5 hour MRI

So I said I would talk about the five hour MRI. It was Tuesday. It's COVID season, so everyone was having to wait outside until it was your turn and they'd call you inside the building. It's just my quarterly brain MRI, and it has to be on a 3Tesla machine, so it's practically downtown, an hour drive from where I live. Scan was to be at 10:30 and they wanted me there at 10:00. Ok, no problem. I left home about 8:30 because traffic and road works, and got there shockingly early. My bad, I'll take the first hour sitting in the parking lot. So it gets time for me to show up and I call the number to tell them I'm in the parking lot and get all signed in, I come to the door and get my armband and all is well. I wait. It's hot. There's no shade in the car park, all just beating sun and Houston heat. I call at 10:30, they're not ready. I call at 11:00. Not yet. So I'm already soaked through. By noon I'm about dead. No food, no water, I'd not expected to have to wait outside for a scan I should have had an hour and a half ago.

The tech comes out and checks my armband, makes sure I have a vein for the IV. She says 'You know we're behind.' Like, no, no one told me. I had an ultrasound I had to get to at 2:30 back home in Katy. at 1pm, the IV tech comes out to get me and puts the IV in, then I go out again and wait for the MRI machine to free up. At 1:30 (1330) I finally get brought back to the trailer and scanned. Showed up at 9am. Got scanned at 1:30. Was out at two and barely made my ultrasound appointment. Only because I took the motorway and it was mostly empty. If traffic had been normal I wouldn't have made it. I was so thirsty. And sweaty and itchy and tired. I spent most of Wednesday being heat sick and hung over from the dehydration. The headache finally went away this morning.

Thank god I'm not sick. Like sick sick. How would someone who's really ill and needs a scan deal with that?