Zen and the Art of Speedskating

A personal blog, when it functions at its best, is really an opportunity for readers to see the world through another set of eyes, to see “inside” someone for a moment through their words.

Well, here is an opportunity to take that metaphor one step further, as here is an image from my MRI this morning! The bones of my thigh and shin are clearly visible, as well as my ACL in the center. This is a cross section, somewhere behind the kneecap. The Doctor suspects an injury to either the Pleica or the Meniscus, both are soft tissues that cushion and guide the bones, and the Meniscus is clearly visible here as the separation between the bones.

Of course the natural thing to do is to look at this image and see if there is evidence of the injury in it. As laypeople, to do this is as fruitful as peering into the night sky trying to discover if a meteorite will someday destroy the earth. We don’t have the training or experience to really understand what we are seeing. All we can experience is the wonder of looking; and it’s pretty amazing; this is the inside of my knee a few hours ago!

I meet with the astronomer/doctor Wednesday.

My friend Carla described the sound of an MRI machine as like “giant ladybugs walking across the earth”. The MRI I spent the better part of an hour underneath sounded to me like the yammering of WWI era machine guns, firing at each other across an echoing valley (weird associations, as these are both things neither Carla or I have ever experienced). The very nice MRI tech said that one patient described an an MRI as sounding like “an antique John Deere tractor”. That works too.

A few days before I had my MRI, I had to answer a surprising questionnaire that included items like “do you experience claustrophobia” or “have you ever suffered shrapnel wounds” or if I work with metal a lot (mechanics & similar trades get metal slivers in their hands/eyes, very bad).

MRIs use extremely powerful magnets to work their visual magic, magnets that evidently can do things like pull pins out of repaired bones, metal slivers from skin, or destroy pacemakers. I had to remove all the metal from my body before I squiggled myself under this MRI (belts/zippers/keys). But I did forget to take off my titanium wedding ring, and although I did not feel it actually move, my ring finger tingled in the same way as the tissues of my knee. The kneecap looks so empty here, fragile like its filled with crepe paper, not like the meaty head of my calf muscle crawling upward from the right. Or the toughened X of my ACL linking the bones.

Thanks for reading, more on Wednesday (I did my hard jump program tonight, felt really good, but the knee is sore now, and I am icing it as I write this).

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