The following week on 03 November, I went for my MRI at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh. I was winning right from the word go because I got a parking space in seconds.
I've had MRIs before. When I was a lot younger, I signed up to a neurology experiment that paid a few quid, where I had my brain scanned for about an hour at a time over several sessions. About a decade ago I did my shoulder in and had an MRI on my back and neck. So I have become familiar with having my head and body inside a tightly spaced, incredibly loud, clanking, buzzing, donking, whooshing washing machine. I was braced to find it incredibly claustrophobic.
Instead, it was a bright, airy, mood-lit, enormous halo of a Krispy Kreme. Nothing even vaguely scary. The nurse balked a bit at my impressive biopsy bruising and caked on dried blood so she didn't pad me out too tightly, but I was very comfy. There was a comedy moment after the nurse had put in a cannula (to inject the 'contrast' or gadolinium dye, later into the MRI) when I pulled the scrunchy out of my hair to try to work out if it had metal in it. Hair, everywhere. And then I couldn't bennd both arms up to put the scrunchy back in. So we had to use the headphones to pin my hair out of the way once I got onto the machine's sliding bed.
Being an amateur musician, I play a lot of classical music. Once the thick ear plugs were in, and the headphones were on, I was deaf to everything. In fact I could barely hear the radiologist give me soothing instructions. Instead, I happily played spot that tune, hearing the faint sounds of the first movement of Rachmaninov's second symphony, a large chunk of Mozart 40, an orchestral version of the Titanic theme tune, and a song version of the Downton Abbey theme among other delights that gave me the giggles. Except I couldn't giggle because you have to lie still. The mood lighting was very soothing so I didn't really notice more than 30 mins of different banging, crashing, scrunching, whooshing, washing, buzzing, pneumatic drilling sound effects, nor the sensation when the contrast was injected near the end, I think. I really couldn't tell.
The radiologist announced they had got everything they wanted and, with the cannula out, I was off to lunch with a friend.
