The Marsden MRI Experience!

Having volunteered to take part in the MRI clinical trial to see the effect it had on my cancer I had to sign a consent form to go into the doughnut!  I didn't mind as long as they don't send me the electricity bill!  Now I was pretty well briefed several times over as to what to expect, that is:-

• You lie still in a confined space for 30 minutes or so (I got the "or so" bonus I think).
• It is noisy so you need to wear ear protection (really).
• Inside the ear defenders are head phones so they can play music and tell you when to breath (very helpful).
• There will be a lot of noise and as a bonus heavy vibration, oh and by the way there will be metal plates resting on your poor old chest and at one point they will get warm!  Am I to be toasted?
• Finally in your left hand will be a rubber ball, squeeze it hard and you will be ejected from the tube at high speed! I made that bit up, the squeezing of the ball stops the machine and gently returns you to the real world.

I hadn't paid a lot of attention to the briefing, but it was all true. Having made me comfortable lying completely flat, the angels departed the room, someone pressed a button and I slide into the doughnut.  It felt like being a suspended animation capsule in a space ship heading for Alpha Centauri.  I was lying there all relaxed when a voice asked what sort of music I wanted, having discarded Elton Johns "Rocket Man" as being a bit OTT I asked if they had anything by Dire Straits?  Sadly they didn't (so now I know what to put in their Christmas stocking)! Eventually we settled on some "Easy Listening tracks", a bit of a waste for what was about to happen.

What they said was all true! The noise was really noisy and the vibration was like someone hitting the machine with a sledge hammer, the plates got warm towards the end and the music was all wrong, it should have been heavy metal!  As someone who use to travel into London on the underground (railway) and as a caver I was use to confined spaces. The inside of the doughnut was less than 2 inches from the tip of my nose (I obviously have a big head, no your not surprised) but what made it wonderfully non claustrophobic was that some inspired engineer had arranged to have cool air blowing down the tunnel and over my face. Brilliant!