Fantastic Voyage

Shade prepping for angiogram

I’m old enough to remember The Fantastic Voyage. Not in the theater. (It’s possible I heard the audio track as a simmering fetus in the womb.) I saw it on TV sometime in the early 70s, and I was blown away by what the future held. Sexy secret agent Raquel Welch, with her retinue of doctors and assistants, would shrink to a millimeter and drive her submarine through the bloodstream of a sick man, right up to the brain to remove a blood clot. What a fantastically ridiculous piece of fiction!

So, last week Shade went to the hospital for an angiogram. This is a process in which a retinue of doctors and assistants drive what amounts to a submarine camera through his bloodstream, right up to the brain to check out where his AVM took place. This was a real process! It differed from the sci-fi in that none of the surgery participants looked like Raquel Welch. I’m pretty sure none of them were secret agents, either. Also, thank goodness, there were no saboteurs as in the original, so the procedure went smoothly.

What I want to know is how do they know when to turn left or right? Are they using Google maps? Are there landmarks? Is there a backseat driver saying, “Okay, like in thirty seconds you need to take the exit ramp off the femoral artery and then merge into hemo-traffic at the next … Watch out for that platelet!”

The purpose was to find out what was left of the AVM since the gamma knife surgery back in December 2011. (A gamma knife sounds like it could have been in The Fantastic Voyage.) Preliminary results are mixed. 95% of the AVM was destroyed by the gamma knife. That’s great. But there’s still 5% of the veiny knot that’s being fed blood. The doctor who performed the angiogram didn’t give any definite indication that this was dangerous or not. (Doctors seem to prefer vagaries when making predictions.) But he did say that there might possibly be, maybe, perhaps a slight danger because, well, it’s there.

We won’t know the full word until the results of the procedure are analyzed by the doctors. Then we will have to consult Dr. Trumble to see if he might need another gamma knife procedure. Maybe Dr. Trumble says there’s not enough risk to warrant it. Maybe he says that Shade has already received his full dosage of radiation from the last gamma knife and more would turn him into a raging green beast. (You know, the Hulk effect.) Or maybe they decide to perform this brand new procedure. It involves a sexy secret agent, with her retinue of doctors and assistants, who will shrink to a millimeter and drive her submarine through Shade’s bloodstream to destroy the 5% leftover.

I’m hoping for the third option.