My First MRI

source :  brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu

My knee injury from three years ago came back to haunt me again. This time beside patellar tendonitis, my new doctor suspected a tear in the meniscus. To support the finding she suggested MRI. I totally jumped on that offer. All this time I only had x-ray done and to my knowledge those x-ray didn't really give a lot of information on any soft tissue injury.

But my doctor raised the question : are you claustrophobic ? Hm..I never thought that I do but who knows right ? So I went in the MRI room with a rather big anxiety. The technician was friendly and trying to make it sounded pretty easy. But my anxiety grew bigger when I found out that it would take 25 minutes instead of 15 minutes my doctor told me.



The machine looked exactly just like in the movie or whatever that I have seen on TV. It's a huge machine with a tunnel-like thing in the middle and a bed-like area that could slide in and out. I laid down and had my injured leg propped higher then the technician covered me up with a blanket. Aaahh that was nice and a lot warmer now. He handed me two ear plugs and told me that it's going to be very loud. What ??!! Nobody told me that before. Then he gave me a squeezer which he said anytime I needed to talk to him I could squeeze that. Huh ?? Why would I ? I asked him anyway if anybody ever got freaked out and needed to stop halfway. He said yeah because the person was already nervous to begin with. Hmm..this information didn't help.

As soon as the technician left the room and closed the door behind him I decided that I would close my eyes and maybe if I fell asleep then I won't feel any claustrophobia in that tunnel (if I had any). I felt my 'bed' sliding towards the tunnel and then stopped. I took a peek to see but since the one getting MRI was my leg I didn't have to have the whole body in the tunnel. Yay !

Then the loud noise started. It sounded like drums... dum..dum..for quite a while and in between it would switch to different resonance. Sometimes it did sound like in a gaming room and everybody were playing Space Invader. At some points it stopped and I thought it was over but NOPE..it started again.

After like ten minutes, I heard faintly the technician voice. And I was like huh ?? Why ? Then the guy came back in the room and told me that I moved. Maybe due to the vibration of the bed. So he put a few more styrofoam on my propped leg and tugged it tighter. Earlier I was told that I should lay still. Any movement would cause blur to the image.

Needless to say. After that guy came in to adjust my position I became more anxious. I tried so hard to not even moved a tiny bit. I felt so tense that by the end of the session I thought I would have cramp all over my body. It was such a relieve when he finally came back in the room and told me it's over. OMG. I told him that was the longest 25 minutes of my life.