PTSD Monkey Gets an MRI
Without Mommy & Daddy to hold her hand.
21 Days after the night I was hit by a drunk driver:
Date: January 10, 2001
To: William
From: BellaDancer
Subject: Tomorrow & Friday
Well...I just said goodbye to my mom & dad. They are leaving at 3:00 a.m. I think the thing I will dread the most is waking up tomorrow morning to an empty apartment after their love & laughter has filled it for so long through this tough time. I can't even say that it will be a comfort to have my place back to myself, because I haven't lived here long enough to have truly felt like it's HOME.
Shit.
I'm already getting choked up over their leaving, although they are only several feet away. They’re right there, and I can already feel how empty it will be in here tomorrow.
All the strength that I am used to having feels like it’s starting to wane. It’s only been three weeks, but because nothing ever lets up, it feels like three months. On the really bad days it feels like three years.
I am scared for them to leave...I don't know why. I feel like I'm going to be so utterly alone now. I know I’m not, and I know it won't be any better if they were to stay for another week. I don't think we could hack it in each other’s hair for that much longer. Hahah!
But everyone has continued with their own lives while mine has stopped. I feel like I'm in this strange bubble, like I'm just watching life from afar...
Dakini will go to the Netherlands without me. Everyone goes to work and comes home and goes to sleep and goes to work. The restaurants hire my students to cover my dance shifts. Everyone wishes me well and says that they will give me rides and help me out, but continually, I can't find anyone to take me anywhere. When Theresa offered to drive me, Melinda STRONGLY recommended that I don’t ride with her because of the terror factor—I guess she’s erratic and scattered and drives way too fast.
Heck, I get wiggy riding with people I used to feel safe with before the crash. Now I don't feel safe anywhere.
Crap. Don’t mind me. It's just a depressed, lonely, stressed moment. An hour ago, I was great. Had taken a loooong bath and done some of the most intense meditation I've ever done. It was awesome!!!!!
But now I said goodnight and goodbye to my parents, and I’m aching for them already.
Think I will just go to bed to get it all over with. *heave of sigh* Yep, definitely glad you will be coming up soon!
January 11, 2001
Day 22
Mom and Dad drove back home to Minnesota at 3:00 a.m. The night before, after a bunch of lingering hugs, stalling, moping, and more hugs, I’d finally gone to bed where I cried and cried and cried until I fell asleep. When they left, I was conked out and didn’t hear them.
Waking up without them was one of the suckiest things I’ve ever experienced in my life. Not only for missing them that day, not only for knowing (some of) what I would have to go through without them, but PTSD brain kept eviscerating me with the images and sensations of what it would be like to truly and completely lose them.
I hear this is called “anticipatory grief.”1
It’s excruciating.
And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.
Probably not a bad thing that I had my first appointment with a neuropsychologist that day, so she could get a look at me while I was exhausted and emotional. The appointment lasted four hours and completely wiped me out, but it was a relief to be told that all the things I was experiencing were completely natural for a brain injury. That—no—it was not all in my head.
Okay, I mean…it was.
But I wasn’t going crazy, which was how I’d felt after three weeks of having some stranger living inside my skull. Or…rather, being the stranger suddenly thrust inside the skull of somebody who had lived there for the past 28 years. Or…like…having spent my first three decades with a high-tech supercomputer, and then suddenly having do everything I used to do, but now on a basement full of filing cabinets and an abacus I’d never learned how to operate. Or…?
I didn’t know how to explain what I was experiencing. It was all those things and none of them.
My neuropsychologist at last started helping me understand what was happening. It would be her job to help me come up with strategies to repair whatever I could, and to live with the emotional impact of what I couldn’t.
Alas. She no longer works in the field, but I couldn't have had a better introduction to the world of neuropsychologists. Throughout those first four hours, she asked me a gazillion questions, and answered my gazillion more.
When I skidded home in ashes, I replied briefly to William’s sweet, encouraging email after he read my Missing Mommy & Daddy Mope. I would have preferred to call him while curled up in bed, about to drool, but I was trying to cut down on my phone usage because the bill was going to be horrendous, considering how many long distance phone calls I’d had to make in the past weeks.
I also needed to confirm that he would—bless him, hallelujah!—drive up 45 minutes through the winter pass and take me to my next big medical adventure: my neck MRI the next day.
Bonus snark and reality-humor from my journal that I’m gonna tell you about now, because by the time we get to the end of this, we’ll be onto a totally different topic from medical procedures:
1/12/01
4:43 p.m.
