First, as part of our departments yearly physical I had to take a treadmill ekg stress test.
The test went fine but then the doctor informed me that there were some changes in my ekg during the test. He said that at the level I was running at there is a great tendency to get false positives so he wasn't too concerned. However, the follow up included running the test again, this time with an I.V. in my hand and an irradiated, myocardial specific, imaging agent injected into me while I ran. This was followed by fifteen minutes of laying under an imaging machine while it took pictures of my heart to examine the blood flow and make sure I had no blockages. The technician looked at the results and said, "Wow, you're zeroes across the board. All good. You don't have to come back." So, it's good to know that my heart is perfectly healthy, I just wish I didn't have to waste an entire day off being subjected to tests and substances that really shouldn't be in my body.
I went to work the next morning and we were sent to another district to do some make up training on search and rescue that my firefighter had missed. The captain and I had done it already but there was no one to swap out with the firefighter so, we all had to go.
When we arrived at the drill site we were informed that one part of the training, the SCBA confidence course, was to be left out because they weren't allowed to train in the building we had used before. OK. Turns out this was due to a probable asbestos issue. Of course, I had already done this drill once - in that building. Wonderful.
Next we moved on to the classroom portion and later we were taken out to a burn room for some hands on practice. As we stood in the burned out metal building discussing the search techniques we were to use that day we kept hearing a beeping noise. My crew had recently been issued a new kind of mask with a special communications system and we thought one had been left on. It was turned off and we continued. The beeping also continued. We traced the sound to a guy on the other crew who was wearing a personal radiation monitor. Our resident hazmat tech looked at it and decided that the unit had a battery problem and disconnected it. Problem solved. We went about the training and were ready to swap stations with the next group who had just arrived. As we were gathering our gear to move out someone on the new crew's radiation alarm went off. Great. OK, now something was definitely going on. This was no battery problem, there was radiation here somewhere.
My crew moved downstairs and left the other crew upstairs at the burned out metal building. When we got to the bottom of the stairs, however, I stopped. "Hold on", I said. I called up the stairs and asked the firefighter if his alarm was still going off. He said no. I told my crew to wait there for a minute and went back upstairs. And just as I thought might happen, when I got within about ten feet of the guy, his alarm started to sound.
It was me!
The radiation they injected me with the day before was setting off everyone's alarms. Now, I had read up on the substance they put in me after the test and it is harmless, akin to normal background radiation levels just a little concentrated. It stays in the system about 24 hours. I wasn't really worried about it. For the rest of the day, though, I kept laughing because every time I walked by someone their alarms would start chirping.
I later heard a story of a crew who had a similar experience. One of the firefighters had had the same test the day before and set off the alarms when he got to work. The firefighter and engineer knew right away what was going on but didn't tell their captain. They made sure the firefighter stuck right by the captain and when the captain's alarm would go off they convinced him that he must be irradiated. They went so far as to tell him he needed to be shielded to protect the rest of the crew and they wrapped him up in a wildland fire shelter, basically a tinfoil sleeping bag. I'm not sure how long they let him stew in that bag, but I heard there are pictures. I just bet there are.
You're making me angry.....
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