DISCLAIMER: I am NOT a medical or health professional, this is ONLY to share my own experience and should not replace professional medical or health advice.

So after a fairly smooth recovery following my second surgery, I had my post-op appointment with my endocrinologist and made decisions to move forward with several tests.

The first being a nuclear bone scan. I guess one of the first places cancer likes to spread to is the bones, (along with the lymph nodes and blood vessels) according to my endocrinologist. So, to rule this out, I went in for a full-body nuclear bone scan. I was nervous because I knew they would be giving me a dose of radioactive substance, so I didn’t want to be around my little dog and my husband for several hours until the radioactive solution had decayed to a low enough level. For a more in-depth explanation of this:

As Johns Hopkins Medicine states, “The radioactive substance, called a radionuclide, or tracer, will collect within the bone tissue at spots of abnormal physical and chemical change.

The radionuclide emits a type of radiation, called gamma radiation. The gamma radiation is detected by a scanner, which processes the information into a picture of the bones.

The areas where the radionuclide collects are called “hot spots,” and may indicate the presence of conditions such as arthritis , malignant (cancerous) bone tumors , metastatic bone cancer (cancer which has spread from another site, such as the lungs), bone infections , bone trauma not seen on ordinary X-rays, and other conditions of the bone.”

I looked it up and they usually use what’s called Technetium 99m (Tc-99m), which exposes you to 4.2 (mSv) of radiation, with a half-life of about 6 hours. For a frame of reference, this website has a useful table showing the time to accumulate comparable natural background dose, as well as other exam doses.

I could eat and drink whatever leading up to my appointment and had to get an IV injection as soon as I got there. Once they injected the radioactive tracer in me, I went home and drank as much water as I could to help flush out the tracer over the next three hours. After I’m pretty sure it was about three hours, I went back and they had me sit still on a bed while they did the scan.

It took maybe 30–40 minutes to complete the whole scan and my one struggle was that I drank SO much water, I REALLY needed to pee by the end of the scan, despite using the bathroom RIGHT before going in. I also regret having my hair up in a ponytail because by the end of the scan, it felt like my ponytail was boring into my skull.

The scan itself really wasn’t bad though, and because it’s just kind of a wheel spinning around you while you sit in a bed, I didn’t feel claustrophobic or anything.