Well, that was fun. Kids, be drug-free, stay in school, and don't get injured!
I won't try to claim that military health care is in the same sorry shape as the rest of the system, but you veterans will appreciate this story.
"My" civilian doctor asked the gatekeeper, Tripler Army Medical Center, to authorize my MRI for Queens Hospital because they know what the heck they're doing have the latest MRI technology. Tripler said yes last Friday and I had visions of civilian healthcare-- limo rides to the waiting lounge, free lattés and a Thai massage while I waited, and the undivided attention of a doctor for over an hour. (Oh, wait, I have that confused with Bumrungrad.) By 4 PM the following Wednesday afternoon (no phone calls from Queens, either!) Tripler said "Cancel that" and redirected me to the Tripler MRI lab. At least they agreed to do both knees instead of just the worse one. I hung up the phone and immediately called the MRI appointment hotline around ("This hotline is open until 1630") but of course it had closed for the day at 3:30.
So Thursday (yesterday) morning I called Tripler's MRI appointment line and they said "two or three weeks."
I said "Send me out to Queens".
They replied "No sir, we're still within 30 days." Sigh.
"OK, I can do it anytime, I'll take the next appointment. When is it?"
"Sir, we just had a cancellation open up at 1:15 on the 23rd."
"Great, but can you tell me where I can find parking at that time of day? The lot is usually full by 8 AM!"
"Sir, we don't mean 1315, we mean 0115. The parking lot should be almost empty." Yikes. Of course they'll use one machine 24/7 before they'll buy another one to lighten the customer load.
"Well, can you at least do both knees during the same appointment, or is that two separate appointments?" (Veterans have learned to ask this question.)
"Uhm, wait one." (tick tick tick...)
"Yessir, this time we can do both knees on the same appointment. Our supervisor said we should have the time since it's early."
After some more questions I learned that they'd call me if a standby appointment came open, but it might be as little as 30 minutes' notice. So we decided to leave the phone turned on at night for the next couple weeks.
At 8:45 last night I got a call: "We just had a 2:30 cancellation. Can you come in?"
"You mean 0230, right? Less than six hours from now?"
"Yes, sir, can you take it? We have other people waiting on standby..."
"Oh, no, no problem, really, I'll be happy to take the midwatch! Can I get a couple hours' sleep first?"
"Thank you sir, see you at 0200."
"Wait, you said 0230 earlier."
"Yessir, your appointment is at 0230 so you need to be here at 0200 to fill out the forms. See you soon!"
As Robert the Red mentioned, imagine that you have to dress for a magnetic field of approximately 1.5 Tesla, which itself is about 30,000 times stronger than the earth's magnetic field. See if you can find enough clothing to cover your body without including metal zippers, rivets, snaps, grommets, or other magnetic materials. Just leave the piercings, jewelry, and wristwatches at home. I finally decided to go with an old pair of surf shorts, a tank top, and rubber slippers-- pretty much what I wear every day. Bad tactical thermal-insulation error.
Parking was great. For the first time in my life I was actually parked within visual range of the Tripler entrance. This feature is normally only available to O-6s and flag officers.
I'd like to tell you more about the MRI machine. However us presbyopians aren't allowed to wear eyeglasses next to an MRI machine because they (our eyeglasses, hopefully not us presbyopians) have metal parts that are affected by the MRI's magnetic fields. TH will be happy to know that the biggest component on the machine, after its magnet, is its GE logo. (I didn't need glasses to see that.) I also couldn't tell exactly what was splattered on the machine's inner toroid at about the radius of my liver, but I'm sure it's not what I was thinking it was.
However I can confirm what everyone has already mentioned-- the gradient magnets make a godawful racket. Imagine standing between a fire truck's air horn and the neighbor kid's car alarm for three or four periods of continuous blasts between four and seven minutes each. Add a jackhammer for variety. I was wearing high-quality engineroom earplugs and my ears were still ringing after 45 minutes of this racket. (No noise-canceling headphones like Bumrungrad.) The MRI techs do their business in a separate room with an acoustic doorlock and a triple-insulated viewing window.
Oddly enough, considering GE's record on refrigeration equipment, the room was icy cold. We're talking meat locker, although I don't know if that was the machine's leaky super-cooling superconducting equipment or Tripler's air-conditioning policy. So after being racked into this multi-million dollar system in my warm-weather clothing I was given a $3.95 cotton blanket and admonished to stay very still ("Don't start shivering!") or we'd have to repeat the sequence. I was pretty sure that the MRI would notice there was no blood near the surface of my skin.
I did get a free CD of very cool DICOM files (thanks, Robert!). The included DICOM viewer even allows you to loop the images so that you can "fly through" your knee on a monitor (instead of during the actual sparring). I now know my axial from my sagitall from my coronal axes. I could pick out both ACLs (one per each knee), they seemed to be attached to all the right bones, and I think I could even see an MCL. No, I didn't learn that at Tripler, silly, I learned that from the "How Stuff Works" and the Medline websites.
Of course I still have no freakin' clue whether there's any damage to my knees. The midwatch staff doesn't actually include a doctor who could check the images while I was standing there (shivering) in case there was a problem or a question. The files will be looked at sometime today (as far as I can tell!) and if there are any quality issues then I'll get another standby appointment. (Is this the meaning of the term "doctor's hours"?) At least I got a second CD to keep, because I was given the first one to take to "my" civilian doctor-- Tripler would send one through the mail in about two weeks. Hopefully next week I'll get the damage report and any surgery options.
The most important lessons of all? I'm surprisingly mortal. I'll never practice "extreme ligament stretching" techniques again. From now on this martial artist is keeping at least one foot firmly planted on the mats during all techniques. When I've done a thousand quadruple kicks on the heavy bags then I'll be ready to try them during sparring, but perhaps I shouldn't be using them during sparring at all. Maybe at my age it's more important to avoid ever having to go back to Tripler again injury than it is to win a sparring match. Hard to believe, I know, but the concept is finally getting through the testosterone poisoning and the Boomeritis.
We'll see how long that lasts. At least when I'm wearing a knee brace I can still pop up on a surfboard, and the grommets paddle out of my way pretty quickly now...
