While I've had MRIs before, I've never had a brain MRI before. If you've never seen an MRI machine, rest assured that they are terrible traps for the claustrophobic or the circumferentially enhanced (I fall into that latter category myself). And frankly, much time spent in an MRI would drive anyone to claustrophobia. And they are noisy. Like Anvil Chorus noisy. Like sticking your head in a jet engine noisy. Something on the order of 125 dB clanging right next to your ears for however long you're in there.
I was handed earplugs. A mask was put over my entire head that looked sort of like a cross between the Alien facehugger and something Dumas wrote about, rendered in the bland, taupe, pebble-finished plastic so beloved of technology designers. Pads were inserted around my head, after a brief discussion of how surprisingly large my skull is.
I then spent forty-five minutes in the tube.
Lately I've been meditating in the mornings. As a formal practice, I mean, not the lie-in-bed-and-groan-about-morning meditation that we all indulge in from time to time. So I meditated inside the MRI tube for forty-five minutes. Which is about like trying to meditate on the flight line of an aircraft carrier. On the plus side, the tech later reported that I held amazingly still, which helped them get good images as quickly as possible. On the minus side, I had my head in an MRI tube for forty-five minutes.
---Steve
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