Yes, exactly. And with everything else as well.
Yes, good luck with the MRI. The noise, fwiw, sounds like dwarves building furniture inside a tin can. Hollow metallic bashing and thudding.
thanks for the good wishes, gang!
The noise, fwiw, sounds like dwarves building furniture inside a tin can. Hollow metallic bashing and thudding.
oh ffs. does it seem as if the dwarves are right there with you, near at hand, one could almost reach out and touch the putative furniture? or is it more like, oh hey, some dwarves are making furniture in that tin can down the way again. I'm going to let them have it one of these days, mace or no godforsaken mace.
and then you find out they were actually working on a 1 trillion USD platinum coin all along! ha ha hah. then you buy them beer, and wheels of cheese. well, wheels of cheese are extraordinarily expensive in narnia, so perhaps I will buy them beer and these tiny little squid fried crunchy in a sweet spicy glaze with sesame seeds. damn, that makes me kind of want to eat them. but I haven't wanted to eat any food of that sort in maybe 4 months? perhaps I am further deficient in something else.
You are awesome. I hope the MRI somehow reveals that all your problems were caused by not eating enough of something delicious.
Good luck with the MRI. Wikipedia tells me that, "according to Sebastien Michaelis, [Astaroth] ... seduces by means of laziness, vanity, and rationalized philosophies. ... To others, he teaches mathematical sciences and handicrafts"; to which I can only say, goddamnit, I knew I should have held out for the handicrafts lessons. Alas, rationalized philosophies seduce me every time.
And fuck, the last time I saw my Astaroth Prince of Thrones class neurologist, he gave me a prescription for nerve tonic.
Wasn't Victorian nerve tonic, like "gripe water" and "patent medicine", just another socially acceptable way of drinking laudanum in public?
The dwarf cabinet makers are fairly present yeah. It's not massively loud, but it's not soft distant tinkling. Fwiw, though, before I had my first MRI friends' stories made it sound more claustrophobic and unpleasantly noisy than I found the reality.
Sorry, but the dwarves are sitting on your fucking head. I think whether the noise is objectively louder or less loud than Concorde if you're sitting on its wing probably depends on the manufacturer of the mahine you're inside. But there's no denying that it's fucking loud. Some MRI operators offer you an MP3 player to pass the time. Forget it. You can't hear a damn thing.
I wonder if the noise varies depending on the sort of scan they are doing? I've had two or three and the last didn't seem as loud. Clunking and donking, but not quite as bashy. Maybe just psychological as I knew what to expect.
thanks neil! neil helped save me from a particularly awful bout of anemia by noting that my sudden, obsessive gluttony for chewing on ice cubes might indicate that my body was feebly trying to save itself by getting me to eat rocks, in the hopes that some would have iron ore in them. I got back to taking iron supplements on the regular and my lust for ice cubes melted away! it had gotten so bad that I was fishing the cubes out with my fingers at restaurants to eat them, and my sister had to reproach me with terrible glances.
7: sadly my nerve tonic is just B vitamins rather than laudanum, which I'm not really supposed to drink in any case. I suppose I have drunk a fair amount of instant release morphine syrup without looking too hard at the label to see whether it contained alcohol what proof it was. um. I guess that was laudanum? ah, no, reading further I see that it was not, as laudanum contains whole opium rather than just morphine. it is a charmingly named substance; given the ailments of the 1600s-1800s and the feeble medical treatment on offer I should say it was praiseworthy indeed.
what I want these fuckers to do is give me a big shot of steroids and painkillers into the part of my spine/neck that is fucked up. they have been sitting around with their thumb up their asses for two months already, and though the MRI is tomorrow, my next neurologist appointment is feb. 20, and he'll have to look at the results, and find me a spine guy... the neurologist was iffy, like, you'll need a spine surgeon for that, maybe you don't want one, it's sort of sketch.
I had neuralgia on and off for quite some time in my late teens / early 20s. It was not anything at all like as severe as your pain but still pretty miserable. I always took it to be dental related. I can't remember now how it eventually went away but I think I had a particular molar removed which had had a giant filling and also my wisdom teeth all came in. I suppose all dental issues have been ruled out for your agony.
I am, indeed, overdue at the dentist's for a regular checkup, so I should certainly do that on general principles. I don't think it will fix everything, though. it's good that your pain went away completely! I'm going to try to sleep now before this dose of meds wears off, so thanks for the good wishes, all.
I hope the MRI shows something easy to fix for you.
13: My dad has tooth-related neuralgia now. The root canal didn't take care of the problem or something.
When I had a head and neck MRI, I got through the noise by pretending I was in a Christian Marclay installation. (It worked surprisingly well.)
I am particularly endeared by the fact that Astaroth is derived from the Canaanite Goddess Ashtoreth, who in turn is equivalent to Ishtar and Inanna. FTM transsexuals are always appealing to cosmopolitan elites.
Good luck, alameida.
Wasn't Victorian nerve tonic, like "gripe water" and "patent medicine", just another socially acceptable way of drinking laudanum in public?
Not patent medicine - that could be all kinds of things, usually snake oil (despite the name, the ingredients were usually secret).
I'm more familiar with Astaroth in his role as the prince of accusers and inquisitors. Astaroth in power tie.
