Saturday, February 9, 2008

You need to get your head examined, or I've lost my mind somewhere

Something weird has happened. Seriously. Yesterday I had an MRI and an MRA of, yes, my head. (A friend told me she's also had her head examined, too.) Well, before I got into the huge machine that makes an enormous amount of noise (I think the inventors of said machine should have THEIR heads examined) I asked the tech guy to explain how it worked. He chuckled and asked, "So, how much time do you have?" My response: "Just give me the Reader's Digest version."

This was basically it: "Our bodies are mostly made up of water molecules."
"Yeah, I said. And water molecules are pretty cool with the way they have an electrical charge." "Right. Well, the magnets in the machine " this part I forget exactly ... send an electrically charged beam or something and it RESONATES somehow with the water particles (read: molecules) and give an image they can record.
"So, the clicking noise (horrendous noise the first time I experienced this procedure) is the machine switching the magnets polarity back and forth?"
"Yes, for the ... " contrast ... or something or the other.

Well, that was kind of what I expected, but I didn't know about the water thing. Water molecules are pretty awesome--the properties they have with the oxygen having, I think, a negative charge and the 2 hydrogen molecules having positive charges . . . if they didn't have those properties, plants couldn't get water up from their roots and the sugar they produce in their leaves down to the roots or other parts of the plant. It amazed me to learn these things when I took biology a few years ago. Anyway, science has always intrigued me.

So, back to the huge machine. With all the magnetic polarity switching back and forth, I think I lost part of the electrical functioning of my brain. Seriously. I visited with, ate dinner with, and saw a movie with my oldest daughter after having the MRI and man! I've had trouble remembering things and getting my words all messed up as they try to come out of my mouth, or out of my fingers onto the keyboard trying to type this post. You could ask her. We laughed a lot, but it was obvious something was different! You have no idea how many huge typos I've had to try to fix as I've gone along. I mean, I'm not the world's greatest typist by far, but gee whiz! This has been extraordinarily difficult today! Not to mention that my usual poor spelling has just zeroed out as well. So if you find errors in this post, its not my faoult! It's the MRI monster that sucked stuff out of my brain yesterday. I promise that's the problem.

I hope I can recover! I need all the positive brain activity I can find--recover--improve--use, whatever. Getting old is hard enough on a person's brain. This is totally unfair. I'm complaining to my neurologist next Tuesday when I see him again.

Ooooooooooooh. Maybe I should wait until AFTER he gives me his diagnosis. Hmmmmmmm. But, seriously. It's been a real trial to try to talk and/or type coherently. (IS that a word? The right word? I hope so.)

Say a prayer, okay?

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