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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: I'm Radioactive - Watch out for the TSA goons.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-14-2013 01:43 PM
Took a nuclear imaging tests on Thursday. They pump you full of a radioactive nuclear isotope and scan you over a few hours to see how your blood is flowing...or not.
Interesting thing is, the lab tech gave me these instructions and a affadavit verifying that I have detectible radioactivity in my person and where to call for confirmation. He said, "But don't let that fool you, if they stop you, you'll be detained for hours...and that's on the subway or around town. I suggest not even trying to fly." "REALLY," sez I, "they are able to detect that little bit of radiation?" Evidently. He said they get about four or five patients a month who get stopped.
He said a patient was walking down the street in the theatre district in NYC and a van drove by her, drove down to the end of the street, then backed up to where she was walking and three guys jumped out and surrounded her. She was 73 yrs old. Another guy went into the subway with a backpack (VERY bad move the tech said). Unfortunately for him, with all the people around him and all the train noise, he didn't understand what the agents were shouting and who they were shouting at and he just kept walking. He was tackled to the ground...the subway ground...yuck. The tech said that if you are flying, you will almost always miss your flight because you will always be detected and then detained while they try to reach the doctors or the lab. You better be traveling when either are opened and not at 10pm on a weekend.
Oh yah, I had to sign a statement that I agree I will not go within 20 feet of pregnant women or any infants, children or teenagers under the age of 17yrs. Makes me feel pretty potent. And I have a mild level -- the half-life of mine is such that it will not be dangerous to anyone by tomorrow, but evidently the residual radiation signature of some types of these isotopes that they use for the thyroid scans containing iodine radioactive isotopes which are able to trigger sensors at airports for as long as 30 days.
Anyone getting stopped needs to report to the SNMMI -- a non-profit org in the medical field that collects the data of such stops with the aim of educating the TSA and various local police forces about how to deal with these human triggers -- evidently there are a lot of us walking around.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-15-2013 09:52 AM
Rick, yes it was a PET scan -- actually, in my case they scanned three time, once before the stuff is pumped into me and then they inject some vile stuff that makes you feel like you are running a marathon, at the same time eating the hottest chili peppers on the planet, at the same time being sprayed with capsasin tear-gas all over the body and at the same time having an elephant sitting on your chest. Oh yah, and with wave after wave of nausea and splitting headache too. The doctor kept asking how I was doing -- he's watching a EKG and two other monitors -- John Glenn style, like Louis says -- the ones that BEEP BEEPs every time your heart pumps (it very disconcerting hearing that beeping sound getting slower and slower). I was hoping the doctor could see "how I was doing" by looking at all that hi-tech monitoring equipment a bit more scientifically than just saying, "Hey Bub, how ya doing?"! Finally I say, "Not so good, doc." GREAT. he says.(!?). "You can do it; only 5 five more minutes to go and I'll give you the antidote." Antidote?
Then comes the isotope and that cold chill flowing thru your veins like a ghost just passed over your body, and two more scans an hour apart to see if the heart is still beating and you're not dead yet.
The scan thing was no walk in the park either. They lay you on a freezing metal bed in a flimsy hospital gown you are sure your ass is hanging out the back as it hits the metal that is just about as wide your my butt, no place to rest your arms which she positioned above my head, grabbing each other. "Hold that position, don't move, not talk, breath normally, don't fall asleep," the tech tells me. Don't fall asleep? Yah, because you breath more deeply when you are sleeping....can't have that. Hold that position for 20 minutes. Doesn't sound like a long time, does it? Well of course two minutes after the scan starts and this huge scanning robot thing starts moving inch by inch over you, getting closer and closer (actually pretty neat to watch), you start to itch -- my nose is itching, me ear is itching, I feel a cramp in my foot, then another in my arm. I am thinking, Man, this is unpleasant, but it's only 20 minutes; that's plenty of time to contemplate whether or not this robot scanner has been programmed properly so that it actually knows where my head starts and ends so that it STOPS before it crushes my nose. After all, we know how easy it is for a tech to forget to put in the proper format macro.
I am thinking, when is this tech coming back to tell me it's over and I can move again...it's GOT to be more than 20 minutes and I reeeeally need to move? I notice that if I roll my eyeballs waaaay to the right, I can just see a wall clock in my peripheral vision. I squint (no glasses, of course), and I can see 6 minutes have gone by....and I realize now I also have to pee. If I was allowed to move my jaw, I would have cursed.
