Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Lower back getting worse, or at least not better; though the symptoms have drifted to somewhere deep inside my hip and thigh, after a battery of stretchtests this afternoon my primary care physician assures me that what I'm feeling is a pinched nerve somewhere near the base of my spine. Proof is I can make my leg hurt by pressing in on just the right vertebra. MRI to follow Thursday, and why is it that they ask you if you've got metal in your eye before you get one? Wouldn't you have had someone take it out when it happened?

Good to see Molly back from college, up from new parental homestead to hang with her favorite faculty, which caused much happiness. After I picked her up at the CompSci Guy's house where she had been baking mediocre cookies, we had supper and a beer, and then sat on the living room floor and chatted while we threw the ball for the dog and Willow dumped the contents of every toyshelf onto the floor in a fit of territorial marking.

The students are back, too, but duty was otherwise boring. Oh well. Guess they can't all be decent trifectas. Work tomorrow morning, though it's my short day -- nice to have less than three hours ahead of you after a long weekend.

(Hmm. Back would seem to be one of those words which stops looking like a real word when you type it too many times. Back back back back back. Ack.)

Comments:

metal in your eye? that's a weird one. metal in your body makes sense (pacemaker, broken-bone supports left in, artificial hips), because the M in MRI is magnetic and the huge fields around your body can haul the metal around/fry circuitry.
good luck with it though. and hey, that egoscue book is good for relaxing/freeing up sacroiliac stress/postural-history

# posted by

Sal : 8:44 AM, October 20, 2004

Woah. No MRI for cyborgs, eh?

My guess is that the concern with eyemetal is exactly that -- if you had even the tiniest blip of metal in your eye (say, from years of finechip metalwork or something), it would be pulled around and destroy your vision during (and then permanently after) the procedure. Eyes being soft and fragile, this would be harder to fix than, say, a metal splinter for years ago in your legflesh. So they ask several times.

Kinda scary, actually...what if you DID have a metal splinter somewhere, a tiny sliver you never knew about, and it totally fried you during the procedure? High risk indeed.

# posted by

boyhowdy : 10:08 AM, October 20, 2004