With an MRI, doctors analyze the inside and outside of your body to see how you’re doing. Sometimes they find some hidden problem, like a broken leg or a heart valve problem. Other times, they’ll look at everything from health issues to stress fractures to explain why your body is going into overdrive at the moment. Regardless of what kind of medical problems you may face during an MRI, it’s essential to understand what to expect. Sometimes it will be a scary experience for you – especially if you have one right now. But you can use it to your advantage to better look at an issue that’s been bothering you for a long time.
You’ll be entirely still inside the machine when an MRI is done. The machine itself contains all of the equipment that makes an MRI work. It has two parts: an outer portion made of a strong material called a lead and an inner part made of a different kind of metal. The day before your scan, you get to relax for about seven hours inside the lead-lined room. The area where you lie is called a bore, and in an MRI scan, this bore gets super hot – up to over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit!
The hot air comes from a giant fan spinning outside your head on the scanner bed. If you have cold hands or feet (or any other part of your body), it will help them warm up before they get scanned inside the machine. During your scan, doctors move around behind and ahead of you like they’re dancing in a concert hall. You won’t see what they’re doing because everything happens on top of you: They put special covered glasses on their eyes to see what they’re looking at – but they can’t touch what they see with their hands or their feet (like how we could if we were there).
extremity MRI in Sparta, NJ is different. Instead of the super-hot air coming from the machine’s fan, ultrasound uses ultrasound pulses to heat blood inside your body – so it’s just like a regular MRI! If you have cold hands or feet, they will warm up using the ultrasound waves that pass through your body. But – and here’s the hard part – the pain of getting scanned has to be equal to or greater than that of the pain of having a blood test.
