The wheeze-slosh-wheeze-slosh of modern medicine
When I first walked in, the machine was making these wet, washing machine sounds, the wheeze-slosh-wheeze-slosh sounds of modern medicine.
“Whoa. It sounds like a breast pump,” I said, pulling the hospital gown away from my arm, where the infusion set for my insulin pump was still connected and catching on the gown sleeve because my pump was stashed inside a locker just outside the scan room.
The clinician smirked. “I’ve never heard that before, but you’re totally right. It does sound like that.” She encouraged me to get onto the table, and I complied. “It makes a lot of other weird sounds, too.”
I’d never had an MRI before, but I was there to check out a shoulder injury that has been problematic for months. Months of physical therapy didn’t help, and neither did a cortisone injection (although it did make diabetes exciting for a few days). So now this MRI to see if I’ve torn the rotator cuff doing all the sportsball and heavy lifting I’m known for. (Oh who are we kidding? I probably tore it crocheting or putting a carry-on into an overhead bin or something equally un-athletic.)
Diabetes devices and MRIs are not friends. The pre-scan phone call from the imaging center confirmed that my CGM would need to be removed entirely, and my insulin pump needed to be disconnected for the duration of the scan, although the infusion set could stay in because it’s entirely plastic.
“The scan could take up to 45 minutes, so do whatever you need to prepare,” the nurse on the phone told me.
I prepared by scoring the first appointment of the day (7 am) and went in at an in-range blood sugar, assuming I’d need a bump of insulin once I reconnected. I bugged out slightly at the idea of being disconnected, but it’s not like I was going deep sea diving or into space, or even being put under general anesthesia. If something got weird, I’d press the little button for emergencies, but an end-scan blood sugar in the 200s or something was not an emergency. And I’d stick on a new G6 sensor to queue up on the ride home.
See how mellow I can be? I AM SO MELLOW.
It helped that this MRI machine happened to be an open MRI, so it wasn’t a full tube enclosure. It was more like a space alien panini press. I could see out the sides, even though the “roof” was right over my nose. (Wait until I tell you about the thing that happened a few days later, when I didn’t have insulin for five hours and ended up with wicked ketones and a more horrible attitude. I’ll get that to paper next week. Back to the MRI table.)
“So you will lie back and not move your arm, just keep it very still. Don’t move anything, honestly. The stiller you can stay, the clearer the images will be,” the clinician said, and I nodded, but then stopped nodding because she just said not to move.
“Got it,” I said, barely moving my teeth as I spoke.
“You can move now. Just not in the machine.” She smirked again. I’ll assume she thought I was nervous. Or an idiot. Only one of those things is true1 and I’ll let you leap to conclusions.
“And I’ll be talking to you through these headphones. You can also listen to music, as the machine sounds are loud. What kind of music would you like?”
Fun! I had not anticipated this as an option.
“What do you have on tap?”
Imaging centers don’t have Elbow or Radiohead playlists at the ready for their patients, it turns out. But they did pipe in some easy-listening tunes, which were Ed Sheeran-adjacent songs done in strings only and without lyrics. Paired well with the shark-thrash sounds of the machine.
Oh the noises of the MRI. I’d never heard such weird shit from such an expensive ride. This machine whirred. It sloshed. It beeped angrily. It knocked like all the ghosts in Rhode Island had stopped by for a brief haunt. After a few scan cycles, I started to hear a bass line emerging from the MRI machine sounds, and suddenly it was like I was listening to a Radiohead album (Amnesiac2-esque, like Pulk/Pull or Packt Like Sardines).
Yay!
That part was kind of fun. Took away from the worry about whether or not they’d detect a torn rotator cuff or an impingement or a gerbil or something in my shoulder.
The test concluded. They rolled me out. I reconnected all my devices and pricked my finger for the first time in many months (212 mg/dl — thanks, no insulin and probably some stress hormone).
And then I drove home.
This story is about having an MRI. And how there wasn’t anything cool I could do to manage diabetes while I was in there so I just rolled disconnected and cleaned up the blood sugar afterwards.
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