...more familiar territory...

i did it! this MRI adventure is now a thing of the past. and from this side looking back on it, i'm doing just fine. the folks at shadyside hospital imaging were friendly, courteous, and pretty damn quick. and the best thing they did was to actually install an IV in my arm.

see, in my MRI experience, the docs always order the scans with and without gadolinium contrast, which gets administered about 3/4s of the way through the scan, and apparently makes things light up in the brain. in every other MRI, the contrast injection has been given through a needle and syringe, which means they have to pull me out of the MRI so that they can shoot me in the arm. well, this time they hooked up the IV works and attached me to a long tube full of saline so that i wouldn't have to move at all when it was time to administer the contrast.

there was a time, friends, when having an IV installed in my arm happened with some frequency. i think they're kind of amazing. you find a good vein, put in a hollow needle, slide the little IV plastic tube in through the hollow needle, then pull the needle away and voila! a little portal into your circulatory system! you hook some plastic tubing into the works that go into your body, and then, to make sure all is working properly, you let the tube fill up with blood (to get all the air out) and then flush it through with a syringe full of saline. weirdest thing ever? when the saline flush goes into your blood, you can actually taste the saline! totally bizarre. i had forgotten about that.

aside: for a fun read about the time i was put in charge of administering my own IV steroids, check here and here.

the MRI itself was fine. i only felt freaked out at first, but i might have perhaps maybe sorta taken an ativan about half an hour before the whole thing started to try to stave off the kinda annoying feeling of being buried alive that MRIs can invoke. but that turned out to have been a good idea, even if it meant that i was all loopy and simulating the noises that the MRI makes while i was on the phone with a certain someone afterwards. but it's over now and i feel a little relieved. my part is done. i've done what i needed to do. now i'll just wait to hear the results. and at that point i'll decide what needs to happen next.

and then i decided to reward myself, so on my way home i stopped by the evil whole foods to get some dinner and some ice cream. what did i get for dinner, you ask? i got a giant salad consisting of the following: mixed greens and spinach, bell peppers, tomatoes, celery, peas, corn, chickpeas, sunflower seeds, raisins, and vinaigrette dressing. best. salad. ever.