claustrophobia, party of one

yeah, so i had my mri this morning. & normally i'm not claustrophobic. i don't fear small places. i don't get all jittery if i don't have tons of space. but man alive, this morning i was ready to have a first rate panic attack. i wound up being able to get through the imaging by closing my eyes & concentrating really hard to the morning show on ks95, which, the bastards, happened to be mostly commercials during the time that i had the headphones on. phooey on them!

so mri's were totally not made for the robust person. i mean, i know i'm not any skinny mini, but i'm also not shamu in human form either. & the little tiny tube was so small that my arms were brushing on either side & the top was just a few inches from my nose. definitely not a comfortable feeling. i felt hemmed in & trapped. like a cat under a laundry basket. i could see the outside word, smell the fresh air freedom, but it was just out of my furry grasp.

*note to self* no longer funny to let the cat get trapped under the laundry basket.

on the upside, they originally told me that i would have to lie perfectly still for a whole hour, & the imaging only wound up lasting about 30-40 minutes & then i was free. free-ee fallin' (name the tune & artist on that one) now i'm hoping that i don't have to stay guessing for weeks on end while the interpretation is done on the actual images. i'm so ready to just get a definitive diagnosis & start treatment for whatever it is that i have.

the pain meds are only helping very minimally. frankly, it scares the beejesus out of me that i can take two vicodin at night, wake up an hour & a half later in sheer agony, & then fitfully sleep for a few more hours before finally getting up for the day. that is not normal. that is so far out of the realm of normal for me. normally those things knock me out so completely that just one of them will have me feeling fuzzy for up to a full day or more. i don't want to be that girl, the one who's dependent on meds just to function.

& on the other end of the spectrum, i took a nice brisk walk this am with miss jenn when i got done with my mri. sitting around & moping & being miserable isn't helping me much, so i thought that perhaps some exercise might do a body good. my right butt muscle was totally killing me from my 20 minutes on the treadmill yesterday during my lunch break, but i pushed through that pain, & the back pain, & actually did the whole 26 minutes. we think it was a mile around the "nature trails" at her apt.

so until i get the medical okie-dokie to go back to my more intense workouts, it'll just be some walking for this chica. so walking with jenn, with jack, with my puppy walker, on a treadmill, in the halls at work. . . .i could almost write a dr. seus-ish book about walking & the places i'll go. & being relegated to just walking bums me out incredibly since i just got three new work out dvds last week. blech. no pilates for me for a while. but possibly the yoga. as long as i'm not on my back for too long. yeah, um, we'll let that one go for now.


ps "nature trails" = torturous hills & windy paths covered in mud, twigs, & other debris.