Heavy Metal

For the last year at least, I’ve had a swollen sternoclavicular joint, and if you don’t know what that is, it’s the joint at the end of your collarbone in the middle of your chest. No one can figure out why it’s swollen, and it’s extremely painful, so I was sent to see a rheumatologist who ordered an MRI. When the hospital called to schedule it, they told me not to wear any metal and asked me if I had any metal in my body. I ran through a mental catalogue, at which point, after having made a detour into a delightful reverie about becoming a human forklift, I determined that I was metal-free. I had carefully considered the surgeries I’d had over the years, and I assumed if a surgeon had left any metal in me, I would know it by now and therefore could enter the MRI tunnel without any worries.

I was WRONG. I am FULL OF METAL.

And how did I arrive at this horrifying conclusion? Well, I recently had an upper chest X-ray as a precursor to the MRI, and on Thursday, I was able to access the report through the radiology clinic dashboard. It was pretty humdrum, and I was getting more than a little miffed once again at the liberal use of the term “unremarkable” (although I was pleased to note that my lungs are apparently “well-aerated”) when it said this: Cholecystectomy clips noted. I was like “What the f*ck is a chole-thingy?” so I googled it, and it’s when you have your gall bladder removed, and I did that about 20 years ago. I realize I’ve just made it sound like I reached into my own abdominal cavity and pulled it out myself, and if that did indeed happen, you will note that I would have accompanied the pulling out of my gall bladder with a flourish and the words Abracadabra, but a surgeon did it, and he was a terrible magician. And I KNOW this because in the same way that a terrible magician would accidentally sit on the top hat and kill his rabbit, this person left METAL CLIPS inside my body. I’ve been setting off the airport security alarms for years and telling them it was MY BELT when, in fact, I am a human IED.

According to my research, there are different kinds of clips for this—some dissolve and some are permanent, but the issue is that no one even asked me if I wanted to become a cyborg, and normally I would have said YES, but in this case, there’s no upside—I mean, it’s nothing AT ALL like having forklift arms, and I was initially very upset (not to mention worried that an MRI might dislodge them, and then I would be slowly stabbed to death from the inside while I was in the MRI machine), but then I remembered the latest Suicide Squad movie. There was a variety of new characters, including a guy called Polka Dot Man, who could shoot polka dots out of his body and eviscerate people with them. Polka dots are a stupid weapon, but you know what’s not? METAL CLIPS. So now I’m going to write to James Gunn and suggest that, if he ever does another Suicide Squad movie (doubtful because both versions received terrible ratings), there should be a new character introduced. Her name is Heavy Metal and her superpower is shooting sharp pieces of steel out of her body:

Criminal: Who the hell are you?!
Heavy Metal: My name is Heavy Metal, loser.
Criminal: You look rather unremarkable to me.
Heavy Metal: Prepare to die.

25 thoughts on “Heavy Metal”

  4. The son of a friend of mine had to have major surgery to brace most of his upper chest cavity with titanium. Aside from the fact that he’s now Wolverine I shared with him that in 1952 a Swedish doctor named Branemark was studying the formation of red blood cells by placing titanium mesh over exposed bone marrow. He discovered the bone cells grew around the titanium rather than rejecting it, meaning it has all kinds of safe medical applications. Branemark was using a rabbit. Pretty neat magic trick.

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  5. The wife has this Swiss milk frother, a star-shaped doodad that spins by induction inside a cavity. MRIs are like that, you could have an internal frother. Maybe they, like my stents, are made of titanium, and non-magnetic.
    I’m of the opinion that humans are not evolved to live past 50. Biologically, mother by 15, grandmother by 30, great-gm by 45 — done.

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  8. Oh my god…I am so glad you had that xray done! I assume this means you won’t be having an MRI? Um, is it possible that it’s those metal clips causing you the problem in the first place?

    Please keep us updated!

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  10. WHO KNEW they leave clips inside you after gall bladder surgery, and THEY DON’T TELL YOU? That is crazy.

    Anyway, I hope they’re able to get the MRI or X-Ray situation sorted out and, more importantly, find the cause of the pain and swelling.

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