It's never pleasant to be stuck in a tube. It kind of reminds me of when Tank Girl disobeys Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell's character) and he shoots her down a tube that's freezing and very, very tight. And tighter still.
I had my third MRI today in less than a year. March, May, November now. My boyfriend always asks me how I did after them.
The first time, I wore my contacts, and wasn't sure I could close my eyes without them sealing shut and red on my irises while they radiated me. I had an almost panic attack, looking at the blue line only inches from my face, my head strapped into a plastic brace.
In May, they added contrast to me, and the warming sensation made my heart jump. You feel like you peed yourself, it's so warm. And you can't tell if you did or not.
This time, my stomach resented the notion entirely. I went to the bathroom before I left work, and had to hurry back to the toilet once I arrived at the radiology location: only 15 minutes later.
Diagnosis Days
It's been a tough year. I decided that I needed a Primary Care Physician, and I got one. I decided I wanted to really see if I had a heart murmur. The cardiologist cleared me, luckily. I wanted to see if the migraines and sharp lightning bolt pains in the right side of my head were abnormal, so I went to a neurologist.
At first, they diagnosed me with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which a lot of people get from scar-causing, nightmare-inducing tragedy and disaster. Think war, 9-11, mass murder. Mine happened to be a car accident back in 2000. Only now, ten years later, am I losing my sense of smell, and partly taste, from invisible bruising on my frontal lobe, possibly caused my my concussion as well as damage caused when the windshield cut my head wide open, and caused swelling in my Central Nerve.
I also had petit mal epilepsy when I was a child, and the only way they treated that was with Phenobarbitol, a horse tranquilizer that I was on for about ten years. No wonder when I think back to my childhood, I don't remember much. That, and I appear to have lost some memory from the car accident of being young and carefree. There are some things I'd rather not remember. But that car accident taught me about mortality, and growed me up real quick.
Maybe that's why I don't like tubes, MRI machines, tunnels, claustrophobic spaces. True, I like my personal space, and a closed door in a room for privacy, but you put walls up against me, and I kind of freak out. When I was younger I had wires glued to my head every six months, until the CAT scans started. I remember being so tiny, that the tube felt so big, and I had a blanket and my stuffed animal and sat as still as a hunter waiting for its chance to leap. It felt like a little treehouse, a tent, a fort in there. I was so tiny, and it was so very big.
But now, not so much.
Ball of Light
Once my neurologist ordered my first MRI, we realized everything I went through for the car accident wasn't showing up. Everything was firing on the right channels. But what we did find, accidentally, was a small dot on my pituitary gland. It looked like a tiny little ball of light on a black palimpsest.
That May, the MRI confirmed it: a pituitary tumor. A lot of people go through life not knowing they have one. Autopsies show that about 10% of people, who die at a good older age, have a little guy hanging out there. But this discovery coincided with my adult onset acne and my periods getting much further apart, not to mention some emotional issues that kind of cropped up out of nowhere for no reason whatsoever.
A round of blood tests, and I'm finally diagnosed with elevated Prolactin levels due to the pituitary cyst. Prolactin is a hormone present in breastfeeding mothers. My body thinks I'm breastfeeding, hence the emotional issues, the acne, the periods being very far between. Normal women have a regular count of 2.8-29.2 ng/mL. I'm at 84... three times the normal levels.
Let's Make a Deal
I tell you... every time I'm in that tube, I think of one thing first: If there's a zombie apocalypse and they come to American Radiology, I'm fucked! My legs will be mighty tasty sitting out there all akimbo. Warm from the contrast. Relaxed. Elevated.
It's amazing what goes through your head in a forced one hour of sitting. I try to sleep, but then I start thinking about all the things I need to do, and should have done. All of my friends. And then I hear the bump bump bump bump, coupled with the rrr rrr rrr rrr in a tetrad as the machine whirls around me and it sounds like I'm at the dance club, with my one-armed striped neon shirt and my jean skirt, wishing the world would never stop turning.
My deal is this: I'm turning 29 in exactly 12 days. I've gained about 50 pounds since my college days. I just moved in with my boyfriend, which is still a rocky situation. I eat like crap, I'm depressed, I've kind of cut off my world a bit.
This is my returning to it. Every day. Almost Ann is on a mission. She's gonna get closer to herself.
Even if it means meeting my claustrophobic, overly analytical self in a dark tube.
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