Good luck with the dwarves in the tin can, alameida. Be sure and get us all a picture of Teh Coin.
Gripe water, or something by that name, was still available in Britain in the early 60s. Careful examination of the label revealed extremely dilute pastis with added sugar.
Oh, you can buy stuff labelled "gripe water" at any US drug store. It's basically chamomile and peppermint and some other relatively harmless stuff that supposedly (but not) helps colicky babies.
One more benefit to messing around with explosives and guns, the hearing damage makes the MRI noise a mere background annoyance. The Cedars-Sinai gadget had an angled mirror at the top of the tube so I could see towards my feet, that helped some with the closed off feeling even though the mirror was spotted with gobs of snot from previous victims.
Good luck, Al.
23. So they've taken the alcohol out of it too? They're just no fun.
Any US drug store? I associate "gripe water" with the wacky colonial-era labels on stuff in Indian stores. But I guess I would not be looking in the baby section of a normal drug store.
Yeah, it sounds like something Nice Pete would partake of. But lo and behold.
Astaroth was also the setting of the most incompetent vampire movie of the pre-digital video era, "Lemora".
29: Rotten Tomatoes doesn't make it sound all that bad.
It gets notice because it's interesting. Female vampire who seems only interested in girls. Weird attitude to religion. Debut for future soft-core actress who was 17 and playing a 13-year-old and acting like a 10-year-old. Odd choice of a depression-era setting with no budget for any depression-era stuff except one old car, making it just look like an exaggeration of the rural South. But in terms of how it's made, super incompetent.
Female vampire who seems only interested in girls.
Not exactly unprecedented.
As far as I know gripe water in the UK is just carbonated water aimed at babies.
It's a specialized subset of silent-film era slapstick humor.
33. Is now. 50 years ago it was about 5% alcohol aimed at babies.
Good luck! Best wishes, and remember that this world is Christ's, and Satan a thrashing, frustrated martinet like a high school vice principal as you peel out on the last day of school in your rockin' '68 Stingray. (Jesus is the car in this image, I think.)
12: Oh, wow! Glad to help with the ice / iron thing.
38: awesome!
in general, I woke up at 3 thinking, there really should be another dose of pain medication here, but there wasn't, and I hesitate to take too much too early lest I end up fucked later, and eventually I fell asleep, so that was a success. sort of. the MRI isn't till 5:35 stupidly, I'm going to be so tired. maybe I'll just sleep through it, as the promotional literature suggests!
39: yeah, totally. I was dying of anemia. you saved me from...continued severe anemia. my doctor might have noticed eventually, one hopes.
very best of luck, alameida!
for what it's worth, the sound does depend on the pulse sequence (so what kind of scan you are getting) and the manufacture (e.g. how the gradient fields and shims are implemented). No real way to avoid it though, there's a lot of stress generated.
er, stress generated on the metal which forms the machine or...
Ah, yes sorry that wasn't clear. Stress on the frames, as you are creating and collapsing shaped magnetic fields the whole time, and the resulting stree & strain aren't symmetric. The frames are incredibly strong but they have to wonbble a bit to account for that.
I once stood near the big MRI. The magnet will shake the keys in your pocket as you walk through the hall outside.
44: that's the main field, the permanent one oriented down the bore (typically generated by super conducting magnets, which complicates engineering it). That's why they'll have a line painted on the floor to keep metal bits out of, what will jingle your keys in the hall will pick up a office chair close by.
The noise is largely caused by the gradient fields and active shims, as they turn on and off perpendicular to that big field.
I've never had an MRI, just a tour with the guy who does them. This was a 7T, which is apparently a thing, radiologist-wise.
So I was a subject for a few fmri studies. It always seemed like I was being turned (in the plane of the floor) about 90 degrees when I was being loaded into the machine. Is that normal? AnyOne else?
They only do that do get a picture of your ass. And they only get a picture of your ass when they think it is a fine, fine ass.
Good luck with the MRI. Hopefully it turns up something worthwhile. Mine always ended up clean, which was disappointing in that it meant that my doctors had no idea what was causing my problems.
My experience with MRIs is that they are mostly boring. I spent most of my MRIs a) paranoid that I'd end up needing to go to the bathroom halfway through, and b) trying to reverse engineer a quieter way to build and collapse specifically shaped gigantic magnetic fields, because surely there must be a quieter way than *this*.
wow, I didn't know there were so many different kinds of loud! loudLOUDcrashclingbangBANGwhambeepbeepbeeeeep. it was...OK. I was reminded that we used horribly loud blasting music to torture people at guantanamo (use?). it would be effective. I had to keep my arms at rest beside my body with my hands on my stomach; this became really painful for the left arm, which is what the pain in my neck controls, so that was almost the worst part. this struck me as funny, seeing how this was the very thing the imaging will be used to diagnose. overall, not the worst thing in the world. they said in advance it would cost $1400 but with our insurance it cost $0, so that kicked ass. having tenure at a university can mean you get amazing health insurance, if you live in a country that's not america. my husband came with me and held my purse and got me water and waited in the taxi queue and is generally a wonderful person.
That's why they make it so loud - if it was quiet people would just go in there for fun. Or to get accurately-rendered 3D models of their own internal organs which they could later print out in order to make Cory Doctorow happy.
Why would anyone want to make Cory Doctorow happy?