Evidently there are a number of different isotopes that they use, depending on what they are looking at, each with a different half-life and each with more or less emissions from your body. I guess that will determine how much they will emphasize the necessity for you to stay away from others and the public detector risk.
Martin, unfortunately no super powers, although I did think it would be fun for me and a few of the stagehands to ride the subway all day and see how many times I could get the detectors to trigger so we could watch the TSA Keystone Cops agents spring into "action." Have my pals capture it on cell phone. Maybe even get it on the 6 o'clock news. Medical Patient Tackled By TSA Agents. The more bad press these guys get the better, although I am glad they have detectors all over the city.
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Jim Cassedy
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1661
From: San Francisco, CA
Registered: Dec 2006
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posted 07-15-2013 11:06 AM
I used to work on the big Chinese New Year parade here in San Francisco.
One year, back around 2002 or 2003, I worked on the parade and then the next day
I was flying out to Phoenix. All of a sudden, as I went through the security screening
at the airport, I started setting off all kinds of alarms. Extra security, & TSA supervisors
were called, and I , and all my belongings were whisked away into a private area.
Why? - - I'll tellya why: My shoes tested positive for explosive residue.
Well, f course they did! I worked on the Chinese friggin' New Years Parade, where
fireworks are constantly going off all along the parade route. I was probably
covered in "explosive residue".
Despite having pictures of the event on my phone & some other documentation,
I was all but strip-searched. They even retreived my checked baggage and
went through every item inside with their 'electronic explosive residue sniffer".
I was eventually 'cleared' and just barely made my flight. But for the next 8 years or so,
every time I flew, I still got singled out for an extra through TSA inspection because
it was still in their computers that I was an "explosive residue carrier" or somthing.
It's only recently that I've been able to fly again without getting hassled.
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Frank Angel
Film God
Posts: 5305
From: Brooklyn NY USA
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 07-29-2013 07:42 PM
I remember when I was a kid, there was this weekly or maybe it was a monthly science magazine they handed out and there was a spat of issues devoted to a series on the glory of nuclear energy as THE future of supplying all our nation's and finally all the world's energy needs. And although I can't recall much else, I do remember the big oooh....aaaah claim was that uranium is naturally occurring and plentiful and that each little nugget could cause atomic chain reactions that could go on for years and keep emitting abundant energy. The big claim was that with atomic plants, we could produce an never-ending supply of power that it would make electric so cheap there would no longer be the need for electric meters because after the power plants were built and paid for, the electricity would be FREE.
Somehow it didn't quite work out that way.
Sean, you are right -- there's no scarcity of toxic stuff we should be worrying about that's a lot more harmful to us than the radioactivity bugaboo. Hell, sun energy, which is nothing more than a type of radiation, can be just as carcinogenic in the right amounts of exposure as other forms as anyone with skin melanoma will tell you. Thing is, decades of the cold war with all that scary stuff about radioactive fallout, with the worse scenarios constantly fed to us about what would happen if someone (Russia) were to do to us what we did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- and we all saw THOSE pictures.
Anyone as old as me will remember that there were fallout shelters in every public school with those big radiation symbols and arrows pointing to how to get to the shelter that was going to protect us should an ATOM BOMB drop on our city! People with enough money actually built fall-out shelters in their basements. There were those big army kaky-colored barrels of food stuffs in the basements of the schools where we were all supposed to run and hide if a nuclear bomb were to land on us. We practiced what we needed to do to protect ourselves in the event we didn't have time to get down to the basement fallout shelter. We actually practiced tipping our desks over and hiding under them. The word "irrational" doesn't begin to describe what passed as government intelligence back then.
If we were lucky enough to make it to the shelters in time, we were instructed to stay in there until we got the "all clear" sirens when it was "safe" to come out...presumably after you had spent about 200 or so years eating salteen crackers, processed American "cheese" product and butter -- pounds of it until the outside no longer had radioactivity dripping from it.
Then there was the fact that 90% of all science fiction "B" pictures had radioactivity as the key cause of every giant mutant monster that Hollywood screen writers could conjure up. Also there was wall-to-wall "TEAM" coverage of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl, which just stoked the nuclear fire as it were.
None of this made for rational thinking about nuclear radiation in the public's collective mind -- and evidently that thinking has yet to hit its half-life. Which is why no nuclear plants have be put on line in years and the minute there is any talk about building one, it's like announcing that you want to put a day-care center in middle of a pedophilia psych ward.
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