Today, I was scheduled for a MUGA (the new name is Radionuclide Angiography - the technicians weren't even positive what MUGA stands for), to check blood flow through the heart, and a Pulmonary Function Test, to measure lung function.
For the MUGA, they injected something that would circulate through the body specifically where they wanted it to (avoiding other organs, for the most part), then had me wait for 20 minutes. Then they injected me with with a radioactive marker that binds to the red blood cells and would flow through the proper path to the heart that they can take pictures of to measure blood flow. The technician was using two syringes through the same line in the back of my hand for the second injection and I got a weird pain in my wrist that was hard to describe, sort of like the muscles painfully contracting. It went away after about ten seconds, though. After that, I laid on the table while they took three pictures at different angles, which took eight minutes each.
For the Pulmonary Function Test, I sat in a clear box with a machine that controlled air flow. They give you nose clips, so you're only breathing through your mouth, and a mouthpiece that attaches to the machine. They had me do different kinds of breathing - normal breathing, exhaling as hard and as long as possible, panting (quick, short breaths and quick, longer breaths), inhaling as hard as possible while the machine restricted the air, and probably something else I'm forgetting, with breaks in between. The whole test took about ten to fifteen minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment