PERSONAL

0

2,854

Neurological Abnormality

9 years ago393 words

I had a brain scan, and there's something wrong with my brain.

As part of my psychology course, I have to be a guinea pig in psychology experiments. In the last week, I've had an EEG (where you wear a cap with nodes attached) and an fMRI (where you lie in a big brain-scanning machine). I was especially curious to do the latter because you're supposed to be given images of your brain to keep, and I thought that looking at my own would be quite a surreal experience. I wondered whether there might be anything unusual about it to validate the constant feeling that there's something off about me.

I checked my emails earlier to see if I'd been sent the images... but instead saw an email from the head researcher saying "I need to see you to talk about the results of your scan".

Worrying!

It was important enough for her to stay overtime in work to wait for me, so I headed over there immediately, terrified that it was some kind of huge lesion or inoperable brain tumour that'd turn me into a vegetable. I've worried about having a brain tumour all my life, and always felt that there was something wrong with my brain...

As it turns out, I do have some kind of very unusual abnormality, but since the researcher isn't medically trained (apparently, even if you're a neurologist who studies brains all day, you don't necessarily know what'd happen health-wise if bits happened to be odd), I'll need the opinion of someone more specialised before I can know for sure whether I should be worried or not. At this point, it's just a 'better safe than sorry' kind of thing.

Still, when I got in the fMRI machine, I was told that occasionally oddities are found in the scanned brains, but it's very rare, so it was unlikely to happen to me. "I bet it does happen, though", I thought. And I was right!

Knowing that my brain's possibly broken evoked all kinds of mixed feelings... Fear, of course, but also a strange sort of elation or gratitude; it put a lot of petty problems in perspective, and made me realise that life is more precious than I felt it was when I took it for granted.

I don't know where things will go from here though...