Posted on 05/14/2012 7:14:13 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
Man pulled over for being radioactive
Last Wednesday, Mike Apatow was getting on to Interstate 84 in Newtown, CT, when police stopped him for no reason he could determine. When the cop told him that his car had set off his radioactivity detectors, it started making sense: Apatow was most certainly radioactive.
Earlier in the day, Apatow had had a bit of radioactive material injected into his veins. He wasn't trying to turn himself into a superhero—just trying to keep himself alive. The off-duty firefighter had gone to a cardiology office to have a cardiac stress test, which tracks the function of the heart by tracking radioactivity as it moves through the circulatory system. Apatow had come to the office after feeling ill earlier and finding that his blood pressure had gone up way above where it was usually. Whatever caused the blip went away quickly, and Apatow went back to work, as recounted at ctpost.com.
Cardiologists say this kind of issue is more common than you might think, and often warn their stress-test patients that they may run into some unwanted attention in places like airports. Apatow's doctor had in fact given him a document explaining the situation just in case he got ran into any suspicion of nuclear monkey business. So in the end, he emerged from both the stress test and the police stop without missing a beat.
“The life of a repo man is always intense!’’.
Meh, just another old beeber stuning incident as far as I can tell.
Paul Rodgers ping. Was that off Outrider? I have it somewhere, but don’t recall.
actually, the first reports of this happened shortly after 911, when those who got radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid cancer were searched in NYCity...one doc wrote a medical journal about this, and then we started hearing about those who got SPECT SCANS and other scans that used larger doses of radiactive isotopes setting off alarms.
most docs now just give them a letter to carry, just in case.
actually, the first reports of this happened shortly after 911, when those who got radioactive iodine treatment for thyroid cancer were searched in NYCity...one doc wrote a medical journal about this, and then we started hearing about those who got SPECT SCANS and other scans that used larger doses of radiactive isotopes setting off alarms.
most docs now just give them a letter to carry, just in case.
I did some work near a place where they were testing the sensors years ago. I had a vague idea of what was going one, but not really.
This guy kept getting into his car (his personal beater) and driving it through the gate. Then he’d go back into the little building, come out and do it again. I got a glimpse as I was closer and he had a Dixie cup in his hand as he went to his car.
When he returned I was at a spot where I could ask him what he was doing. “Oh - just testing the response as we go lower and lower in the radiation dose”. He was wearing his street clothes with the Dixie cup in the car’s cup holder.
I was impressed!
“The bad guys now know that to transport bad stuff will need a lot of radiation shielding.”
The bad guys can guess that the CT cops can’t screen out medical isotopes (patients) from threats. In other words, no gamma spectrometer, and they come in very small packages these days.
They also learned that a piece of paper with the right words will get them by a traffic stop, as long as rad levels are what you’d expect from a patient.
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