The following is the mass email I sent to loved ones after the MRI results were revealed by my Primary Care Physician
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"Sorry for the impersonalization of a mass e-mail. I hate getting them, and I think they suck, but in the interest of my delicate girl hands, it was easier than typing all day.
As some of you know, I have had what I initially thought was hysterical vertigo that surfaced a few days before the crappy pilot episode of the television show I hosted. (“Hysterical” in this case only implies that I conjured it up in my head out of nervousness, not that it was funny in any way… which it wasn’t.) It was like being a little drunk without the fun or improved self-opinion—not that I needed it anyway.
I initially went to the doctor about two weeks later, after the crappy show was finished taping, and it still hung around. Apparently people really do call a doctor for being drunk, because the appointment consisted of a number of the same tests that are administered roadside while bathed in the embarrassing light of passing cars.
“Now recite the alphabet backwards, starting with ‘f’.”
I was told to come back in two weeks if it stayed the same, and earlier if it worsened.
Two weeks passed without change, and I went in again. It was pretty much the same song and dance, but a little briefer, and my doctor insisted that I schedule an MRI. I told her that she was the doctor, so she should schedule the MRI—I don’t think they let common folk do it.
I thought that the possibility remained that it was my eyes to blame, since I had absolutely no other symptoms, and I had convinced myself that she only wanted the MRI because it meant more money for her office. I had visions of her staff popping open bottles of Dom and handing out MRIs like parking tickets.
Sneezing a lot? MRI.
Slammed your finger in a car door? MRI.
Delivering a pizza to the office? MRI.
But I went anyway.
Funny things about my MRI experience:
The lab tech was showing me to my locker to put away my hat and coat, and I said to him, “Oh, and I shaved my head too, like they asked.”
He said, “What?”
“I shaved my head like the girl on the phone said,” I replied.
“Who told you that?!?”
His look was priceless. Then I told him I was just kidding, and he looked very relieved.
The thing itself I found rather soothing. I confirmed that I could nap in it, and your head is held in place so you don’t really have to worry about flopping about—which you are not allowed to do anyway. It bangs around and shakes and sort of sounds like the background foundations for a Radiohead album.
He kept offering to play a CD for me, and I don’t think I would have lasted if I was stuffed into a vibrating tunnel with Kenny G. I think that is the name of his last album, though—The Vibrating Tunnel of Kenny G.
They give you a little rubber pump ball (like the kind they use for taking your blood pressure) as a panic button that will stop everything immediately and get you out of the tube. About halfway through, I squeezed it, and he ran in and slid me out.
“Is everything all right? What happened?”
“Sorry, man. I was just having a dream about CENSORED,” I explained.
Ok, that part didn’t really happen, but it fit well into the category of “funny things about my MRI.”
Unfunny things about my MRI experience:
I have MS.
Just thought I would let everyone know, and do so in traditional, abrupt Nik fashion.
Your Best Friend in the Whole World,
Nik"
#multiplesclerosis #diagnosis