So I injured my foot a awhile back (hyper-flexed my big toe while clumsily climbing out of one of those giant children’s inflatable jump toys). Went to the doctor after it happened thinking it might have been broken, but the x-rays showed no fractures and the doc just told me to rest it and that it should heal up in a week or two.
Smash cut to almost three months later and the joint at the top of my big toe (don’t know the medical term) has been hurting a lot lately. It’s never stopped hurting, actually, but recently I aggravated it somehow and it’s really painful.
I went back in to the doc and he said I’ll need an MRI to figure out what’s happening w/ the joint. My guess is that it’s a torn ligament or tendon.
Anyway, this will be my first MRI. I understand how the technology works but I’d like to hear from others on what the experience is like. Will I feel anything? Do I just put my foot into a machine or will my entire body go in? Will my steady diet of ball bearings and metal shavings be an issue? Anything else I should know?
I had one on my left knee a few months ago. You feel nothing, but the machine makes a lot of noises. Mostly the hard part is keeping as still as possible for upwards of 30 minutes. They will put you on some sort of a bed and keep the relevant part immobilized but it still isn’t easy. That is, however, the hardest part of the whole thing. You feel nothing other than boredom and the urge to move your leg.
Like a moron I brought the 700 page hardcover I was reading. Try laying on your back and holding that behemoth above your face to read. Impossible. I suggest something with a favorable “takes forever to read” to weight ratio, like The Economist.
ETA: My whole body was not in. Just my lower half.
My only recollection is that it was LOUD. It sounds like you put your head into a steel drum and let someone beat on it with a sledge hammer. That’s what it sounded like to me.
The other thing is that they will tell you to make sure you don’t have anything metal in your pockets. If you bring a family member along, and they are in the MRI room, they will be told to divest themselves of metal objects as well.
In my case, they had lockers available to put everything into.
Chances are you will also have a smallish cage-like device (a “coil”, per se) placed around/near your foot. It acts as an antennae to more easily pick up the signals generated from your tissues, and makes a better/faster image of area being scanned. Different places have different machines with various accessories, so ymmv. I have used coils on elbows, knees, feet - about anything that is smaller than a ‘torso’. There is even a coil used for cranial imaging (most of the time anyways).