MR HEAD

I returned from my first MRI. Was a little worried about claustrophobia in the machine for 30 minutes, but my three strategies worked pretty well.

 

1)    Listen to the sounds like a modern piece of music. I was hearing woodblocks, baritone saxophone and high trumpets, though I have to say the rhythms weren’t exactly grooving. 

2)    Keep my eyes closed and pretend I was in the dentist chair (where I usually close my eyes.)

3)    Attend to my breath, do some silent Buddhist chanting, see if I had Bach’s opening to Cello Suite No. 1 sufficiently memorized. 

 

I was quite surprised and happy when I got the 2-minute warning and after, the attendant thought it took more like 20 minutes because I kept completely still and they never had to re-do anything. So I passed Step 1 of potential anxiety about finding out what’s causing my episodes of intense vertigo (one in July in Ghana, one in Australia in January and one in SF last week). But Step 2 is the much more important one—the results. 

 

Which I just got a mere two hours later, announced by an e-mail and showing up in my online Kaiser page as MR HEAD. I thought it was a bit cartoonish to call such important results “Mr. Head” and then realized the MR was for Magnetic Resonance (the I for Imaging). The good news seems to be that Mr. Head is okay. At the top of the page it said in language I can mostly understand:

 

• No acute intercranial abnormality.

• Normal MRA head.

• Normal MRA neck.

 

Not sure what the A stands for, but I like the sound of normal head and neck and no abnormality. So of course I’m relieved that no cancer or brain tumor was detected. I’ll take it. The rest of the details mostly began with “no ______ detected” and also felt like good news. 

 

But there’s still Step 3. How do I find out what’s actually happening to cause these episodes? Between a brain tumor and dealing with lightheadeness and slight dizziness with occasional one-hour more severe episodes, I’ll take the latter. But something clearly abnormal is going on and I would sure like to know its name and how to deal with it. 

 

I imagine the doctor will call me and perhaps refer me to a neurologist. We’ll see. And had it been more severe, I wonder whether I would have read it online or someone would have called immediately. Not the time to complain about impersonal doctoring, as I’m grateful someone (I’m sure many people) invented something as extraordinarally complex as an MRI machine to figure out what might be happening in the yet more extraordinarally complex human brain. But in the midst of my confusion, a little TLC should accompany the MRI to make sure I don’t enter PTSD and need some LSD healing.

 

LOL!

 

Yours truly,

 

Mr. Head