DMSA

Today I had my DMSA kidney scan, which was such a simple test there's actually hardly anything to say.  DMSA stands for dimercaptosuccinic acid, which is the name of the dye they use to make the kidneys show up on camera.  The dye was injected into my arm, not even via a cannula, which only took five minutes.  After that I was allowed to leave the hospital for 3 hours, then return to the nuclear medicine department for the pictures to be taken.

This involved lying on my back while a gamma camera took pictures to determine the structure and location of my kidneys.   The gamma camera is a very fancy machine which looks like this:

It rotates around to take pictures from both the front and back, which takes around 20 minutes.  Then I had to wait a few more minutes for the radiographer to confirm that the pictures were clear enough, and that was it!  Pretty straightforward.  Fingers crossed everything looks good - not sure when I will hear back but imagine in the next couple of weeks.