MRI- Hated it!

Oh my, was that an awful experience. I don't know how all the people out there (with cancer in particular) who have to get these routinely do it. Give me the 10 hours of intestinal distress from a quickie CT scan or the not quite as bad intestinal distress (1 bottle of barium instead of two) and 45 minutes in the PET/CT machine over the half hour to 45 minutes of the MRI any day. I felt like I was in some bizarre performance art piece where I was laying in a very tight coffin (with a light bulb and no air and it was hot) while someone jackhammered and banged on various metal objects right up against my ear. And like many performance art pieces, it went on and on and on. Oh boy. Afterwards I drove back to my neighborhood and went to the Post Office, one of my least favorite places on earth (this is one of those post offices with the bullet proof glass, never more than one person working the windows, always a line out the door and every person in front of me has at least 10 money orders, which take forever, while I am stuck there waiting because I need to pick up my packages- although the PO employee told me today that I could call for redelivery in the future if I wanted and that she would give me the phone number because she said it was really hard to find- isn't it on the orange slip they leave at your door?). So, being at the post office for 20-25 minutes was not as bad as the MRI because I could see and breathe and if I wanted to I could have walked right out of there, but it was downright exhausting piggybacked to the 2 hours I spent at the scan place ( they were running more than an hour late today).

So, never again if I can help it. Or if I have to do it again I may consider a sedative (now I understand why people do it) or at least earplugs underneath the headphones. It wasn't the actual being in a tight space so much, I kept my eyes closed pretty much the whole time, but the fact that I knew that I couldn't move my arms (or anything else for that matter) if I needed to and couldn't get out of there on my own. But even that wasn't as bad as that noise, good god it was like a John Cage torture chamber on full volume. She put headphones on me that initially had music but at the very beginning she talked to me over the speaker and the music shut off and never went back on. I'm not sure it would have helped though, and might have even made it worse.

Now I get to wait for the results of this and the CT from yesterday. My plan is to call on Monday to ask for the report and the cd of at least the CT scan (they said it would be ready by then) and then pick it up on Tuesday morning on the way to the gyn onc's office. A. and I can read it before we get to the drs. office and at least won't be sitting in the waiting room with anxiety levels through the roof while we wait to see the dr. It's the not knowing that is always the toughest part. Also I can bring it with me to the new rad onc appt. on Wed.

My back is killing me, I woke up at 3am in terrible pain, had to get up and eat a small bowl of cereal so I could take some ibuprofen and sat on the shiatsu chair for 15 minutes, then went back to bed and laid on the heating pad for another half hour or so before the pain stopped taking my breath away and subsided enough that I could fall back to sleep.. I am going to go take a bath with the airjets, take a muscle relaxant (which I've never taken so I don't know how well it will work, I was afraid to take it at 3am last night knowing I had to drive downtown and back for the scan today) and go to bed. I see the acupuncturist on Monday, which has been helping but it just doesn't last long enough.

I'll end this post with some photos I took in our backyard this morning before leaving for my scan.