Observations on Growing Old, Part 1

This is not going to come as a surprise to a lot of you, but growing old sucks.

I'm sitting at our dining room table with my leg propped up on pillows and an ice pack on my knee.  A couple of weeks ago, while doing nothing more strenuous or exciting than GETTING UP FROM MY CHAIR at work, I seem to have hurt my knee.  There was a "Pop!" and a piercing pain up through my leg.  After self treating with ice packs, anti-inflammatories, and muscle relaxers, it occurred to me that come July, I intend to be trekking around the United Kingdom for two weeks so I had better get it fixed or else I could again end up enjoying the hospitality of a Scottish hospital!  (See previous blog entries, circa June 2012).

Anyway, I went to go see my doctor yesterday.  Dr. Marienau - who I love.  He's retiring at the end of August, so I told him I'm gonna put him to work before he leaves me to the uncaring devices of some new Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde-esque doctor!  My friend Annette tells me I'm his favorite patient.. and while it is nice to be told, it wasn't really necessary.  :0

Anyway, after telling him my woes we agreed that growing old is a bitch and he scheduled me for an MRI of my knee... feeling that it was most likely a soft-tissue problem.

This is not the first MRI I've had this year, actually it's only off by a week or so of my being able to say it's not my first this month!  In late February I started having bad, constant headaches and, my uncle having just recently passed away from brain cancer, I did not delay (well, not too much) in going to the doctor.  Dr. M sent me for my first MRI - here I learned a couple of things.  1) it was originally set to be performed at the hospital, but my insurance company called me to tell me that a) it was going to be covered, although it would apply to my deductible first and 2) that it would be $X if I had it at the hospital, but that if I had it at one of two other possible locations in town it would only be 1/2 $X.  So the first thing I learned was don't just go to the first place you're sent - shop around.  Being a world-class shopper, this should not have been a surprise to me, but...  Next, when I told my boss, Care-Bear, that I was having an MRI and gave her the story about the phone call and the price difference, she told me that her hubs had to have an MRI pre-knee surgery and his surgeon said that if the MRI was performed at this one place (which happened to be the place I'd agreed to go), then he wouldn't be willing to perform surgery based on the results of an MRI at that place - I gather their equipment might not be as state of the art as the hospital's so it wouldn't show the details that the other place's MRI's would show.  Lesson number two: not all facilities are the same - makes sense.  So I ended up going to Indiana MRI on John Street.  After assuring everyone that I had no metal implants in my body, I laid there on the slab for close to an hour trying not to move when the machine was making noise (because that was when it was scanning.

The problem, for me at least, was that it wasn't scanning constantly, so I'd begin to doze off and then WHAM! it would make a noise and jolt me back to life and ... let's just say my heart was given a good work out.  Afterwards, they sent me on my merry way with a CD of my MRI.  You KNOW I put it in my disc drive the minute I got back to the office so I could see it.  I didn't know what I was seeing, although what I did see looked fine in my humble medical opinion (FYI, I diagnosed my own gallbladder issues back in 2000).  The fun part is that it's a moving image, as the slices through the layers of whatever it's scanning.  So lesson three is that it's uber cool, especially as it moved through the eyeballs.  (See pic).

I'm reminded of about 25 years ago I had an EEG - electro-encephlagraph - and I remember still having cement on my scalp for about a week afterwards, and I remember Dad professing to be relieved to know that why the results didn't explain the source of my (then) headaches, they did confirm that I had a brain.  He was such funny guy. 

Anyway, back to today's MRI - I can tell you now, from experience, that the MRI of the knee takes longer than that of a brain, and if your knee hurts to begin with, it is very painful to lie there with your leg extended in the same position for over an hour.  Don't have the results yet, but again, they sent me off with a CD - I looked at it again and although there are more views of the knee (8 vs. 4), they aren't as cool as the brain because of the lack of eyeball stems and all but you can see like leg muscles and all.