I imagine that being shot out of a cannon at the circus is probably not too much different than undergoing a cardiac MRI. Only instead of sporting an Evel Knievel jumpsuit with cape and flying through the air to execute a stunt landing, you are shivering in a cotton hospital gown, stuck in a tight tube going nowhere.
At least that’s how I felt when I underwent one to please my cardiologist. I had been going for monthly echocardiograms to check on my pericardium and to monitor what she thought might be a slightly enlarged ventricle, but she believed an MRI (which uses a magnetic field and radio waves to take detailed pictures of internal organs) would finally tell us if there was anything to worry about.
At the hospital I was shown to a locker room and told to strip down to my socks, remove all metal, don a gown, and abstain from breast-feeding for 48 hours post-scan. To better see my heart they were going to shoot me with gadolinium, a contrast dye that should be totally out of my body in two days time. Had I known a cardiac MRI was in my future, I would have stored up more frozen breast milk—this episode wiped out my backup supply, but that’s another story.
I entered a large, white room and laid down on a skinny, stretcher-like platform. A friendly man put an IV line into the top of my hand to administer the gadolinium, placed headphones on me so that I could hear instructions from another room, and then pushed a button that moved me slowly into the long tube of the MRI.
The first thing I did once inside was open my eyes. Big mistake. The ceiling was literally four inches from my face, and I immediately went into a claustrophobic panic. I shut my eyes tight and pretended that my husband and other friends and family were sitting in the room with me waiting for me to finish. I felt myself calming down, but I knew staying that way was dependent upon me not opening my eyes again.
Then a friendly doctor voice (the radiologist) came in through the headphones and told me that I would hear a series of loud sounds over the course of the test, would be instructed to breathe and hold my breath at different points, and would be in there about an hour.
He wasn’t kidding. This is how it went:
Jarring science fiction noises (stun gun stutters, vibrations, whack, whack whacking, gong!) began to reverberate all around me. My ship was definitely under attack, and I wondered what the racket was doing to my heart rate. Then, the periodic breathing instructions began, “Breathe deeply, breathe deeply, one more time, and hold…. OK, breathe out.” Sometimes I felt as if I wasn’t going to make it to the release.
So, sonic booms are shaking my body, I’m holding my breath to the point of turning blue, and through it all, I am wondering what the inscrutable, calm doctor is seeing. Has he just discovered that my heart has a major malfunction and I have two weeks to live? (Yes, I am prone to hypochondria.) Have my episodes of pericarditis thickened my pericardium to the point of restricting my heart from beating?
What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Are you there, doctor? What’s wrong?!
OK, breathe. Remember that David and your parents are sitting right outside smiling at your stocking feet sticking out of the tube. You are a young woman who has run two marathons and used to teach aerobics, your heart is probably awesome! Maybe the doctor is taking periodic breaks from talking to you not because he has gone to get the head of cardiology to confirm your rare and life-threatening heart defect, but instead because he has assembled all the radiologists to show them what a super-healthy heart looks like. Hey, dummy, don’t open your eyes!
That went on for one fun-filled hour. And then it was done. I slowly emerged from the tube and looked anxiously at the tech’s face to see if it betrayed any possible diagnosis. I would get the results in two to four days, he said. “Can’t they tell me anything now?” “No, your doctor has to analyze it first.”
I got dressed and went home to chain myself to my breast pump for two days and wait for the call. My cardiologist forgot to call. And I was nervous, so it took a week before I finally got up the nerve to call her.
When she got on the phone, the first thing she said was, “The radiologist asked me to remind him what he was supposed to be looking for, because your heart looked totally normal.” Totally normal. Normal. Healthy. Fine.
“You mean my heart is fine. There is no problem with the pericardium and no enlarged ventricle?”
“Yep, it looks totally healthy.”
Now that felt like flying through the air.
(PHOTO: CORBIS)
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Comments (1)
Congratulations! “Totally normal” may not explain what the heck has been happening to you, but they’re still beautiful words to hear.