As I walked into the hospital for my MRI, my stress levels were hitting new heights. I was going to be jammed into a machine that would invasively scan my knee and discover that it now had the same basic structural integrity as a bowl of chocolate pudding! Never mind that I was moving around pretty well and feeling better each and every day. My brain had no room for cold, hard facts such as that, especially when there was stressing out to do!
Once I was situated in the waiting room, I had to fill out a form that asked all kinds of scary metal-related questions, such as if I had any pins, rods, or screws floating around in my body from surgery, if I had any artificial joints, or even if I listened to heavy metal music on the radio. I quickly got the vibe that MRI machines and metal don’t mix, to the point where said machine might explode dramatically if I left even a single stray coin in my pants. This was pretty stressful and distracting, to the point where as I filled out the form, I couldn’t even remember if I had a pacemaker or not. (My answer: “Mayyyybbbeeeeee???”)
Eventually, after I’d signed my life away, I was called from the waiting room and made to deposit all my valuables into a locker. I assumed this was because it would then be much easier for them to wipe my identity from the face of the earth if the procedure were to go awry and the machine reduced me into a steaming pile of goo. I was then brought over to the MRI machine itself, which is basically a gigantic tube that the technician jams you into, laughing maniacally the entire time. Just kidding, they don’t laugh at all. Instead, they simply ask you to lie down, then pile a bunch of weights onto you, making sure there’s no chance of you ever escaping. When you’re fully immobile, they then suck you into the machine and quickly sprint behind a wall roughly 10 feet thick, for the purpose of protecting themselves from the mysterious rays the giant tube is about to bombard your body with.
Lucky for me, since they were scanning just my knee, I didn’t have to go all the way into the Tube of Horrors and deal with claustrophobia. Instead, I was only sucked in to about my waist. They had also given me headphones, so I could listen to music while the machine growled, grunted, and basically sounded as if somebody was running a load of rocks through a dryer. One of the questions on the form I had filled out was what kind of music I wanted to listen to, and I had confidently answered “country.” As I was strapped in, however, I realized that I may have made a terrible mistake. Maybe it would be a bunch of modern weenie-pop country, which I hate! Maybe I’d spend a half hour listening to Thomas Rhett and Sam Hunt, at which point turning into a steaming pile of goo might be a reasonable alternative.
As it turns out, the process went pretty well. The machine was definitely loud, basically drowning out the music from my headphones. Still, I did manage to pick out some Chris Stapleton and Darius Rucker, so it was by no means torture. (There was one Luke Bryan song that came on, and it was touch and go there for a while, but I managed to persevere.) As the machine grunted and groaned, I imagined the mysterious MRI rays shooting deep into my knee, to the point where I honestly could have sworn I felt it tingling and getting hot, which then made me picture a Hot Pocket being left too long in the microwave and exploding. (Sorry for the imagery, but that’s honestly what was on my mind!)
After about 25 minutes on clunking and banging, the machine finally went silent and I was unceremoniously spit out. The technician ambled casually out of his bunker and removed the hundreds of pounds of weights covering my body, leaving me free to go. I was disappointed to learn I wouldn’t be able to see any of the results that day, and instead would have to wait until my follow-up appointment at the orthopedics clinic in about a week, which would be more than enough time to raise my stress levels to even greater heights. But that’s another story.
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