Hello, dear readers, and my apologies for the late blog today. I intended to write a post last night, knowing that I probably wouldn’t get a chance to this morning unless I got up particularly early, and then I forgot. And then this morning didn’t really go as planned, either.

CONTENT WARNING: Medical stuff, including vague descriptions involving needles. Nothing graphic, but I won’t be offended if you’re not up for reading about this.

The original plan this morning was pretty straightforward: go get an MRI done, then go get labs drawn, then come home and enjoy the rest of my afternoon.

Some backstory here: about ten years ago I had some weird medical stuff come up, and one of the investigative steps taken at that time was an MRI of my brain. There was a very small spot of some sort that showed up on my pituitary gland, but a couple of subsequent MRIs revealed no changes to that spot, and the symptoms went away, and so I sort of tried to forget about all of that.

Fast forward to now, and I’m having some as-yet-unexplained symptoms that are mostly just annoying, but this whole situation that happened ten years ago came up in the course of talking things through with my doctor, and we decided it would probably be a good idea to have another MRI done, just to be safe (also, I don’t have a copy of the original MRI and it’s been long enough that the clinic where I got that done has probably purged the records, so we want to establish a new baseline). So, I took today off from work and scheduled the MRI for this morning.

Only…I didn’t wake up early enough to be very hydrated before I left the house, and that was a mistake. They were able to do the first part of the MRI (without contrast), but when they went to inject me with the contrast solution, my veins (which are hard to hit at the best of times) were super constricted, and every time they hit one it basically collapsed on itself when they tried to start the injection. So, after three attempts to find a workable vein, they sent me home to hydrate, and told me to come back later this afternoon.

It was discouraging, to say the least. I was struggling to stay calm when they first put me in the machine – I almost pressed the call button to ask them to let me out, because I didn’t know how I was going to make it the full 20+ minutes in that claustrophobic space. But I closed my eyes and breathed and counted and wiggled my toes (which were outside of the machine), and somehow got over the initial panic. Still, after that, I was REALLY hoping I could just get it all over with at once.

I’ve decided not to get the labs done today – I need to be hydrated for those, too, and at this point I don’t think I have time to sufficiently hydrate, get labs drawn, and go back for MRI part two (to say nothing of the fact that I’ve already been stuck enough times today). I drank some coffee, which I know was probably counter-productive on the vein front, but which was necessary for my own sanity, and now I’m focusing on drinking water and keeping my arms warm so that, hopefully, when I go back in a few hours, my veins will cooperate. I’m trying to find the bright spots – at least I took the whole day off from work, instead of just the morning like I was originally planning – but it’s just not how I want to be spending my day.

Anyway, all that to say that I’m glad it’s almost the weekend. We’ve just about made it through another week – go team! Please keep wearing your masks and washing your hands, and please vote. If you’re in IL, I highly recommend this voter guide.