So I just had my first, and hopefully my last MRI. Due to a severe migraine storm, and the constant sound of my own pulse in my ears, combined with five years of fatigue, the docs thought they’d have a look inside my head. So they sent me off to have a Magnetic Resonance Image. I’d never had one before, so I thought, “hey, this will be interesting”.

I was prepared to be put in a small space in a large machine, but I was underestimating things a bit. The machine was the size of a room, and the space was a tiny tube i could barely squeeze into. I was shoved in with instructions not too move, and given headphones that didn’t fit my ear very well. They were suppose to pipe in music from a cd I brought and to filter out the loud noise of The Machine - they did neither. And the sound that The Machine made. It wasn’t just loud, it was scary. Every horrible siren and alien sound you’ve heard, combined with loud tappings. And it wasn’t constant - that would have been alright. It would go for a while, and then a different noise would come in, both different in timbre, rythme and velocity.

I tried to go my happy places - memories of Jaime and I cuddling in bed on a lazy sunday morning, or floating in the salt water pool on a holiday in Queensland. I even tried the old “Hail Mary”s. Anything to stop the impulse my brain was throwing at me to scream my head off and worm my way out The Machine. I finally took solice in that fact that I might of been uncomfortable in a squishy, very loud place but I wasn’t really in pain. After what seemed like ages, the techie slid me out of the machine. Finally, I thought, its over. Then he leans over to me and says “The doctor is just going to come down and inject you with a contrast agent”. And sure enough a doctor comes down and injected me with some rare isotope and they shoved me back into the machine for another aoen in The Machine (I was smart this time - I shoved my earphones as far into my ears as possible so that I could just drown out The Machine enough to hear a small amount of the Vivaldi Cello Sonatas).

Eventually it ended. I now have a bunch of photos of the inside of my head - Weird, Weird, Weird. I now get to play the waiting game. Waiting to see the doctor again in a week to find out if the inside of my head is supposed to look like it does.