Hi, yes, I did have an MRI a few weeks ago. The last one I had was about 2 years ago when I had neck pain on the right side. It showed some further degeneration, but not much different. The interesting thing I found was the doctor writing the MRI report this time around was more thorough in his descriptions.

I had to beg my PCP to order the MRI. She wanted to send me to pain management first, then I would need a current MRI ordered from them before they could safely do any injections (I’m not sure about that), then wait for another appt, then wait for a procedure, lots of waiting, but that’s OK, I would love to not have any invasive procedures and get better with exercise! I finally convinced her to order an MRI when I said “wouldn’t it be better to know what is going on in my neck before we decide which specialist I should go to?”.

The pain on the right side of my neck (2 years ago) finally went away (thank you, God!) after a year of PT and doing the exercises faithfully. I continue to do the PT exercises and have gone again to PT this year for my left sided neck pain. Worse thing is I can’t drive very far because the seatbelt causes a big pain flare after about 20 minutes of driving.

The MRI of my cervical spine took 20 minutes. They only put my head/ upper chest inside the machine and I did visualization and counting backwards by 3’s to keep my mind off where I was.

I hope you can get some relief! Vertigo is hell, I had it for 1 day when I transitioned off Gabapentin and I hope I never feel that way again! Now I’m getting headaches that radiate up from my neck into the back of my head that get worse when I bend over. Strange. I also have Sjogrens auto-immune disease. Hard to know sometimes what’s causing what.