A busy morning - every second Tuesday paediatric scans are carried out, with families travelling from all over the country. The majority of scans today were brain scans for frontal lobe epilepsy and a EEG was carried out first. I can't begin to tell you the pandemonium caused. Each child is accompanied by one or both parents naturally, a paediatric nurse, a EEG technician, an anaesthetist, a staff nurse and a recovery nurse. The children need to be given a general anaethestic for the scan and then recovered in the scan room afterwards. The department is not particularly child friendly, the staff are lovely but it is very clinical - we couldn't find the toys this morning, although the staff were sure we had some. This is one of the few centres which scan children and I believe they want to become a paediatric centre of excellence - so it would be interesting to see how they develop this.

I also saw a 19yr old scanned for treatment response for Hodgkins Disease today and the difference between the progression of HD and NHL was very obvious. HD starts as a unifocal disease in one node and spreads in an orderly fashion to the next - on this particular scan you could see the disease like a necklace of beads running bilaterally down the neck into the mediastinum

There wasn’t time to review individual cases after scans today as the paed cases made us play catch up for the rest of the day. One does have to be careful not to be gratuitously interested in spotting pathology and remember the patients who have so much riding on the outcome of the scan.