A NEW KIND OF SUPERHERO

This morning I had a PET scan... yet another fascinating medical procedure. I went in to the (I'm not joking) double wide trailer where they keep the machine, and the technician gave me an injection of the radioactive sugar material. Then I sat there for 30 minutes to give myself time to glow. After I was sufficiently suffused, they had me lie down on a table that was less wide then I am. The put an elastic around my toes "to keep them from flopping around" and velcroed my arms in place above my head. It actually wasn't that uncomfortable. I spent the next 40 minutes or so lying still (I'm becoming an expert at immobility)while the machine scanned sections of my body. I found out it's actually a CAT/PET scan-- the CAT scan is used to draw a background picture of my organs, and the PET scan is a bunch of dots that measures the relative metabolic rate of the stuff within me. How do they come up with this stuff?
I had been told that I "couldn't cuddle my children" for 24 hours after the test. Jim wanted to know if it would be safe for him to sleep next to me, and I was duly impressed by his sensitivity. In any event, I've decided on an alternate career path as RADIOACTIVE BOOB WOMAN. Out of curiosity, when I went to work, I checked it with our resident radiological expert (an unforeseen advantage of working at an environmental engineering company) to see if he could measure me with a Geiger counter. When I went in there, he was testing out his equipment on an orange fiesta-wear plate (did you know those are coated with uranium?). In any event, I screwed up his test, because when I walked into the room, the measurement went through the roof. It went from something like 10,000 to over 2million counts per minute. We could see with his program what I was emitting based on the frequency peak (not surprisingly it was what they told me they had injected me with, but good to have an impartial verification). The isotope has a 2 hour half life (i.e., half is gone in 2 hours) but when I went back in his office at 3 and he did measure me with a Geiger counter I was still 100 times background level. He said if I was on a jobsite I would be considered a hazard. The only reason that I am so glib about this is because I know that the danger from radiation comes from both dose and duration, and obviously mine was a short-term exposure (and here I thought I would never use the information I had to study for the radiological section on the PE exam)... but needless to say, I took a night off from cuddling the kiddos.