Badly claustrophobic and the planning MRI is with the frame already on. How do people get through it?

I am posting this at half eleven at night which tells you where my head is. I have a date in September for a second target and I coped last time, just about, but the planning MRI was the worst forty minutes of my life and I have been dreading a repeat since the letter arrived.

It is not the frame. The frame was fine. It is being inside the scanner with the frame fixed to a headrest so you genuinely cannot turn your head even a fraction. Last time I got through it by counting and by being extremely stubborn about it and I came out shaking.

Has anyone found something that actually works? I do not want to be the person who ruins their own treatment day.

You did it once already, which is more than most people managing claustrophobia can say, so start from there rather than from the shaking.

Practical things that helped me: keeping my eyes shut before I went in rather than after, so I never saw the bore at all, and asking the radiographer to talk to me between sequences rather than leaving me in silence. They did, every couple of minutes, and it turned it into a conversation with breaks instead of forty minutes alone in a tube.

Ask about a mirror or prism attachment. Mine had a small angled mirror so I was looking down the length of the room rather than at the inside of the scanner, and it changed the whole thing for me. Not every unit has one but it costs nothing to ask.

Tell them before the day, not on the morning. I said something at my pre assessment call about struggling in enclosed spaces and it turned into a note on my file, and on the day two different people mentioned it to me before anything started. Nobody made me feel like a nuisance.

They also asked whether I wanted a mild sedative discussed with the doctor. I did not use it in the end but knowing it was an option was half the battle.

Pete, the thing you have that you did not have last time is knowledge of exactly what you are walking into, and in my experience that cuts both ways: it makes the dread worse in advance and the reality easier on the day.

What I would add to the excellent advice above is to be specific with your team about which part is difficult. There is a real difference between the frame, the scanner, the fixed head position and the noise, and the help is different for each one. Mine narrated every step before doing it, which sounds small and was not. Saying it out loud on the phone beforehand also means it is written down before you are in a gown and less able to advocate for yourself, which is the point where most of us go quiet and polite instead.

The rest of the run up is gathered in preparing for Gamma Knife, including flagging things like this early rather than on the morning, and the shape of the whole day is in the day of Gamma Knife hour by hour if seeing the sequence written out helps you the way it helped me.

One small thing that nobody told me: ask how many sequences there are and roughly how long each one runs. Knowing I had four to get through, and hearing "that was two of four" in my ear, was worth more to me than any breathing exercise. Counting down a known number is a completely different experience from enduring an unknown one.

Right. Phoning the unit tomorrow to ask about the mirror and to get the claustrophobia written down properly, and I am going to ask for the sequence count as well. Feels much less like something happening to me and more like something I have a part in. Thank you.