August 1, 2005 – 2 sedatives, a shot & 2 bruises, and 1 broken MRI machine add up to 2 hours.

Ruben (my chauffeur these days) and I headed across town today to Henderson hopefully put an end to these restless nights worrying. We get to SDMI, I check in, they take me back into another lobby. They give me forms to fill out and a gown to put on. I get done with filling out the paper work, and sit and wait. No one comes for me. Suddenly I realize that I’ve been back there for over an hour. So I got out my cell phone and gave him a quick call to let him know that I was going to be a while longer. Apparently he already knew that though, as the whole front office had been talking about the computers and the MRI machines being down, although no one had the courtesy to come back there and tell us anything. After another 10 minutes someone finally came back to tell us that one of the MRI machines went down while someone was on it and they didn’t know how long it would be until it was back up. While she was there, I asked her about sedation, since they do not have any open MRI machines at that location, and I’m a little more than somewhat claustrophobic. She went and got me 2 sedatives to chew up and take with water, which tasted pretty nasty. But once they got those machines up and running, I was glad I took those awful pills. As if sticking me in an MRI wasn’t bad enough, they covered my face with what seemed like some sort of face mask, so I was even more entrapped. Even still THAT wasn’t even all bad. It didn’t get bad until I leaned my doctor order the test to be done with a contrast injection. The injection was to go in my vein, my very bad veins. She poked me once and made the vein collapse. Her efforts left a nice quarter size bruise at the top of my elbow. She tried again in a different spot on the inside of my elbow. This time she got lucky with my vein, but somehow she still managed to leave a mark. Thirty minutes later we finally walked out of there wondering just how soon tomorrow we would know if I had a tumor in my head or not.