Day one, as expected was the roughest.
I'm not usually one for references, literary or otherwise, but this is impossible to resist. Radiation is Inferno plus 2001: A space Odyssey with a splash of Frankenstein.
First there was the guide. He called me out from the waiting room, yellow medical folder in hand, a photo of me on its cover. The file contained everything pertinent about my brain. He opened the fogged glass door, the portal I'd been seen other people enter once a speaker-boxed voice called their names from above, and held it open for me to pass through.
Inside, we descended a long ramp. As we walked,he told me what to do each day I came. Sign in, wait for my name to be called on the loudspeaker, come down the ramp, and wait by the chairs until someone comes for me. He could hardly have been gentler--the bleakness of tone is all mine.
We turned the corner and down another ramp. At the end of that, we stood before two open doorways, separated by a large and tastefully decorated tree. Next to each doorway was a little control room, each with a large bay window looking onto something I couldn't see. Inside, a few technicians looked at screens. He told me mostly I would go in left door, but sometimes in the right. They did the same thing, he said. Ready?
We entered the left passageway--as we passed, I noted the door, which looked like a bank vault lock--a movable wall of metal, thick as a cinder block. On its face was the radiation symbol: a circle surrounded by three trapezoids with curved sides. The little circle, I thought, was my head. The trapezoids were the radiation shooting in; or, they were my thoughts shooting out; or, they were like the squiggly lines of a cartoonist to indicate some emotion--grief, fear, anger, but these were the mechanical forms of the emotions, since the lines were not squiggly at all but smooth and delineated geometric shapes. The caption read: Danger, high radiation area.
We descended still another long ramp, and as we approached the bottom, I heard music, indistinct at first, but as we neared I judged it soothing. It bouncing off the walls and up the corridor, but could not make it as far as the thick door. It got clearer as we reached the turn, and I could make out a voice. On the counter was a small CD player.
I turned to take in the room and there was the machine.
I wasn't prepared for it. I imagined something small, something like the photon guns of the sci-fi movies I'd seen. This was not a tool--this was an entity. It took up most of the room--everything was drawn to it, no matter where you stood, it remained the center. Silent and still as a statue, it seemed to brood over something it could never express or solve. Its body gave it bravado--an enormous rectangular box of flat metal jutting out from the wall into the middle of the room. The body had none of the delicacy I expected from sharp-edge technology, having instead the air of a brutish printing press, pistons and hydrolics hiding under its metal skin.
But the head was really the wonder: two sets of thick arms, also dark gray, formed a cross, jaws open, leaving a large square mouth in the center. In this middle of this mouth was a target board--there, at last, evidence of its sophistication: a circular digital screen with orange numbers, all single digits with one decimal place, some negative, some positive.
Only a few feet in front of its waiting mouth was the hard bed I was to be laid on. "That's where you stay," one of the two technicians said. They moved back and forth from the counters to the bed, then from the bed to the machine, from the machine back to the counters. They worked devoutly, reverently, in silent symbiosis with the machine, knowing what it needed when it needed it without a signifier passed between them.
On the bed there was a black molding in the shape of human shoulders and neck, and a plastic bowl where the back of my head would fit. The other technician was holding the white plastic mask of my head.
"You should feel the same when you leave as when you came in," one tech said. "You ready? Sit right up here. Now, scoot up a bit, a bit more. That's good. Now when you come out, don't get up right away, because you'll be up in the air, the table moves around up and down, will turn at some points so the machine can reach at different angles. Alright?"
The back of my head hurt because of the metal plate there. The white mask came over my head, and each technician stood on one side of me, locking the mask into place, tighter, and tighter with each snap, until I was frozen in place. A laser light from above hit just under my left eye, and the bottom of my vision there was bathed in a soft glow of red light.
"If you need us, just wave, we'll be watching from up there, in the window. But most people don't need anything, but just in case, so you know, we'll be right there, ok?"
I imagine they sealed the vault after they left me in the mouth of the machine.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Tests
Another MRI: Six in the morning, 30 degrees and dark. Lie me on the white slab, stuff yellow plugs in my ears, lower the hockey mask to keep me in place. "Hold this ball and squeeze it if you need me." What could I possibly need? I'm swallowed by the plastic tube.
This place is familiar.
