I am full of...

[cjsmith]

...technitium-99. (This is for a triphase bone scan.) The half life is six hours, so in a day I'll be back to normal background; in the meantime I shouldn't try to fly at a commercial airport.

Naturally this got me wondering about the medical supply of an isotope whose half life is six hours. El Camino Hospital probably has a moly cow. I get to go back for the bone portion of the scan in a couple of hours, so I'll ask.

I love asking medical people about things. Techs either love me or hate me. :-)

Comments

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

It's particularly odd that 99(m)Tc, which is what you have in you, doesn't actually decay into another element. It just has an excited nucleus (woohoo!) and it either emits a gamma ray or transfers energy to an orbit electron, which then flees, but in either case it stays 99Tc (the non-(m) version).

This means, for the reader who's paying attention, that you aren't emitting neutrinos from this decay. However, 99Tc has a half-life of 211,100 years, and does beta decay, thus releasing neutrinos, into 99Ru, which is stable. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether you are emitting more or fewer neutrinos from 99Tc decay than a banana does from the decay of potassium (http://rfrench.livejournal.com/185880.html).

[psi-star-psi.livejournal.com]

Incomplete info. The banana problem included the amount of potassium in a banana. We need to know the 99(m)Tc dosage info for what CJ received, plus how fresh it is. Then, of course, we need to look up the environmental 99Tc traces for high tech industrial areas and the body's absorption rate to determine what fraction of CJ is already 99Tc. Finally, we need to know CJ's weight

and that's were I stop doing the problem before I get slapped.

Of course, the neutrino scanner display will be overwhelmed by the flare from the thyroid. *snerk* (Dang, I left my tricorder in my other Starfleet uniform.)

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know. Like any good "exercise left for the reader" it is unsolvable with the known information.

"Exercise left for the reader" is in the same class as "it can be easily seen that", which means "we have no idea how to derive this, but we copied it out of some other book."

I've probably told this story before...

[psi-star-psi.livejournal.com]

In my grad school E&M course, the prof gave us a homework assignment which included "Go to pp. N-N+1 in Jackson, and fill in the steps in the derivation between equations M & M+1". So we started in trying to figure out how to get from the one equation to the other, but none of us could make head or tails of it.

During discussion section, we asked the prof for some guidance. He started out, "Certainly, this is straightforward!" 30 minutes later, there was no free blackboard space and he was scratching his head. "I must be missing an obvious step here. I'll get back to you next time."

Of course, I mentioned Jackson as the textbook author because he was a prof at UCB. So in the next class, the prof comes in: "I talked to Jackson, and it is obvious! Here, it goes like this..." More blackboard filling, etc.

I feel confident most technical educations include a few experiences like this.

Re: I've probably told this story before...

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

I believe Jackson has a reputation for being inscrutable. I've never had to use it. I did the engineering-for-poets track at MIT.

Re: I've probably told this story before...

[oddhack.livejournal.com]

IIRC Jackson had the reputation for a high error rate when I was in grad school - though not nearly so high as Goldstein.

But Landau & Lifschitz were the inscrutable ones. Mostly, IMO, because Landau was so brilliant that even after Lifschitz translated down to mortal-speak for him, the derivations were still surpassingly compact. The upside was that e.g. their CM text was a tiny fraction the size of anyone else's, and you felt like you had really accomplished something by the time you worked through the derivations.

I recall wandering around the UNC campus feeling affinity with the Incredible Hulk after my bone scan. Since our research group collaborated with the radiology folks on medical imaging stuff, they were happy to give me a copy of my raw dataset to play with afterwards.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

What the scanner picks up to make the pretty medical pictures is the gamma rays.

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

Well, I suppose it's easier than detecting neutrinos!