The images above are taken from the head MRI I had done last year. They would be at home hanging in the surrealist wing of an art museum or on the album cover of a metal band’s CD.

I was surprised to learn that MRI films come on CDs now, but my radiologist friend, Lakshmi, that I visited this weekend said most of these things are done digitally now. She flipped through my films and explained what all the black, grey, and white bits were without charging me $400 for it.

Each image on the CD is a slice of my head, as if they cut it up like bread and peeked inside. The way Lakshmi read the MRI was to sort through the images like they were a flip book, back and forth. Each time she ran the animation she looked at a specific part of the picture, like the brain stem or the sinuses, and looked for abnormalities. I have a healthy brain according to the films. Yay?

• Continue reading "The most expensive portrait I own"

Yesterday, I was all, “Hey, by the way, did I mention I’ve been in chronic pain for three months? I didn’t? Whoopsies!” For those of you sneaking in your blog reading at work, I shall summarize: my head has hurt constantly since February 18th. I was going to list everything I’ve done or considered here, but it got insanely long. (I have a headache notebook now just so I can keep track of all the doctor contact information and record all the drugs I’ve introduced into my bloodstream.) So today I’ll just cover treatments I’ve tried and tests I’ve taken. Tomorrow I’ll go over other possible causes/treatments I’ve considered and am still considering. I’m leaving out some of the specifics because I have privacy concerns and I don’t want anything to come back to bite me in the ass, even if I can’t completely visualize how it might do so right now.

Over-the-counter painkillers

Like most people, I didn’t immediately reach for the intravenous drugs, I reached for my medicine cabinet. During the first week [...]

• Continue reading "The headache that never went away: Part 2 – My medicine cabinet looks like a pharmacy"