Shoot i am back after 5 years

I hope that's just a bump; not uncommon for patients who have had radiation therapy.

I am now scheduled for a pet scan for better evaluation of the prostate cancer.

I have an inflammatory disease that has showed up in the bone in 2021, so now am doing a prostate specific scan. still leaning toward cyberknife.

G'day @Steve1961,

I have had three PSMA PET Scans, which have all come back negative. They are probably false negatives. I got my first one when I hit the biochemical recurrence trigger of 0.20 (I had surgery as my primary treatment), my second a year later when my PSA was 0.38 and my last 10 months later when my PSA was 0.57. Although my PSA is still relatively low, it was rising quickly in percentage terms over the past few years and a bit of panic set in.

There is some good advice around that says that the scans are more than likely able to detect cancerous cells once your PSA is over 1.0, so you should probably only need to have one scan to see what is going on.

On the day, the whole process takes a good couple of hours, but the scan itself is only about half an hour. It's no big deal. You will be asked to front up well hydrated but not bursting; for me, for a late morning scan, I have a normal breakfast with a glass of juice and a cup of tea, then a couple of glasses of water. You will be led into a small isolation room and fitted with a cannula to your arm. A tube will be passed through a glory hole(!) and the nurse will hook it up. You are then left on your own for about 90 minutes, during which time you are still encouraged to drink some water. The stuff that is being injected into your arm is radioactive, hence the isolation. So sit back in the recliner, watch TV or play games on your phone, or have a nap. You are allowed to buzz for the nurse to disconnect you if you need the toilet during this time. The stuff that went into your arm only took a few minutes but you are left hooked up until you need to be disconnected. After about 90 minutes you will be taken to the room that houses the machine. You will lay on your back and your body will be passed slowly all the way through the donut, then every few minutes it will increment a few inches the other way. It is not hard to stay perfectly still during the scan, in fact, I normally doze off.

Hope this helps.

No no no! Lol, sorry!

The tube that puts the radioactive stuff in your arm is passed through a hole in the wall and hooked up to you. It is then injected remotely, from the next room presumably. I'm assuming it is done the same way everywhere. I only said the phrase glory hole for humour!

Not sure if the machine is bigger than an MRI machine; I suspect not, but there seemed to be PLENTY of room in there. A good foot of clearance above your nose. Google 'pet scan machine' and look at images.

No sedation required.