Wednesday, September 06, 2006 12:20 AM

One left foot

That's what went into the MRI machine today. Actually, both feet went in, but only one was scanned. I asked if I could get a CD and they gave one to me 5 minutes after the scan! Maybe I'll start a personal collection of medical image CDs.

They want you to not move the body part they're imaging, since it'll screw up the pictures. So naturally I had an (almost) irresistible impulse to twitch my foot the entire time I was there, even with the foam they stuffed in around it.

So I asked about the machine itself: is there a huge coil, or permanent magnets, or what? It turns out that the main coil is really small. They place it around the foot before moving you into the machine. I was imagining some really large stack of rare earth magnets from an even larger stack of dead hard drives...

I've now done ultrasound, a CT scan, MRI, and of course X-RAYS. What's left?