I spent over an hour of my morning yesterday in an MRI machine. I am no stranger to lying in a cigar tube while invisible, high powered magnets whirl about me making loud, strange noises, but this is the first time I have ever been in one for so long. Twice before I have been subjected to this torture so that my doctor could muse over backlit images of my cervical spine. However, now my thoracic and lumbar spine have decided to join the rebellion started by my cervical spine, and so I found myself in the machine easily twice as long while we try to take reconnaissance photographs of their locations, and spy on whatever evil that may be going on there.
I don’t have a problem with claustrophobia, so it isn’t being in a confined space that I find uncomfortable during an MRI. What does bother me is that I have a metal plate in my neck, and although logic tells me there is no way this titanium plate will respond to the intense magnetism of the MRI machine, I just can’t help but worry that it could evacuate my body at high speed before I could even grip the emergency ball they placed in my hot little hand with only the most perfunctory of instructions in it’s usage as I am being into the machine.
However, after I realized, (again,) that my titanium plate would stay put, and I would be released mostly unharmed, I actually found myself somewhat relaxed while the MRI magically produced pictures of my insides. I even dozed off, and dreamt of being in a 1950’s science fiction movie with the most fantastic special sound effects I had ever heard.
Then I awoke to a disembodied voice letting me know that the dream was over, as was my ride in the magnetic dream machine. It hurt like hell to raise myself from the hard surface of the "bed" I was on, because I had been on it so long. You’d think that it would be a bit more comfortable so that people with nasty spinal problems such as myself would have an easier time of it.
But I guess technology just hasn't progressed that far.
Posted by Jeff at June 23, 2005 3:12 PM