*Good News Update: There is nothing in my brain except brain!*
I didn't really expect to have any tumors lurking about up in there, but you never know. Something I've noticed in myself is that now, whenever there's some little health glitch, some small thing that needs to be tested or checked on, I feel a little swell of concern, a touch of panic that I have to quell. I never felt this way in the past, and I've had my fair share of weird crap going on in my body -- but I always just assumed that whatever it was was "nothing," and didn't worry about the tests. Now, however, that I know that "nothing" can sometimes be "something really huge and awful," I get a little bit more concerned over those little things that crop up. Interesting.
So, this week, I went back to Raleigh once again, and had a MRI of my brain. It was done at 9pm (which is a bit weird in itself), and Mom and I had to go out to the "Satellite MRI Facility" near the children's hospital. Now, when I read "Satellite MRI Facility," I just figured it was an outlying clinic or hospital where they did testing. What I was NOT expecting was the trailer park/summer camp/truck stop that greeted us as we pulled up. There were rows of white trailers behind a picket fence, connected by wooden ramps and covered by an aluminum-siding roof. It looked like somewhere one might go to get a flu shot...in Zimbabwe. NOT where one might go to get an MRI OF ONE'S BRAIN. Each trailer served a different purpose -- one for registration, one for seeing the nurses and getting the IV put in, and a couple of actual honest-to-God MRI machines in other trailers. So you had to run along the deck outside to get from one location to another. And you did actually RUN, because it was about TWENTY DEGREES OUTSIDE. This technician came in, wrapped me in a hot blanket, and hustled me out the door and along the deck to the MRI room, joking about the long underwear she had to wear when she worked the night shift. Ha. Ha.
At any rate, I had the MRI (and convinced the technician to let me look at the nifty images of my curly brain stuff, vertebrae, spinal cord, and esophagus) and all was well.
I didn't really expect to have any tumors lurking about up in there, but you never know. Something I've noticed in myself is that now, whenever there's some little health glitch, some small thing that needs to be tested or checked on, I feel a little swell of concern, a touch of panic that I have to quell. I never felt this way in the past, and I've had my fair share of weird crap going on in my body -- but I always just assumed that whatever it was was "nothing," and didn't worry about the tests. Now, however, that I know that "nothing" can sometimes be "something really huge and awful," I get a little bit more concerned over those little things that crop up. Interesting.
So, this week, I went back to Raleigh once again, and had a MRI of my brain. It was done at 9pm (which is a bit weird in itself), and Mom and I had to go out to the "Satellite MRI Facility" near the children's hospital. Now, when I read "Satellite MRI Facility," I just figured it was an outlying clinic or hospital where they did testing. What I was NOT expecting was the trailer park/summer camp/truck stop that greeted us as we pulled up. There were rows of white trailers behind a picket fence, connected by wooden ramps and covered by an aluminum-siding roof. It looked like somewhere one might go to get a flu shot...in Zimbabwe. NOT where one might go to get an MRI OF ONE'S BRAIN. Each trailer served a different purpose -- one for registration, one for seeing the nurses and getting the IV put in, and a couple of actual honest-to-God MRI machines in other trailers. So you had to run along the deck outside to get from one location to another. And you did actually RUN, because it was about TWENTY DEGREES OUTSIDE. This technician came in, wrapped me in a hot blanket, and hustled me out the door and along the deck to the MRI room, joking about the long underwear she had to wear when she worked the night shift. Ha. Ha.
At any rate, I had the MRI (and convinced the technician to let me look at the nifty images of my curly brain stuff, vertebrae, spinal cord, and esophagus) and all was well.