the giant hot dog cooker
I went to get an MRI of my hip.
It was even more fun than I expected.
My hip still hurts after months of physical therapy. It hurts more if I exercise, which might lead us to conclude that I should give up exercising, but I do like lifting heavy things. Also it hurts more if I have sex, and I am surely not going to give that up yet. A series of appointments and so on landed me at the MRI shop at my local clinic.
First order of business was to take off everything but my socks and shoes, and put on a gown and a robe. The first gown was missing a tie, so I rejected it because we all know how shy I am, heh. The nurse came to collect me. I showed her the gown missing a tie and she threw it into a nearby wastebasket with a flourish. In another room, she interviewed me: name, birthdate, have I had any surgery on that hip, any recent colonoscopy, any metal anywhere in my body?
"I don't have any metal, but I do have my period," I said. Significant because I had to take off everything. She looked startled. Nurses are usually startled to see a 52-year-old woman still battling shark week as often as I do. I should be enjoying a brittle semi-retirement at this age. "I'm okay for now," I said. "But maybe you would like your underwear back after we do this part," she said. "Probably best for all concerned," I said.
A nice-enough-seeming fellow joined us. He was wearing a bright pink belt with blue sharks embossed upon it--ha, I thought, it really is shark week. He delicately peeled the gown away from the front of my hip and poked the area with his thumb. "Jeez, dude, I'm ticklish," I said. "No problem," he said. He explained all the terrible things that could happen to me, such as a septic joint infection, and then swabbed off my skin. He and the nurse teamed up to prepare what seemed like a really large syringe with many small bottles of stuff. They used a laser doohickey and an x-ray to figure out where my JOINT CAPSULE is, and then he put a shot of lidocaine in. I was not brave. I didn't say "fuck," though, so go me. Nurse: "Would you like to hold my hand? Because you're digging your thumbnail into your own hand." Me: "No, I quite like digging in my thumbnail. It gives me something to focus on."
Shark Belt said lidocaine takes 60 seconds to work, that he did not learn this in med school or the Air Force but later, on the job, and he was proud of not having patients feel the needle going in. As he started to insert this needle, I had to burst his bubble. "Sorry, but that still feels really pointy to me, but then again I always need extra time at the dentist for novacaine to work too, I am special." Shark Belt said another 60 seconds should do it. When he came back at it, the needle was pointy but not AS pointy. Fortunately, one's hip joint is pretty near the surface, assuming one is not carrying 80+ extra pounds around the middle, which I'm not, not yet. Soon he was steadily releasing a megafuckton of saline, radiation and something else into my joint capsule and I was saying "this is really, really unpleasant," and the nurse was saying "deep breath, deep breath." And then, hoorah, it was done.
The best part was me trying to put my underpants back on, over my shoes, when the hip flexor on one side was numb. Imagine trying to raise your leg with no hip flexor: pretty challenging! Then I went down the hall to another room and laid myself on the tray to be plunged into what resembled a giant hot dog cooker. A nice person taped my feet together so they absolutely would not move, put a warm blanket on me, bolted a thing over my torso so I couldn't possibly move that way either, gave me some headphones (I picked "spa music" as my other choices were classic rock and Today's Country) and slid me into the tube. The rest is your typical MRI stuff: loud horrible noises, bizarre half-asleep nightmares. I have a bandaid on that spot now and I'm kind of nervous to take it off. I wonder what's under there. Blood? If there is blood, I hope it has formed the outline of a shark on my hip.
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