When I woke up this morning, I felt nervous. After the nine million people in my life, both personal and medically professional, telling me it was a BIG HUGE DEAL to get my whole spine MRI-ed at once, and also my knowledge of my own claustrophobia creeping in, I was on edge. My heart was racing. This worked well for getting some stuff done at high speed (dishes and laundry for instance) but it did not bode well for my MRI experience.
"Self," I said. "Get a grip. On your bottle of Xanax." And I went into the kitchen and did so. And the Xanax helped a lot.
Now, I don't take a lot of Xanax. My prescription is for .5 mg tablets. For comparison, the vet prescribed 1 mg tablets for our cat. To be fair, the cat got totally wasted on 1 mg and we reduced his dose, but he weighed ten pounds at that point.. and I weigh considerably more. I am only a lightweight in the pharmaceutical department.
I got the prescription last year for two reasons: traveling (hello I hate flying) and dealing with NASA bureaucracy while trying to move our offices and datacenter out of the physical facilities and network they'd been in for 17 years. The latter was actually worse.
Anyway, out of something like 30 pills, I probably had 27 left. I think I had been taking them in halves. But I was feeling pretty revved up so I took a whole (WHOLE!) .5 mg and was on my merry way. I figured I'd be at the radiologist's office before it kicked in, and I was right. I was totally coherent and pleasant to the (very nice, capable, professional) front desk attendant. And I was totally coherent when talking to the MRI tech. And I was probably pretty coherent while the first MRI (out of three) was happening.
Somewhere around the second I started getting a little drifty.
I think I slept through most of the third one. I told her I was feeling sleepy, and she said I couldn't sleep if I were going to snore, because that could make my spine move. So I tried really hard to stay awake, but since that 45 minutes passed in 5 minutes, I'm thinking I missed some time. And occasionally I noticed the sounds of heavy breathing in that tube with me. The sounds stopped whenever I started paying attention though.
FYI? The new 3T MRI is REALLY LOUD. They gave me earplugs to wear, but it was still loud enough that I could feel it inside of me. And they didn't play me any soothing music, either, not that I would have been awake enough to appreciate it.
If you're claustrophobic? Definitely keep your eyes closed in the tube. I closed my eyes before I went in and pretty much kept them closed. I looked a couple of times but then I could feel my claustrophobia starting to overwhelm my Xanax so I chose to look at the insides of my eyelids instead.
Oh, and everybody who said it was a huge deal to be still for that long? You suck at being still. I *excel* at lying around being slack, and I didn't have a problem. I did do some yoga breathing but that was more due to the tiny, coffin-like space I was in than any issue with lying still.
After that I drove, slowly and carefully, to my office. Which fortunately was about two miles away. There I told my boss that my brain was basically offline for the day and not to expect much. And then I was dopey for the rest of the day.
I even felt too washed out to go to yoga. I came home. You know it's bad if I skip yoga.
Somewhere during the day I acquired a new Verizon iPhone 4, courtesy of JD. There was really nothing wrong with my old phone, but I wanted a smartphone that would work in more of the woods than my old AT&T iPhone. So, iPhone 4 it was. It took approximately forever to start working but now it does, and I think it will be a fine replacement providing it didn't take any damage when JD dropped it as soon as it came out of the package.
In addition to the actually getting signal part, I hope that the new battery will hold charge for longer. The phone is not sporting a sexy Buffy the Vampire Slayer skin like my old phone did. I'm pondering replacing it. Or maybe I'll just add some Hello Kitty Duck Tape (tm).
Oh, and I forgot the other huge benny of this phone! It has a camera on both sides. That means that those arms-length photos I take whenever I'm hiking alone? I will now be able to tell that my head is in the frame!
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