Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Of MRIs and other things

This is my blog so this is as fair a place to rant as any. I’ve had 6 needles poked into me over the last 12 days. 3 of them were successful. And they have all bloomed into beautiful shades of purplish-redish-yellowish bruise-tasticness.

Yesterday, I had my first MRI. That was a strange experience. Nothing like being in a noisy tube for 20 minutes being told to “breath quietly” so as not to move my abdomen too much. So much for that deep yoga breathing. While I’m not claustrophobic, it’s slightly panic enducing to see the tube be about 4 inches from your nose. Thankfully, only ½ my head was in, so I got to peek at the edge of the tube, if I looked up a bit.

While laying there and trying to concentrate on relaxing and keeping still, my mind was completely in the moment. I looked at the few scratches on the GE MRI appliance, and wondered if they had happened during shipping. I wondered about the little green marks on it. I wondered about how warm the sides of the tube felt against my upper arms (which where touching it). I wondered if that innvoulentary leg spasm I just had would ruin the image. I tried to think of ways to reengineer these things to be less noisy – like adding inexpensive padding on the inside. When the room got quiet, I started to wonder about the little tweeting noises in my headphones. Did they pipe in quiet natural forest sounds to help people relax? I wondered what the contrast would feel like when the MD injected me with it. I’d heard it felt “warm”. I’ve also seen my mom get aggressive IV hydration before and be shivering because it was cold.  I wondered if it would be a simple injection or an IV. I wondered if he’d get a vein on the first try, or if he’d just use my hand. I wondered if I’d have a reaction to it. I wondered about the people who design these technological marvels…

But that was all covered in about 30 minutes.

For the next 10, I was someplace else, listening to the squeaks, whirs, clicks and thuds of the imaging machine surrounding me. My brain tried to make words out of the odd noises. For a while, it sounded like it was saying, “Ow! Ow! Ow!” in sympathy pains, with each click, whir, and thud. Then it was saying something with a P that I couldn’t quite make out… In the end, the machine had nothing intelligible to say.

I wondered if I’d be able to actually LOOK at the images that were being taken. I wanted to see what they looked like.

I thought about all the times Randy Pausch must have gone through these kinds of things – and was suddenly grateful for life in general.

I should get all my test results in less than 24 hours from the time I post this. That waiting time will be filled with work, rehearsal, and best of all, sleep. So we’ll see what happens.


1 comment:

  1. posting, posting... :-)

    Hope you had a fun day at Disneyland!

    ReplyDelete