All MRI'z on me.

So, I had the MRI today. I went out last night and decided to try to throw like a madman at dodgeball so the elbow ligaments would be properly beat up when I went into the big freaky tube. Of course, it would have helped if I got to throw more than 2 or 3 times each game before I got pegged or caught out. And then all the beer I drank afterwards probably loosened the ligaments right back up again. Oh well.

As for the MRI? Talk about anti-climatic... I don't even get to find out the results until I go back to visit my good friend the doctor in a couple weeks. And pay another $30 copay. So weak. Not as weak as my shoulder today, though. In order to get my elbow properly in the big gigantic MRI tube, they had me lay on my side, with my arm outstretched up above my head. I had to keep the inside of my elbow facing up and my palm up also. No big deal, right? Well, as the assistant pushes me in she says, "okay, now you just have to keep that absolutely still until it finishes." I think, okay, that's no big deal. I'm not comfortable, but it's not painful either. Sure, my shoulders are too broad to fit in this tube and I'm hunched over but it'll only take a few minutes and I'm done, right?

Not quite.

35 minutes and countless cycles of hums, buzzes, drones and chucka-chucka-chuckas later (good thing for the earplugs they gave me) she finally slides me back out of the machine. I was thankful for that for three reasons: first, my hand had fallen completely asleep at this point; second, my shoulder felt like jello; third, I was literally going insane of boredom since all I could do was stare at the inside of the tube or close my eyes but remain awake (the random noise kind of made sure of that). I wished I had my iPod with me, but then remembered that my head was inside a giant magnet and thought better of it.

You'd be surprised at how much you contemplate your existence when forced to do nothing but sit still for half an hour inside a giant metal tube. You think of the old friends you haven't spoken to in years; you remember songs that had been forced out of your head long ago and wonder how you still know every single damn verse; you contemplate just what man's greater purpose on this earth is, whether it's to create or destroy; you wonder who the hell thought of sticking somebody inside a big metal tube and running loud magnets all around them at different speeds in order to get an image of their insides; on the same token you wonder who the hell saw a potato that had liquefied and decided to drink enough of it to get trashed, thus inventing vodka; you ponder the continued popularity of country music and NASCAR racing; you mentally add up the exact calories you've consumed so far that day; you mentally write another scene in your screenplay and then forget it all; you contemplate the blog post about all of your thoughts. In other words, you get a lot to think about when you can't do anything else but think. And if you're me, all you think about is More Junk. ™.

And then two weeks later they tell you how much physical therapy you'll need in order to fix the thing they were scanning in the first place. Fun!

In short? MRIs = not much fun. Thanks for your time.