NEDDY O'NED

CivilMatt said:

nice
Hi Dre,

Tell me, how do I read my scan? Glad to hear NED again and again. Roll your R’s for me it was getting my whistle back.

Keep healing!

Best,

Matt

Thank you all for your
Thank you all for your messages!

This is what to do to self-read your scans:

1. Right before or after your scan, ask if you can have a cd with the images for your record. They'll ask you to wait 10 minutes while they write the cd.

2. Insert the cd in your computer and launch it. This time I got an error message and I had to download a .dll file from the Microsoft website. It was really easy, so don't get discouraged if you have to do it too. The cd of my very first scan, instead, started without any problems.

I guess what follows depends on the specific software they load on the cd. In my case:

3. I see a brief list of exams (e.g. CT only, combined PET-CT, ...) I click on the exam I want to look at.

4. The screen gets divided into four quadrants, one with a 3d rotating image of my body, and the others with sections along the three axes.

5. It took a few minutes of trial and error, but with the menu on the left I could explore different slices of the body, zoom in and out, change the brightness of the PET data superimposed to the CT data and so on.

6. Ideally only tumors would show up as bright spots and everything else would be dark. In realty there are bright structures with varying levels of brightness (your brains, believe it or not, is super-bright :P, your bladder, part of your kidneys, ...) Online you can find a lot of images of healthy patients and use those as a reference. Also, right after treatment some diffuse brightness in the areas that were treated has to be expected. In my very first scan I had a few spots on my shoulders.. they told me it's brown fat.. didn't see any of it in my last scan. The point I want to make is that there's a lot of anatomy knowledge (which I don't necessarily have) that goes into interpreting the images.

Which brings me to my disclaimer:

Your self-diagnosis must not replace the opinion of a qualified doctor. And for the faint of heart it might be better to wait for a few days without knowing anything, instead of playing radiologist.

Good luck to all of you!

Dre.