And it kind of sucked. It was creepy and confining and SO INCREDIBLY LOUD. Like, loudness in a way I was not even prepared for. My ears were ringing when we left last night, like I’d been sitting next to a speaker at a concert or something! I had earplugs in, thank God, or I’d probably be suffering some sort of permanent hearing loss now, I’m thinking. This is what the machine looks like:

And this is what the thing looked like that they snapped my head into:

And then they slid me inside that machine up to my feet. It was like being in a cannon or something. I couldn’t move anything except my feet. I mean, you’re supposed to lie perfectly still, but I couldn’t have moved anything. It was like shoving a Barbie into a paper towel tube and then screaming into one end of it for 30 minutes.

It made all kinds of crazy, ridiculous noises - I kept almost thinking I was going to crack up laughing, because it just seemed so insane! I was like, really? Seriously? A whole NEW set of noises now? What is that, a truck horn? Oh, now a jack hammer? At one point, I was seriously thinking the fire alarm was going off in the building and they were going to yank me out of that thing so we could run for our lives. But, nope! That’s just what it sounds like. Like you’re sitting on the front bumper of a semi while it’s honking it’s horn repeatedly, and someone next to you is firing a machine gun.

I found this page online that has recordings of an MRI machine. It was surprisingly hard to find any other recordings anywhere, I guess because the magnet is so strong, you can’t have any metal in the room at all. So, probably no tape recorder. I saw lots of YouTube clips of chairs and mop buckets and shit that flew into MRI machines, though!

Click here and listen to those sounds, so you know I’m not exaggerating.

The guy told me it’d be about 5 days before someone read the scan. Of course. I’m so glad it’s over!

The tech guy told me something interesting, though. I asked him if he sees a lot of brain cysts. He said, “Arachnoid cysts?” I said I wasn’t sure what it was. He said, “My wife has one.” I said that seemed like a weird coincidence, for the wife of an MRI tech to have a brain cyst! He said a lot of people have them. I asked if it was a big deal and he nodded, but then said, “They just keep checking on it to make sure it doesn’t get bigger.” And then we were done talking because it was time for me to get packed into my little MRI coffin so the machine could scream in my ear for awhile.

I sure hope I hear something soon. Stupid Kaiser.

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