I Was Not Warned

Moving away from art and history today, I want to deliver a public service announcement to all who read this blog. MRIs are terrifying. First, they ask you six thousand times if you have any metal in your body (are you a veteran who might have encountered shrapnel? Are you a construction worker who grinds metal on the job? Do I seem like either of those things (the obvious answer here is no, for the record). They they take you into a room (series of rooms) with every imaginable warning label on the door (at this point, I was starting to wonder what I had gotten myself into). The nurse asked if I had ever had an MRI before. Nope, definitely not. Having admitted I was a newbie to the whole magnetic scanning thing, I was sort of hoping for some instructions, or warning or that sort of thing. Nope, not so much as a by-your-leave. (That happens to be one of my favorite old phrases.) Anyways, so for all the the future peoplw ho will note be warned about MRIs, I am here for you.

After they get you into the room with the giant machine (picture below), they ask you some more if you have any metal anywhere in your body (Plates in your head? Artificial joints?) then they hand you some earplugs (you will really, really need these), and lay you down on a table, which slides into the machine tube. I should note that at this point, the machine is already making a constant beeping noise. here's the Machine of Death/Magnetic Imaging:

So, once inside the really small machine tube (I am not a large person and I felt really squished in there...what do...larger...people do? How can they fit? They asked me beforehand if I was claustrophobic and now I realized why. You are stuck inside this noisy tube and you're not allowed to move at all. Once the test started, the sound level went from "annoying beep" to "outright mechanical roar". According to some very reliable sources (Wikipedia), MRI machines can produce up to 120 dB(a), which is the noise equivalent of a jet engine. Except this jet engine was right next to my head, doing God knows what (well, I know it was scanning me, but I of course have no real idea how these machines work). About five minutes into the test, I realized that I do, in fact, have metal in my body (a little bar behind my bottom teeth from having braces as a kid). With this realization, and the umpteen questions I had been asked about metal, I immediately went into Panic Mode. I probably don't have to mention that Panic Mode is not a good thing when you are confined into a small tube and not allowed to move. On one hand, I didn't want my panic breathing to mess up the scan/test, but on the other head, I really didn't want my head to explode.

Now, while I'm busying myself panicking about whether or not my head was going to explode or my teeth were going to be ripped out of my head by ultra-strong magnets, the machine changed noises. It did this every five minutes or so. One minute it going "ZwahZwahZwah", and the next minute its changed tones. All of the noises the machine made were alarming. This one was particularly crazed. So all of a sudden the machine starts making this insane nuclear meltdown warning klaxon siren sound. I can't move, I can't see anything, I have no idea if this is a perfectly normal noise, and I can't just ask the nurse. Where did the nurse go? Was she watching? Had she left for a bathroom break? If this noise was bad, and she had left me by myself, was my head going to explode? Why was I not warned in any way? A little, "don't be alarmed by the noises" would have been nice. or even, "it's loud in there, just so you know, that's normal." I'm not asking for much, just some sort of warning so I know that I'm not about to die inside this gigantic machine.

So now you know. You have been warned by me, if no one else. For the record, my head did not explode and I'm pretty sure that I'm not dead (who knows, maybe I'll suddenly fall down at 5pm). Well, I'll keep you updated, or if I don't just figure that if there's a blog post tomorrow, I'm fine.