MRI

The procedure took longer (I was there a total of 3 hours) than I expected but most of that time was spent waiting to get into the room. They had to access my port and the nurse who does that had a ferry to catch so they brought me back early and I spent better than a 1/2 hour waiting for my turn.

Once I got in there they set me up with ear plugs. A cage (not form fittng like the radiation mask) goes over your head and they stuffed additional foam padding in around the side of my face both to keep my head still and to provide additional sound deadening. And it's a good thing they did. That machine is NOISY! I've since read the decibels it puts out are similar to a jet taking off.

The biggest surprise to me was that instead of just putting my head in the machine like I expected, they slid me in up to my waist. It was a tight fit which was a little claustrophobic. They have a mirror attached to the head piece so you can look out through the foot area, and they have a good cooling breeze running through there which I found very helpful. And I had thought ahead and had taken an ativan. But it was still unpleasant. They took 5 separate scans. The first was only a minute, but the others were between 5 and 8 minutes. After the third, they pulled me out, injected some contrast solution and sent me back in. I found the best thing to do was to keep my eyes closed. There was nothing to look at anyway and looking at how close the wals of the tube have you closed in could get a little freaky if you stop to think about it too much. After a while, I could have almost drifted off, but the noise is crazy and the machine thumps and vibrates and changes tones, etc, so it keeps you on edge.

Oh well, at least that's over. I woder if they wait until May for the Cyberknife if they would do it again.