MRI

I guess all of my exercise over the last four centuries has finally caught up with me. Last week I saw an orthopedic surgeon for my intense knee pain. I waited for around two hours to see the doctor and at first I thought I was being punished for being fifteen minutes late to my appointment, but alas all patients were being treating equally bad. Maybe I am spoiled with on-site health care at the place I currently work. Once the doctor came in to see me it was not a nice experience. He pushed on my knee quite forcefully, I guess to make sure where the pain was located, but I could have told him where if he had asked. Then he pushed on the front of my knee cap and that hurt just as much, but it never bothers me at all. He said that was common with runners to live with tendonitis and not know it. He also asked if I used to play basketball as he could feel a bone spur on my left knee cap as he pushed on it. I wanted to tell him to stop pushing on my knees, but at $139/hr I wanted to get my money's worth somehow. Actually I only had to pay $20 co-pay as the insurance will pay the rest.

This week I visited the Wake Radiology facility for an MRI to find out what kind of cartilage or tendon damage I had inflicted on myself. I had previously had an MRI when we lived in San Antonio as a first cousin of mine had a serious brain aneurysm and all immediate relatives were advised to have brain scans. It was kind of freaky as my whole body was inserted into a narrow tube. The initial paperwork said if you weighed over 300 pounds or were claustrophopic or had metal parts in your body an MRI was not in your future. I got the same notice this week! For the brain MRI there was a small 2"x2" window you could look out of directly up above your eyes, as if that was to help in any way. I just closed my eyes and thought happy thoughts to get through the 30 minute MRI. The end result was no brain aneurysm existed in my head, which is a good thing. I never saw the actual MRI scans or films. I did see the bill for the 30 minutes of extremely loud noise as it was $5000 of which I had to pay nothing as insurance covered the cost. This week I just had to stick my knee into the small tube and the same super loud magnetic rumble carried on for around thirty minutes. In the end I was handed the original MRI film scans and I have yet to see the bill.

The MRI output in my case was 6 x-ray films about 14"x20" in size, with each one containing around 20 snapshots of my right knee at different angles. I tried scanning them using our computer at home. After playing around with a couple of the scanned images using the GIMP image editor, I was only able to get one of them to have any visible contents. That is the one I posted with this blog entry even though it makes my knee look like a dinosaur bone! I will find out next week from my original orthopedic surgeon the prognosis. At least the MRI films look neat.