Had to cut my nose ring off with a pair of pliers for the MRI. Technically it’s a nose bone. The piercing was so new that it wasn’t fully healed, yet that little ball on the inside still did the job it was designed for—to keep it in my face. No matter how much I stretched and tugged and tried to open the piercing hole wider, no way I was getting that sucker out without wounding myself. Totally not what I need right now. So I had to use the nipper in my needle nose pliers.
I only had the piercing out for a few hours, yet it closed up so fast I just had to re-pierce myself with a sterilized earring so I could put in the little gold one William got me awhile back. He didn't know that I had a bone, and couldn't change it out at will.
Alas. This gold one is a J-hook, so it catches more boogers. You can also see it on the inside sometimes if it's turned wrong. Looks like boogers then too, if you don’t know what you’re looking at. I liked my first little "diamond" one so much better, but there’s no way I’m going back to a bone. What a pain in the—
Well, it’s a pain in the nose.
Anyway. So William took me to the MRI…
January 12. 2001
Day 23
I’d never had an MRI before, so I had no idea what to expect. I’d also never realized that I have a touch of claustrophobia until they rolled me inside that confining, white tube. As all sound disappeared except the echo of my own suddenly heavy panting, and as my entire scope of vision was reduced to several inches away from my nose, I slammed my eyes shut and scrabbled for my breathing exercises.
Alas. To do an MRI of your neck, you have to hold your whole upper body still. That means no deep breathing that will move your chest, neck and shoulders. They had to halt me from doing that before we could get started.
Greeeeat…
I also learned, yet again, how much trouble my brain has with conflicting, overlapping audio input. See, they give you these huge headphones to protect your ears from the blasts, beeps, buzzes, blats, rumbles and roars of the machine. The headphones also provide you with audio entertainment of your choice during your 15-90 minutes of immobility inside the tube. They offered me news programs as well as as a wide variety of radio stations.
I should have chosen silence.
That’s what I’ve done for every MRI I’ve had since that first one. Now I use all those rhythms, vibrations, and energy bombardment as part of my meditation. I envision similar healing miracles to the ones I had started imagining in my nightly baths. And besides, it takes a whole lot of energy to operate that machine, so I envision it super-charging my
PHENOMENAL COZMIK POWAHS
OF HEALING—RAWR!
Wut? It can’t hurt.
It also keeps PTSD Monkey chattering about geeky science stuff and fascinating woo-woo, rather than noticing how confined my body and breathing are, how loud that machine is, how infuriating that itch is on the inside of my knee and the even worse one at the edge of my nose, or how bored I am but we’re not even two minutes in.
I’m actually glad I never realized that claustrophobia would kick in until it was too late and I was in the machine. Because I might have asked for sedation for this, and thus every MRI I’ve had since. (Which you can totally ask for, if your claustrophobia is significant. You can also look into an open MRI machine for certain procedures and if you have certain needs.)2
But for me, un-sedated is absolutely the way to go. This way, no drugs, no groggy afterwards, and it turns the experience into a nerd-out session instead of a scary medical procedure.
However. That first time?
I’d arrived with no clue, because I’d received very little information in advance. Back then we also didn’t have access to the types of geeky DIY prep-material that now abounds all over the internet. (No YouTube in 2001. No plethora of blogs and articles on “what to expect” either.) All I could do was try to keep my body calm and still, and tune out the music every time the machine started up again.
It’s deafening inside that tube, even with the protective headphones. Sometimes it appears as though the magnets are whirling around and around and around, two inches away from your head (they’re not).3 So there was no tuning the MRI’s song out.
Alas, neither was there any way I could tune out the music because of my broken brain. That came as a shock—just how bad it was. Yet again, I was rendered incapable of speech because my brain was too busy trying to process multiple layers of audio input to form the words, “Can we please eighty-six the music?”
Back then, they didn’t hand you a panic button like they did at my last MRI the other week. They also gave me the “oh shit” button for the CT scan a couple months ago. That was cool.
Tell ya what. I have never once had an MRI, CT, ultrasound, mammogram, or EEG tech who was cranky, short, or anything less than awesome with me.
EVER.
(Knock on wood. I’m sure jerks exist, but all of mine over the past quarter-century have been stellar.)
I don’t know what it is about those particular callings, but the people who stuff you into or hook you up to these machines have been so amazing. They’re super efficient and super sweet, even while they have Curious Monkey on Anxious Monkey adrenaline asking a gazillion goggle-eyed, science-fascinated questions.
Even the emergency room X-ray guy whose thoughtless neglect screwed up my whole court case had been super sweet and so gentle with me as I laid on that ambulance board. Unlike the ER nurses who ignored my complaints and told me there was “nothing wrong with me.” They were not nice.
