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RE: A once in a lifetime opportunity



The most curious aspects of my test were involved with the (young) people
who administered it. The woman who gave me my first dose (of Tc99m, of
course), when I asked her how many microcuries I was getting, said "Oh,
we don't use those old fashioned units any more. You're getting 370
megabequerels. Everything is measured in megabeqs nowadays." It took no
time at all for me to recognize that 370 MBq is exactly 0.010 mCi, and
that a hard conversion (no doubt with excess implicit precision) had been
done from the "old fashioned" units. The second interaction, this time
with the young man who administered the technicium when I was at a high
heart rate, introduced me to a worker in the field who pronounced the
word"nuclear" in the antinuke manner as "nucyuler". I remember having
been surprised to hear Jimmy Carter pronouncing it that way. Only the
rather improbably named Chinese Canadian technician Scott who supervised
the actual scans (20 minutes lying motionless while a NaI-Tl camera works
its way slowly around me) seemed to know very much about the technique,
and he knew quite a lot. I'm very thankful for the existence of the MCA,
which by the way was invented at my alma mater while I was there (by. I
think, Mel Klein, though his name may escape my imperfect recall). The
first one was located in the hallway outside my lab. (Three doors down,
in 101 LeConte Hall, was the lab in which Ernest Lawrence used his first
cyclotrons.) Using an old fashioned kick sorter (single channel anayzer)
and manual control that procedure would take all day.

I also considered whether it might be advisable to sleep in another bed
from my wife at least the first night. I did not do so, however. My wife
has been both a radio chemist at General Atomic and a radiation chemist
at Donner laboratory. She has taught the radiation chemistry laboratory
course here at SFU, and we took a medical physics laboratory course
together at Cal as lab partners in which we did lots of tracer experiments.
I couldn't see anything fluorescing in my vicinity, so I guessed I was
not so hot. I noticed that the technicians all wore aprons around me, but
they had no qualms about letting me roam free in the hospital cafeteria,
uning the same restrooms as everyone else, etc. Incidentally, while I was
in the scanning camera I was given a lap pad to wear, just like whenever
I get an x-ray. In this case, however, the shielding was *from* me, for
the camera's benefit. Some of the technetium winds up in liver and stomach.

All of this is indicative of the different manner in which we physicists
view the ordinary world. Two other people taking the test with me Friday
were a "commoner" who has great faith in physicians and could take all
this in stride without question, and a very prominent multimillionaire who
also seemed somewhat disinterested in the details I found so fascinating.

I'm, er, heartened to learn that so many of my colleagues in this group
have been through the same test, and that they all seem to have taken
the same sort of interest in it that I did. I'm really not at all worried
about my health, by the way.

Leigh