I’ve been waiting for this

No, I’m not talking about San Bernardino.  Important as it is, I’m a selfish human being.  Others are already talking about it and at the moment, I don’t have anything useful to add.

I want to talk about this.

That, boys and girls, is an MRI image of my brain as seen from the bottom looking up.  As with the gazillion other images taken that same day, it’s notable for what isn’t there, rather than what is there.  It’s an image of a perfectly normal brain.

Almost a month ago, I had to pull an all-nighter so I could do a “sleep deprived EEG”.  My migraines had taken a bad turn and the neurologist wanted a deeper look into things.  The results came back with a “focal slow wave”.  They wanted to schedule an MRI.

You don’t want to Google “focal slow wave”.  It will scare the hell out of you.  At best, it either tells you:

• You have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which would explain why my thyroid took the last train for the coast but will do nothing to fix it.
• You suffer from migraines.

Almost everything else involves “lesions”, which is doctor speak for anything from a healed injury to a cancerous tumor.  In this case, it mostly involved tumors.  Unpleasant tumors.

So while waiting for the MRI to be scheduled, occur and the results to come back, a process which took approximately 10% longer than forever, my rather vivid imagination was able to run through pretty much every scenario you can possibly imagine.  Multiple times.

The results finally came back today.  The scans were all normal.  Nothing found.

Probably 15 years ago, I had another health scare, this time with my heart.  In my family, with cardiac issues on both sides, you take that shit seriously.  So when I started showing the symptoms of a heart attack at work, they slapped me in a bus and hauled me to the ER in record time.  Since then, I’ve always said the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me is when the attending walked in and told me “It’s not a heart attack.”

“Your scans were all normal” has now tied for first place.