As such, once I finally began to receive orders and authorizations beyond chiropractic, I’d been really nervous about those heftier medical appointments, because “magnetic resonance imaging” and “neuropsychologist”—dun-dun-dunnnnn—those sounded really intimidating with their official techno-lingo names.4
Nah.
These were actually some of the few enjoyable aspects of my recovery—I mean…as “enjoyable” as a car wreck recovery can be.
Undiagnosed Autistic Monkey was also being thrown into the deep end with new people, new procedures, new facilities full of new technologies—on a new brain injury and fresh PTSD, just as the two people I trusted most in the whole world were no longer there to hold my hand or hug me afterwards.
No problemo.
For those first few Scawey Stranger-Danger appointments, I didn’t need to worry. These new medical practitioners were so great with me. I had a completely different experience at PenRad Imaging than I’d had at the Penrose Hospital ER the night of the crash. Now that Holiday Hell had ended and the world began to understand that—yes, actually—I had been injured, I was rapidly gaining an amazing medical team.
The dance community also rallied behind me. More kind strangers started to flood into that raw, aching void left by my parents’ absence and the Abandon Ship maneuvers from some of the people I had once thought of as my closest friends. That vacuum—a hole that would have been soul-crushing—was unexpectedly filled by strangers and people I had barely known before the crash.
William was the first, and he is one of my best friends to this day.
Only a few months before my wreck, he had started taking private dance lessons with me. He was a Vietnam Vet who had landed in a VA hospital plagued by numerous heart attacks after his multiple consecutive tours. He was only 35, so his nurses had recommended all sorts of calming activities that would sooth the over-adrenalized, overly aggressive “butch” state he’d come home in.
One of these activities was belly dancing. He was an avid, dedicated student, wielding double-veils like matador capes, and making us roll on the ground in stitches with his comedy pieces.
As it turns out, he was also an amazing teacher. In all those hours taking me to doctor’s appointments, helping me put my dishes in the dishwasher because I couldn’t bend over, carting away my dirty laundry, returning with baskets of clean clothes, and asking me how things were going—with the genuine desire to truly listen to my answers—he helped me understand another layer of what was going on inside my rattled skull and my racing heart.
The night terrors, flashbacks, hair-trigger freak-outs, hyper-vigilance, gruesome images of “what could happen”, panic attacks, flash-pan rages, and bomb-drops of hysterical crying out of nowhere—there was nobody better equipped to teach me what was going on than a guy who had spent years in hostile jungles as an Airborne Ranger.
He was estranged from his daughter—a classic PTSD tale, if ever there was one—and he took me under his wing, replacing direct atonement with Pay It Forward. His are some of the most profound gifts that I also Pay Forward in sharing these stories and the lessons they’ve taught me, the way he shared his.
So when I came out of that first MRI, shaking and brain-fried, there was nobody who could have caught me better. Maybe not even my parents, because William knew exactly how to calm down PTSD Brain on TBI Steroids.5
He had the gentle firmness he’d learned from his combat nurses, and the warm, steady hand of a natural nurturer. On the other hand, he wielded plenty of geek-out science information, as well as the breed of dark-snarky humor that we Underworld Denizens often adopt.
My neuropsychologist wouldn’t have gotten nearly so far with me if I hadn’t had William’s firsthand experience and practical application to supplement what she taught me about the brain-hijacking symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.6
🎶 The Real MRI Sounds 🎶
It’s LOUD!!! It’s OBNOXIOUS. And yes, HOSTILE is a good descriptor. And these sounds go on for waaaaaaaay longer than is shown here:
Unless you have a brain like mine. Then sometimes they don’t go on for long enough because you’re really just getting into the rhythmic groove and envisioning the energy patterns before the switch.
This is what Imagination Monkey turns all those sounds, pulses, blares and blats into, IN mah mind:
Thank you, alloutofsync, for this gem!
Up Next: STUPID PTSD - All Nightmare Long, both sleep and awake
© 2024 Hartebeast
NERD ALERT! Geek-Out Session with Curious Monkey
MRI: Let’s meet the machine - how the heck does that work?
Geekier Still - the Insane Engineering of the MRI! Whoaaa…
How Star Wars helped kids get prototype brain scans in the early 80s - by wearing a Jedi Helmet, doy!
Are MRIs safe? Mostly. For certain people they’re not.
If you ever hear MRI called by the name Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, no need to stress. That would be Nuclear as in the atomic nuclei of one’s body, not being nuked by radiation from the machine.
Obviously I’m not a medical, mental health, neurological or medical research practitioner. I only live with the stuff. This is my experience with it.
I’ve been in an MRI too, those things are freaky. :)