Radioactive man

The next step in this thing is to get properly staged. Cancer has four stages, which tell you how far the disease has spread around your body. Stage I means it's localized in one area, while stage IV means that your body is essentially swiss cheese except instead of holes there are tumors. Accurate staging is important because it means the doctors can choose the best treatment for your particular case.

Today I met the lymphoma specialist who will be looking after my treatment. His name is Dr. Follows, and he has nice hands but sadly no moustache. He sent me for a high-tech PET scan at the hospital. As scary as cancer is, you get to see some pretty amazing technology in action. In a PET scan, they inject you with a radioactive tracer, which decays via positron emission, eventually yielding two 511 keV gamma rays that fly off in opposite directions and are picked up by a detector. This is cool physics. Apparently monkey face cells hog all of the radioactive tracer, so wherever the detector sees gamma rays, that's where the cancer is. The scanner is basically like the picture up there except it has a hollow tube that you lie in for 30 minutes with your hands over your head. I spent my time thinking of hamburgers because you are not allowed to eat for 7 hours before the scan and I was starving. So now, I wait two days for the results and a follow up meeting with Dr. Follows. In the meantime I am radioactive and am not allowed to be around pregnant women and small children which totally screws up my plans for the afternoon.

Top Tip: If you don't like needles and you get bored sitting around in waiting areas for hours at a time listening to Cheryl Cole hits on the radio then I would strongly recommend avoiding cancer, since you'll experience plenty of both.