The "Having An MRI" Story

It was an ordinary day. Just got back from the Neuroscience and Spine doctor, Dr. Gastaldo. Dr. Gastaldo operated on me in the early 2000s for what was thought to be bone fragments flowing in my back. Turned out to be arthritis. He opened the area around the nerves that enter my legs so I would no longer have pain in my back and legs. He did a great job! But, he told me he had no idea how long before the disease, arthritis, would do the same thing to me again. It's back! Two days before I saw Dr. Gastaldo, I had an MRI done. An MRI is Magnetic Resonance Imaging. MRI is a medical imaging technique used in radiology to visualize detailed internal structures. MRI makes use of the property of nuclear magnetic resonance(NMR) to image nuclei of atoms inside the body. An MRI machine uses a powerfulmagnetic field to align the magnetization of some atoms in the body, and radio frequencyfields to systematically alter the alignment of this magnetization. This causes the nuclei to produce a rotating magnetic field detectable by the scanner—and this information is recorded to construct an image of the scanned area of the body. MRI provides good contrastbetween the different soft tissues of the body, which make it especially useful in imaging thebrain, muscles, the heart, and cancers compared with other medical imaging techniques. If you haven't figured it out yet, I copied that info from a web site. To have an MRI done, you need to lay on a table, with a gown on so you have nothing metal to ruin the image. The table enters a donut shaped unit that contains the magnetic system. The test itself is painless, but slightly noisy as the magnets clank and bang around you. They do place head phones on you to help with the noise. I had a few images done which took 10 minutes each and then they stopped the machine and injected a dye into my bloodstream. Part-way through the injection, the saline solution came shooting across my bright yellow shirt. At first I thought it was blood, but the nurse told me that it wasn't, and wouldn't stain my St. Thomas shirt I had worn. I entered the donut for a second round of images. In no time I had fallen asleep! Yep, I can fall asleep almost anywhere! Just ask my wife. The nurse woke me when she moved my out of the donut so I could get dressed. Can't imagine how much it must cost to have an MRI done. So glad for insurance. Well, Dr. Gastaldo hooked into my MRI results via his computer and sat and explained them to me. Seems that the thin things (nerves) which he described as pieces of spaghetti, that go through my spinal cord, are being pinched at a few spots by my disease. He told me that the first procedure would be physical therapy for two weeks to see if that will relieve the pain. I told him it didn't the last time, but he said we will try again. He likes to use the least invasive methods first before he tries anything even mildly invasive. And since he is the Doctor, I am starting the physical therapy next week. Hope it works. The only bad part of the entire procedure to relieve me of my back pain has been the music that they played on the headset when I was in the MRI unit. I chose the Margarittaville radio station on Sirius Radio, and they didn't play a single Jimmy Buffett song the entire hour I was in the machine. Wait, maybe I slept through one of his songs! It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. PS - The day after my exam with Dr. Gastaldo I received in the mail a CD that has 168 images on it from my MRI. Put it in my computer and had the exact same thing that the Doctor had on his computer. Pretty neat, but not sure what to do with it, yet. Following is an interview with Dr. John Gastaldo that I found on YouTube.