a bit of luck

I had a bit of luck today. Apparently. A bird shat on me. Why that is supposed to be good luck I still don't know and I don't really care. Maybe it means my MRI scan will be all good, and with that silky smooth link, I head for Edgecliff for my 5pm snooze in a tube. The place looked a little past it's heyday but better than the docs place. I had a bit of a wait until I was called, given a gown with ties at the (missing) back and told I to leave all my stuff in a battered old locker. All metal to be left behind, obviously. Mike had told me yesterday that if you have any small metal particles in your eye then the machine can start your eye spinning and basicallty rip it to bits. Thanks Mike! I'll bear that in mind as I slide into the tube.

I was given ear plugs and told that the scan would take around 15minutes and near the end I would have some stuff injected into my arm that would allow them, in those last 2-3 minutes to get a better scan of how blood flows around my brain and eyes. I laid back on the bed/bench/table/whatever that was poking from the machine, had a large pillow type thing put under my legs and told that I should lay as still as possible. It was going to get noisy but people did tend to doze a bit. Fair enough. My head was laying on a pillow type thing shped to hold, well, a head. Then another contraption comes down over your head and they wedge some flat ear muff things between this brace and your already plugged ears. I was not going to get music piped at this place. I was given a squeezy thing to hold that would would alert them shoudl I squeeze it. All OK, the bed slid into the tube.

It was a tight squeeze and I chose to keep my eyes closed for pretty much the entire time. There seemd to be an air-con type breeze, the bed was comfortable enough and had it not been for the fucking racket the machine makes it would not have been as bad as it was. Twice I got a bit freaked. Once near the begining when it got what I think was it's noisiest. That was not nice. Head in brace, slid into a tube and a very, very, very fucking loud metallic crashing going on all around me. The noise - not sound, noise - changed a fair few times from a god awful and monotone racket to something akin to a bongo solo to daleks impersonating Donald Duck. Basically it was variations on the theme of nbeing held fast in a very noisy metal tube. Second slightly freaky moment was after they slid me out, stuck the needle in my arm - did not see, only felt that as I was still held in the neck/head brace - and slid me back in again. I felt something move at the back of my neck, and although the rational part of my brain told me it was probably one of the gown ties moving, the other part, lets say the other 99%, was screaming about killer spiders in the tube with me and my spine being sucked out of the back of my head by this fucking great magnet that now, magically, could suck bone as well as metal. So I was glad to find that I was still in one piece when it was all over, thank you very much, here is some money and I'm off.

Decided to walk home, straight up Ocean Street and across Centennial Park. I discovered that you can see Botany Bay from up near the Woollahra Gate. You can when the weather is as bloody gorgeous as it was this evening. I barely gave a thought to the results of the test as I wandered home. Weird. Even now I feel less oppressed, if that is the right word, than I did before. That despite the certain knowledge that I am every bit as well, or as unwell, now as I was in the lead up to the scan. I don't feel too bad right now and my mood has lifted, so all good.

What is not as good, in a nerdy sense, is the loss of the tool bar in blogger. So no pics, no links, no control over font other than bold or italic. So who knows if this will end up arial small. Maybe it's a Firefox thing. Lets check IE...

Hmm. Nothing to do with Firefox, more something I must have changed and now, it appears, I have changed back. No idea what. I guess that is what 12years in IT gets you.