Dad: Medical Geeks have lairs too.

Today's Friday and we feel like we've been through finals or beaten up or something.  Well, we only have 1 test today and it doesn't take surgery.  Because of this we are all breathing a bit easier then we have for the past few days.  However, the one test that we are doing is the MIBG part 2.  This is where they take a massive machine and scan for the radioactive iodine that they injected into my 4 month and 3 week old baby.  Creepy...yes, but that's what it is.  Anyway, the department that does the scan is called Nuclear Radiology.  Which seems to be the home of the biggest geeks to ever call themselves doctors.  Keep in mind I can have a longer conversation about marvel super heros than is necessarily healthy.  I am proudly a card carrying member of the geek community (Literally, the computer programming competition in Socal gave me a card).  Anyway, as much as I do appreciate all the geeks out there, it does take you off guard to walk through a hospital and then go into a room where D&D would not be out of place.

Back on topic, we spent some time with a very nice nurse while our baby screamed at us over, again, starving her all morning.  After what seemed like about 3 years they brought in the drugs that would put her to sleep.  You would think that you would never be grateful to see drugs that will be used on your baby, but after an hour of screaming a little sedation seems very nice.  This is a light sedative and she drinks it and slowly drifts off, which sounds calming but for our baby girl that means occassional groggy/ loud bursts of screaming.

The scan itself is really rather disturbing.  To properly convey it I think we need to cover some proportions.  My baby girl is roughly 26 in X 8 in X 5 in.  The machine is two massive scanner looking things are about 3.5 ft X 3.5 ft X3.5 ft, and there is one above her and one beneith.  Both comming from a very large circular axis. The procedure goes as follows.

Step 1: place baby on slab

Step 2:  Roll slab between the two massive scanner things.

Step 3:  By means of eye balling it, slowly lower the top slap pneumatically until it is a fraction of an inch from Cambria's nose.  This creeped me right out.  I mean if his thumb slipped at the wrong moment then suddenly the dimensions I specified would no longer be accurate.

Step 4:  The nice geeky doctor pressed "play" and starts wandering around.  The machine proceeds to rotate a couple of degrees, adjusting the width between the two scanners slightly as to avoid crushing our child.  This part really creeped my wife out.  Apparently the software engineer has less faith in computers than I do.


After about an hour and minutes I expect some kind of dinging noise or something, but the geeky man just pulls the slab out and I head off to tell the Grandma's in the waiting room that it's finished (after about 2 hours of waiting they were freaking out a bit).  Then we all wheel over to radiological recovery which was A LOT more calming then surgical recovery.  They had a pretty cloud scene and it was quiet, and several nurses that we've meet during previous tests.  It's probably not a good thing when you know a bunch of people who work at a hospital... Anyway, on our way out of there we met another old friend, the ever nice Dr. Meany.  This was an unexpected random meeting at the elevator and gave us the exciting news that one test came back and her bone marrow is clear of cancer.

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Our God is an awesome God.