I woke up today feeling fine, great even.

For once this is incredibly frustrating. I’ve been doing my best to overload my system with borderline foods to trigger something for the MRI scan.

At the same time I also really don’t want to cause damage so I’m also relieved.

I’ve put so much work into healing myself and I don’t want to ruin all the good work.

So it was a weird one.

I decided I wouldn’t do any exercise or moving around this morning, that’s normally a guaranteed way to cause some sensation.

I ate food right up until my appointment and then took public transport to the hospital.

Lunch was salad and chorizo.  I wolfed that down along with some of Kat’s compliant starch free sugar free brownies.

I also had pork scratchings in the morning just to try and trigger something. I was convinced that they caused a problem before.

But I have literally never felt better than I do today.

All of this feels like a giant and risky waste of time. I’ve made myself feel a little bit sick just to try and ensure something comes up on an MRI scan.

My other hope is that they will find all those x-rays they seem to have lost from before because I know I wasn’t feeling good that day and hopefully they would be able to find what was going on in those.

I just don’t know whether that would show anything. My rheumatologist insisted you can see hints of inflammation on X-Rays and even pointed to a thin white line on my most recent one but that seems to contradict a lot of what’s online.

I got to the hospital in plenty of time and the whole process was very straightforward.

I had to fill out a form and on there was lots of stuff about previous surgeries and whether I had any metal in me.

I put all the details of my previous shoulder operation and procedure names in there. It turns out they didn’t really pay any attention to this.

I know it should be fine as they took all the metal out but still but for something that seems like it would be incredibly dangerous, they didn’t seem to give a monkeys.

I just had visions of myself being sucked up to this giant magnet and having parts of my shoulder ripped out of me.

A rather brusque but friendly lady told me to go and get changed in a little cubicle. 

She said I only needed to take my jeans off and I could leave my pants, socks and top on. I did that and then put on the little backless pyjama thing over that. You then have to shovel your belongings into what looks like a shopping basket.

I didn’t have to wait long for my turn. While you’re waiting you can hear the intense, industrial, slightly creepy sounds of the machine going.

There were two doctors in there and they explained what I would be doing.

She told me to lie down with my head in the padded clamp area. That sounds medieval but it was very comfortable and they put a cushion underneath my knees.

She had squashed some foam ear plugs for me so that they were ready to go in my ears and I put those in.

Then she took my face mask off of me because she said that had metal in it. They said I would be in there for half an hour.

It was a very strange experience.

You lie down in this futuristic coffin and you’re gently pulled up like you are on a conveyor belt.

It is spotlessly clean and white and before going inside you can see a pretty projection of some cherry blossoms on the ceiling. I was hoping that would be replicated inside but instead all you can see is white.  Your gleaming white spaceship coffin.

It did feel incredibly futuristic. In your hand you have a funny little squeezy thing. Squeeze this and that’s their signal if you need to get out.

I didn’t need it but I did find my heart was thumping and an incredible rate throughout. It was beating so loudly I was worried it would disrupt the readings, which is ridiculous obviously.

She told me to be still as I possibly could. I did my best but my heart was so frantic I felt like it was moving my whole body.

It wasn’t pleasant for the first minute or so. I did feel a bit panicked because claustrophobia does kick in. You’re having to trust that everything is ok but there would really be no room to move or escape.

But I did some mind over matter and quickly felt fine about the whole thing, though my heart continued to pound throughout the whole process.

The experience is a strange one because you are kind of shunted up and down up and down every few minutes.

It feels like you’re almost endless endlessly going through a tunnel and you have no perception of how fast you’re going or how far you’ve moved.

If I didn’t know better, I would imagine that I had travelled several metres, but in reality I only travelled probably less than a metre.

Throughout the process you hear these really unearthly sounds and they are quite rhythmic in a way.

There are the loud ones. There are short ones. They’re a longer more deep bass ones. 

All of them sound incredibly futuristic and it must be sound of the magnets going.

That was how I got through the process. I just focused on the noise and by the end of it I was actually quite sad to come out. I had gone into a calm state where it was quite enjoying it.

The doctor said she couldn’t see anything obvious on there when I came out. That made sense because I’m not feeling any pain at the moment so I’m not really sure what they would be finding.

Let’s see, I think the rheumatologist looks for different things on the scan. Finger’s crossed.

I left the hospital and it was drizzling but not too bad. I decided I would walk all of the way.