Deep magnetic vibrations rumble through me, and beeps blare like apocalyptic car alarms, catastrophic computer errors. Everything's wrong, Everything's wrong! they scream, inches from my ears. The sounds repeat, and repeat, in the same pattern for minutes,and minutes, and soon these warnings soothe like gentle coos. It's the repetition that provides the relief. Five beeps, pause, five clicks, pause. After each pause the sounds move down my head, a centimeter at a time. Five beeps, pause, five clicks pause. Sometimes the magnets vibrate my chest, my stomach. A voice chimes from a speaker behind me that I cannot see, "Doing great, four more."
This one is chatty, I think. My last MRI techs were more of the set-it-and-forget-it, stick-em-in-and-ciya-in-a-half-hour variety. This lady checks in every few tests. There is a mirror above my eyes, slanted at a forty-five degree angle so that I can see out of the tube at the operator in the booth. I wonder why this is there. It's nice, I guess, for people who are freaked out, who need a smiling face, who need to be reminded that there are still humans in the world, that no nuclear bomb has eradicated the landscape, that no sudden plague has descended and wiped out half the population while they lay, safe, crooned into a trance by magnetic rays. It is easy to forget the rest of the world, ten minutes into that plastic tube, with the constant humming and whirring of magnets, scanning, seeing. . .but I prefer to be forgotten, isolated, prefer to have my communion with the tube and its hidden magnets, its smooth skin and moving parts I can hear but cannot see, connected to very wise computers that can map all the secret parts of my less-than-perfect brain.
I see the woman, safely behind the glass booth. I watch her, through a mirror, through the glass on whose surface reflects the image of my plastic tomb--I can see the circular hole, and the bottom of my feet. I think of half-eaten alligator victims. I can see the technician drinking her coffee, going to the bathroom, then sitting to start another test.
Another test. This time it's just beeps, beeps, high pitched, no deep hums, no clicks. It repeats, and repeats, and soon I hear it as a song--some noises from the left, some from the right, and it's steady. I listen closer, longer. . .more sounds emerge, sounds lurking inside the other sounds, sounds that emerge between the other sounds, that feel like a wave floating back and forth between my ears. As I understand its music, it feels safe. I like this place more and more, my little safe yellow-white tube.
I am pulled out, injected with "contrast," sent back in. I like this place because it's not the next place, where they radiate you. Me. I do not like that verb," radiate." It should only be used as a metaphor. Never literal. I am frightened of the brain frying I have agreed to, have signed for on a tiny digital signature box with a plastic wired pen, my name was barely legible, scratchy and jumpy--was it me or the machine? I still have time to change my mind, I assure myself. Nothing is happening yet. Five clicks, pause, five beeps, pause. Nothing is happening.
Upstairs, in radiation central, a nurse goes over side effects again--even with my eyepatch, I can see her compassion. Every time she states a side effect, "hair loss, headaches. . ." she makes a face, a face I can't describe except to say that it reveals that this is not easy for her, her face tells me her heart sears every time she explains these things to someone--which is likely often--every time she has to look at the fear and disbelief on another human's face, sitting two feet from her. That is all that separates us: two feet, and millions of miles.
Next they make the mask--my new attendant is blond with a constant and tall mid-western smile. Her compassion is hidden--or replaced--by lavish niceness. "And how are you today?" A different approach to the patient. I preferred the believable compassion route, but I'm sure that if everyone treated me that way, I'd wretch on an empty stomach.
"Patient," by the way, is a wonderful name. In as much as my life has changed, so has my profession. At the moment, "patient," is my career, my daily worry and reward, and "patience," perhaps the flickering human quality that best predicts success or failure--not of health necessarily, but of happiness and sanity. I can only do well or poorly in relation to this job; everything else in life flattens, looses a dimension, as a sphere to a circle; everything else becomes a banal, facile narrative of humdrum unsickness.
Of course, I say to myself, this is not true. The rest of my life does matter, and it some ways, it only matters all the more. It is not only my health that matters. So says the foolish babbling of the good old head, while the heart screams its maligned and unwanted bits of truth.
The mask--I lie in front of another tube, this time with a black rack for my head. The niceness keeps coming,"Winter's here, eh?" as she guides me down,and tells me each thing that will happen, very slowly, very clearly, how someone speaks to kindergartners: I am going to put you in this mask, I am going to press it on your face, it is going to be warm, then it will get very tight as it cools. She sounds deeply thrilled about this. She props up my legs with a bright red foam pillow, tells me to hold still.
