The MRI didn’t feel like anything. It wasn’t until the neurologist showed me images of my brain with my eyeballs right there in the front that I felt like I was going to have a panic attack. I have no idea how regular people just laugh off stuff like that. Awful existential crisis level dread seeing my mental meat.
For anyone wanting to relive that experience, you should know that (in the US at least) you can go to the imaging department at the hospital and get all of that data on a CD, and there's some good free software to render it. I've got a 3D print of my head somewhere that I made from a CT scan.
I think it can handle a few other formats as well. Once they are .nii(.gz) files, then mricrogl (https://www.nitrc.org/projects/mricrogl) should be able to render it - of course, for a brain scan - this would be your whole head. Brain extraction is performed by more specialized software, but that would get you started.
When I did it, I got the guy in the office next to me to put his DVD drive on a file share so I could copy to modern media. That was probably at least four years ago, so not sure if I could do the same now.
I had a similar feeling when the doctor showed the MRI images going progressively deeper into my brain. It was truly bizarre and made me squirm in discomfort. I hadn't expected to feel that way.
Former epileptic, I've had dozens of MRs and CTs. It's rote for me to see and I never had a visceral reaction and in fact I find it pretty fascinating. The one that I do have that's a standout and quite shocking is my first post-lobeectomy MRI. There's a very noticeable void where my right temporal lobe (+amygdala, cerebellum and hippocampus) were resected. Great conversation starter.
