"It's gonna be a piece of cake...Bren."

Oh boy, dear readers.  Today at 9:30 I go for my first MRI.  Relax.  It's nothing serious.  At least I hope.  I've been having some pain in my hip, making it impossible for me to full rotate my leg out at a ninety degree angle, or sit "like a pretzel"* and my ortho wants to be sure it's not a cartilage tear.  So do I since if I have to stop running, I am going to make some childcare  plans for my inevitable institutionalization.

Other than my big fear of needing surgery and having to be still for several weeks with no way to shake my sillies out, I am a little nervous about the test as well.  In addition to becoming a cripple, another side effect of my aging is increasing claustrophobia.  While younger, I was only freaked out by buried alive movies, now when I'm in an airplane, I have to actively fight my brain from thinking about the fact that I can't get out, sending me shrieking down the aisles.  So being faced with an hour inside an enclosed tube is not exactly on my to do list.

As soon as this test was brought up, I immediately asked my doc for some medication, knowing this was the only way i was going to make it through.  So here I am, test morning, with a single Xanax in my purse with H ready to drive me to and from the test.

And now I have another fear.  What if the drugs make me babble inappropriately, snapping my fingers in fromt of my own face, fascinated, ala Ginny Baker?

I have heard taking these drugs is similar to, although mot exactly like, being drunk. That you just don't care about things that normally bother you.  Like being enclosed in a tube...or saying inappropriate things?  What if the tech has weird body art, or a good song comes on the radio everyone tells me they have playing in the machine?  I can just see myself creaming the lyrics to the new Nicki Minaj song.

I've written before, I was too much of a goody-two-shoes to try any drugs whatsoever in college and this is exactly why.  I couldn't handle the unknown effects in an environment that encouraged jackassery.  Now I get to do it in a suburban hospital.

So wish me luck, dear readers.  Let's hope H doesn't wind up having to carry me out of the facility over his shoulder while strangers watch.  At least there won't be a photographer.

*Or "Indian style" for those of us old enough to remember the pre-PC days.  Those were the same days when you described your Asian friends as "Oriental", and we called our enemies "retarded" with abandon.