(The Elispis, which Dan has also stopped using.)
To recap: it’s been five months since the injury and only now have I been granted access to the upper echelons of health care as dictated by my insurance company.
To recap: it’s been five months since the injury and only now have I been granted access to the upper echelons of health care as dictated by my insurance company.
This occurred only after our high deductible medical savings account has been eaten away by examinations, physical therapy, x-rays that showed absolutely nothing, and my all-time favorite professionally prescribed activity – doing nothing, and waiting to see if it gets any better. All the while, still paying those pricey monthly insurance premiums.
It was a winding path through the halls of the diagnostic imaging department, then a short scissorlift to the magic MRI machine. Aside from having my wisdom teeth removed 25 years ago, I haven’t been this deep inside any hospital. If I had been on my own, I wouldn’t have been able to find my way back out of the maze.
What was the experience like? Think of lying on a board in a cement culvert being rolled down a hill, with all of the noise and the shuddering, but none of the actual spinning or vomiting.
My thoughts?How very un-Star Trek it all was.
For over 40 years, I’ve been pop-culturally prepared to expect futuristic diagnostic beds that quietly beep, analyze in holographic 3-D, and are governed by talking, nearly sentient computers.
It was reasonable to anticipate a glimpse of what’s been envisioned for the 21st - 23rd centuries. My expectations were quite high. (That's a bad jpeg of an MRI device taken from the internet, btw.)
After all, I have a communicator cellphone with a touch-screen, that I can use as a tri-corder GPS or speak to a person face-to-face via various devices in full sci-fi fashion.
On another note: at check-in, I was asked if I had meds for claustrophobia. Well, ‘no’, I said, wondering why no one had offered me any, since I wrote “severe claustrophobe” on my patient history and circled it repeatedly until it was scratched into the paper.
‘Just how deep am I going to be jammed into yon hi-tech cruller?’ I said.
‘Not to worry’, the nurse replied, ‘you’ll only be going in chest deep’.
It sounded like a promise that I won’t be over my head in the pool.
I believed her.
I managed to put my phobia aside – no mean feat – so long as I wasn’t to be confined inside anything similar to what Uma Thurman was in Kill Bill 2. But sadly, there I was with an iPod soundtrack that I couldn’t listen to due to the proximity of the giant magnet.
The whole experience was a bit of a let down. This will probably be the only chance I’ll have to be scanned by some pricey contraption, and it wasn’t a model that looked like it belonged in Dr. Crusher’s sickbay.I’m sure that’s where things are heading, and it would be just my luck to be healthy enough (or perhaps too dead) to miss the awesome coolness of it all, when it finally gets here.
