MRI

January 6 2007

MRI image

The next step was an MRI on saturday. luckily colin could be there for this. i was tired of feeling small, alone and helpless. pretending to be brave when your heart is shivering with fear is exhausting. What we as humans often find the most terrifying is the strange and the unknown. i couldn't have found much more strange and unknown than weird brain tests in a taiwanese hospital for an ominous feeling mental condition.

looking at my MRI pictures, a friend once said to me, 'this is as real as the face you see in the mirror every day'. i find it all pretty amazing. i think it's pretty cool that i have pictures of 'inside my head' that i can share with others. looks just like the textbook drawings (or an alien).

MRI: first they have to insert a needle into your hand attached to a syringe filled with a contrast solution. this solution is injected at some point during the procedure to act as a contrast medium. it helps show your blood flow more clearly. the nurse who was doing this messed it up the first time, then she put the tourniquet around the same arm, so of course the wound she had made earlier started pumping blood. colin was completely useless :-), he felt faint and had to sit down at the sight of my red red blood flowing over the turquoise cushion. i felt strangely calm and detached. but not for long . . .

they put a hockey mask type thing over my head and pretty much padded me in, i couldn't move my head at all. then i got pushed into a narrow white tube. at this point i experienced the most intense claustrophobia i have ever felt. every nerve in my body wanted to kick and scream, 'LET ME OUT!'. i am not claustrophobic at all, but at that time i felt the most primeval, animal fear. this was wrong. perhaps this fear has survived inside humans since our ape days, it is one of our most basic self-preservation reactions at work. or, if you are not an evolutionist, then the experience could be likened to being pushed back up the birth canal. that's for all the feminists out there ;-) but as i am a civilised ape, my common-sense kicked in. i reminded myself that i had to do this. The biggest surprise is how loud an MRI is. i felt like i was in the nautilus, "20 000 leagues under the sea". listening to great knocking and fog horn sounds that seemed to move around me. i managed to find some of these sounds quite amusing and i think this helped me 'keep my cool'.

Then i had to wait until Monday for the results ...