Every Heartbeat

Yesterday was a very interesting day in the Greater Boston area. Because of the lockdown/shelter in place order public transportation was not running. My mother, really who else, came and picked me up at 6:20 am to drive me to work. She knew that I had my MUGA (heart) scan and that enrolling in this trial was very important to me. Also, as she and the rest of the Commonwealth haven't been sleeping very well she was awake and ready to go. We rode to work glued to the radio listening to everything going on.

MUGA Scan
At 9 am I changed out of my work clothes and into my test uniform (Columbia Athletics T-shirt and shorts, game day ready). Because I have had my lymph nodes out in my right side any injections have to go in my left arm. Well, as all of chemotherapy went through the left arm my veins are still in pretty rough shape. The Nuclear medicine techs found that out. It took 3 attempts (each by a different person) but finally using a vein in my thumb were able to do the radioactive Technetium-99m in. The techs felt really bad and were apologizing left and right. I reassured them that a) it is fine b) 3 sticks was pretty good and that it once took 5 sticks to get the chem running c) bruising is way down there on my injury list. After sitting for 20 minutes in the waiting room under a tv with the news coverage of the active manhunt I was looking forward to the quite room of the scan. MUGA scans happen in two parts.

Part 1 involves sitting in a chair and basically hugging a large metal arm that is laid around your chest to get pictures of your heart. Given my age and general appearance the fourth nuclear medicine tech I met asked me the same question each of the previous 3 had. Do you know why your having this test? When I explain because I've had chemo and I am enrolling in a clinical trial for a breast cancer vaccine I still get a shocked look from people. This poor tech couldn't recover. She started stammering about chemo being cardiotoxic and good thing they were getting pictures and how often she see's people who have had chemo and then trailed off and just said "don't move I'm starting the scan". Part one is 4 minutes of hugging metal. I took this opportunity to sing Don Johnson. Thank you years of watching VH1's I love the 80's for introducing me to it.

Part 2 of the scan involves laying on a thin metal strip and getting velcro-d in place not to move. As the tech who was able to find my vein was the one getting me ready for the 2nd scans I took the opportunity to ask some curiosity questions about the scans. My biggest was I wanted to know if they were taking video of my heart? He explained there are mostly static photos, but some dynamic photos. He was very basically explaining what they were measuring, and I interrupted and said "Oh I know, we are checking my ejection fraction and I was wondering how they would be able to do it with out video". The tech took a deep breath, looked at me and said "Ok so don't move, we're starting the scan now". I figured that I would continue with Don Johnson, but my brain had a surprise-Amy Grant!

 

Once the hour of injections and scans were done I changed my clothes and headed back to work. They gave me a card to carry around until Monday because according to the card, although I am not a public danger I am still radioactive enough to set of geiger counters. My spidey sense is tingling.  I got an e-mail from my oncologist who let me know that all the bloodwork from Thursday was normal (yay normal labs) and that my MUGA scan looked great. Not good, GREAT.

I celebrated my healthy heart and paid tribute to all of this weeks heroes and victims by spending my morning running a track workout in the rain. I did half a ladder: 500, 400, 300, 200, 100. A good way to start a Saturday.