How often has this happened to you?
“Ma’am, you were pulled over because you set off a nuclear radioactive alarm,” a man dressed in a blue jumpsuit-type uniform and a baseball cap said in a monotone.
Perhaps she’d picked up some unwanted cargo? Maybe her SUV had kicked up some dirt at Yucca Mountain? Nope! The radiation the Connecticut state troopers picked up was from… her:
Relieved to have completed a series of stress tests on her heart on Feb. 23, the woman was heading home, seatbelt on, and cruising at the 65 mph speed limit on I-91 north.
Inspectors in the SUV were on a routine assignment when the device started beeping and they homed in on the woman’s car.
The woman, who asked not to be identified, wasn’t angry about being stopped, nor particularly inconvenienced, but baffled as to how police detected radiation from a substance injected into her body hours earlier.
The pager-size devices are so new to Connecticut law enforcement that even state homeland security officials and top state police were at first perplexed by the woman’s story…
“I was pulled over because of something in my bloodstream,” she said. “There are [federal privacy laws], and I pretty much had to tell him I had a medical test. I was going to say, `none of your business why I’m radioactive.’ But that wouldn’t have gotten me that far.”
We remember hearing about thyroid patients stopped in NYC subways in the months after 9-11. It seems that radiation detection has finally seeped into the suburbs.
More from the Hartford Courant…
(hat tip: Thomas Brander)