A few days and many x-rays and MRIs later, I get moved to a normal room on 3 East. The hospital needs my special room for someone with a possibly infectious disease. It’s not quite as nice a room as 360 and I have to share a bathroom, but it’s still a private room.
Late in the morning I take another trip to the MRI center. I’m set for a head and neck MRI this time. We’re grasping at straws I think.
The MRI starts, and about 10 to 15 minutes later the techs come running in saying the fire alarm is going off and there’s smoke throughout the building. The MRI is so noisy I couldn’t hear a thing. They unceremoniously yank me out and up and roll out the wheelchair I came down in. And we’re off.
There some smell of smoke in the hall outside the MRI center, but nothing serious. The only problem is the MRI center is in a true basement with no direct exits to the outside that don’t involve elevators or steps. Of course, the fire department who are already arriving in force, have shut down the elevators. So I get to haul myself slowly up the stairs, barefoot and in a hospital gown. The techs are great, staying with me as slow as I am. There’s a large fully equipped fireman on the landing, calming those people who are freaking out.
When we get to a lobby with good access to the outside, the techs find me a chair and then a wheelchair. After a short wait they wheel me outside — the sun feels great — and up the driveway to the main hospital entrance and back in and to my room.
It turns out that was no fire in the building. However, some landscaping mulch near the building did burn and the smoke was sucked in the building’s ventilation system. That’s why it was detected all through the building.
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