It is fair to say yesterday’s trip to the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery was one of the most interesting trips to hospital I’ve ever had. There was a line-side fire at Waterloo Station, so it took 3 hours to do a 1hr40 train & tube journey there. Instead of arriving about 40 minutes early, I eventually got there 30 minutes late. Fortunately I’d been able to get in touch with them and they confirmed they could do the scan later, so it wouldn’t be a wasted trip.
When they were going over the details of my MRI, they said they needed to check about the instructions on the request, because it seemed to say the consultant wanted it done face down, and they never do them that way. It turned out the request was correct, so it took them a while to work out how to position me, the equipment etc. It is possibly the most uncomfortable imaging I’ve had done. The radiographers were really apologetic for the hassle. After, she said she had never been asked to do that in the 4 years she’s worked there, and that is in a specialist neuroradiology centre, so surely if it’s going to be done it will have been done there! I’ve since done a bit of research and they use face down for investigating breast cancer and that type of thing, but it mentions specially shaped equipment for that. Rather than having my head in the padded head-shaped restraint, I had my face on the front edge of it so my eyes and bridge of my nose were where it narrows where your neck would normally be. Given that my sinuses were blocked, this caused a lot of pressure across my face. I then had to angle myself to make sure my chest was flat on the bed, with my arms up around my head whilst trying not to snag the canular in my arm. I lost track of what time I actually went in for the scan, but they said that, given the unusual position I was in, they would try to be much quicker than the 1 hour 15 minutes it was booked for. Having the contrast injected part way through was a welcome relief as it at least meant I got a chance to wiggle my feet and hands for a minute or so.
When I came out at about 19:30, Cat and I headed back to the underground, where I checked the train situation. The web site at the time suggested that Waterloo was starting to run trains again over the next hour, and there would be a train at 20:39, so we got the tube back there. As we stared at the departures board, along with hundreds of other passengers, the departure time got further and further away. We eventually spotted that another train was boarding and heading to Southampton en route to Poole, so we squeezed ourselves into that one. I then proceeded to break down! It eventually took 4hrs20 to do the 1hr40min return journey.
I should be getting an appointment with the neurosurgeon in the near future to review the results. Hopefully the journey will be somewhat more straightforward next time!