive, Radioactive

This post coming to you from the bowels of Tuality Hospital.  Ok…not really the bowels…just the basement.

In my gastroenterologist's ongoing quest to figure out a reason for my stomach pain, I am having my 3rd GI test today.  This one is a stomach emptying test, checking to make sure that my stomach is dealing with food in a timely manner.

And how do they do that, you ask? 

By feeding you breakfast.  Complete with radioactive eggs.

Yep, that’s what I said.  Eggs (actually egg-beaters) mixed with a small amount of some radioactive substance that I cannot remember the name of.  (But not mixed with salt.  Sadly.)

What’s even better is that after my first bite of anything on the tray, I had exactly 10 minutes to finish my meal.  Me.  The second-slowest eater in the world.  Who finishes nothing except perhaps a glass of water in 10 minutes.  There was even a stopwatch.

And even better than that was that I got to wear a bib.

Truly.  They taped it to my shoulders.  But not because they were afraid that I would drop radioactivity onto my clothes and damage them.  (Because although you can’t see it, I’m wearing a cute new halloween shirt bought on clearance last year.  And cute red jeans too.  It would be a shame to radioactively damage them.)  No, they were afraid that if I dropped a crumb of radioactive egg on, say, my shoulder, it would confuse their pictures.  And they would wonder why I was digesting part of my breakfast in my shoulder.  So there you have it.

In case you were wondering what the setup looks like for getting radioactive pictures taken of one’s stomach, here you go.

The bed part raises up, then rolls forward into the open part of the circle.  The camera is in the rectangular part and my stomach went right up till I was almost touching that.  My chin was pretty much on the metal. 

Now I am just thirsty, thirsty, thirsty.  Because in addition to my breakfast I was given 4 oz of water, and that’s all I’m allowed to have until it’s all over.  Hopefully that will be soon!