Hey Woodsy
I empathize your plight regarding MRIs ... having suffered through a couple of one hour sessions of the full body insertion-type about 10 years ago. Luckily for you, the machinery has dramatically improved in the decade since I last experienced the affect of super conducting magnets surrounding a chamber cooled with liquid nitrogen in which your body just barely fits and despite the warm air circulation, feels about as cold as the touch of the grim reaper himself! The experience is punctuated with piercing raps arising from rapid scanning of the magnetic and radio frequency fields which for all intents and purposes sound much like several people beating on the outside of the tube with sticks. All the while, several of your nuclei are being stimulated to higher energy levels and during their return to ground state emit a resonance signal which can be detected and displayed at high spatial resolution in three dimensions ... pretty amazing stuff, eh? And you thought this whole thing was just some kind of torture meant to test your willpower?
Ten years ago the machines had core tubes that were less than 24 inches in diameter … and the magnets were not as powerful therefore the experience took more time … also a data collection parameter comes into play here, modern computers can collect and process the output signals at much higher speeds.
It is interesting you were scanned for almost an hour … seems a bit long for a typical run on a modern MRI. What were they specifically looking for? Did they inject you with an opaque “dye” during the run … if so, they usually make a run with and without the dye perhaps explaining the long exposure? Another possibility is that the human MRI was unavailable so they put you in the veterinary unit usually employed for scanning horses, asses and other large animals? I think they also use these in the morgue to do virtual autopsies ... did you notice other folks lying around with their heads covered up?
Overall, it could simply be your ‘steely’ personality that necessitated the scan time. You see, anything magnetic tends to cause difficulties with this technique … guess that rules out any lead in your hind end, or titanium in your back, anyway? Hope this experience leads to a better understanding of your current condition and therefore a quicker repair/recovery.
As an interesting sidelight … in my case, neither MRI ever showed anything interesting ... just a lot of pretty pictures! However, they were concentrating on my head … obviously a place largely inhabited with vacant space! The good news is that a little old fashioned surgical ‘rooting around’ on the bottom of my brain with a power drill, some probes and a microscope solved my problem. Let’s hope that something similar, perhaps a little lower on your anatomy, will ultimately solve your problems in the very near future. Good to read you're back on Kadie ... keep on steamin' !!!
terry nestrick