MRI

December 6, 2011 - Went into Columbia/Presby for an MRI this morning. I like that I don;t have to wait around for much of anything. I got there and within 5 minutes they whisked me (and Simon) to another section. There was a waiting room for him and a dressing room with lockers and a bathroom for me. I put on a gown and footies and locked all my stuff in the locker. Simon held onto my key to the locker for me. Again, they almost immediately took me over to the MRI room. I met Juan and he gave me an IV load of Multihance. Basically Multihance is used to get what they call a contrast reading. So they do a regular MRI - this is a magnetic reading - and then do an enhanced one with Multihance. Using Multihance shows a greater contrast in the pictures with people with known lesions. So they have the regular MRI and a higher contrast MRI to compare. Everybody was really sweet and all kept telling me how uncomfortable the MRI table would be, but it really wasn't. There was one snafu though - the Dr's notes mentioned that he had wanted me to get a clip inserted (a small clip that gets embedded into the tumor so they can determine how much it deteriorates over the course of the treatment, and where the original tumor bed was in case we eliminate the entire thing). I waited on the table for about a 1/2 hour while they straightened that out. It was decided to go ahead with the MRI and then I would go up and get the clip after. MRI's are music makers. They have all these different rhythms and clicks and sounds that go with the machine - I kept finding myself making up songs to go with the rhythms and clicks. I also fell asleep for awhile. After the MRI - I got dressed, found Simon and we went back up to the 10th Floor. Here I waited for a while, but I didn't really have an appointment. I got called into change (again) and wait in a different room for the clip insertion. While waiting an Asian woman around my age started asking what I was there for, she was concerned because they wanted to see her due to a calcium deposit in her breast. The only problem was that she couldn't remember the word calcium, we finally figured it out when she started telling me it was in milk and bones... it felt a little like charades. I let her feel the lump in my breast and she said she didn't have anything like that. While we were chatting another younger woman sat down near us and burst into tears. I couldn't just sit there, so I reached out and asked if she just got bad news. She said not yet, but she knows that she has cancer, she can feel the lump and she is only 35 and has a little baby. I told her to concentrate on her baby daughter and think only good thoughts and be positive. She calmed down and was called into her Mammogram. I was then called in to the Sonogram room. They located the tumor on the sonogram, same process as before and then put a thin needle into the tumor and released a tiny marker (clip) into the breast. I had a quick mammogram after that and was sent off. I ran into the young woman from the waiting room on my way out and we exchanged phone numbers. She's going to keep in touch and let me know how she's doing!