I finally have a job. This mask is used to lock me down, hold me in a precise point in space, so that the radiation can line up where it needs to, so its rays find their mark. This is the middle of my brain--think snipers, not napalm carpet bombers. Precision. Precision. At this technical wizardry, I am amazed and horrified. I feel lucky, and jinxed. Precision, I think. Don't move, don't swallow. If there's anything I can do to save myself, any part I can play in this drama, this is it: don't move.
She presses the mask down on my face, and it is like a hot warm plastic bath. As it cools, it feels like a snake slowly constricting around my face. Soon, the plastic has hardened and I have a new face, a new skin. I am scanned again, this time with the mask. I wonder what I look like from the outside, with this white plastic mask with its consistent pattern of holes. I can breath through this, I think. I don't know why this is surprising, but it is. I can breath through this.
This place is familiar.
Deep magnetic vibrations rumble through me, and beeps blare like apocalyptic car alarms, catastrophic computer errors. Everything's wrong, Everything's wrong! they scream, inches from my ears. The sounds repeat, and repeat, in the same pattern for minutes,and minutes, and soon these warnings soothe like gentle coos. It's the repetition that provides the relief. Five beeps, pause, five clicks, pause. After each pause the sounds move down my head, a centimeter at a time. Five beeps, pause, five clicks pause. Sometimes the magnets vibrate my chest, my stomach. A voice chimes from a speaker behind me that I cannot see, "Doing great, four more."
This one is chatty, I think. My last MRI techs were more of the set-it-and-forget-it, stick-em-in-and-ciya-in-a-half-hour variety. This lady checks in every few tests. There is a mirror above my eyes, slanted at a forty-five degree angle so that I can see out of the tube at the operator in the booth. I wonder why this is there. It's nice, I guess, for people who are freaked out, who need a smiling face, who need to be reminded that there are still humans in the world, that no nuclear bomb has eradicated the landscape, that no sudden plague has descended and wiped out half the population while they lay, safe, crooned into a trance by magnetic rays. It is easy to forget the rest of the world, ten minutes into that plastic tube, with the constant humming and whirring of magnets, scanning, seeing. . .but I prefer to be forgotten, isolated, prefer to have my communion with the tube and its hidden magnets, its smooth skin and moving parts I can hear but cannot see, connected to very wise computers that can map all the secret parts of my less-than-perfect brain.
I see the woman, safely behind the glass booth. I watch her, through a mirror, through the glass on whose surface reflects the image of my plastic tomb--I can see the circular hole, and the bottom of my feet. I think of half-eaten alligator victims. I can see the technician drinking her coffee, going to the bathroom, then sitting to start another test.
Another test. This time it's just beeps, beeps, high pitched, no deep hums, no clicks. It repeats, and repeats, and soon I hear it as a song--some noises from the left, some from the right, and it's steady. I listen closer, longer. . .more sounds emerge, sounds lurking inside the other sounds, sounds that emerge between the other sounds, that feel like a wave floating back and forth between my ears. As I understand its music, it feels safe. I like this place more and more, my little safe yellow-white tube.
I am pulled out, injected with "contrast," sent back in. I like this place because it's not the next place, where they radiate you. Me. I do not like that verb," radiate." It should only be used as a metaphor. Never literal. I am frightened of the brain frying I have agreed to, have signed for on a tiny digital signature box with a plastic wired pen, my name was barely legible, scratchy and jumpy--was it me or the machine? I still have time to change my mind, I assure myself. Nothing is happening yet. Five clicks, pause, five beeps, pause. Nothing is happening.
Upstairs, in radiation central, a nurse goes over side effects again--even with my eyepatch, I can see her compassion. Every time she states a side effect, "hair loss, headaches. . ." she makes a face, a face I can't describe except to say that it reveals that this is not easy for her, her face tells me her heart sears every time she explains these things to someone--which is likely often--every time she has to look at the fear and disbelief on another human's face, sitting two feet from her. That is all that separates us: two feet, and millions of miles.
Next they make the mask--my new attendant is blond with a constant and tall mid-western smile. Her compassion is hidden--or replaced--by lavish niceness. "And how are you today?" A different approach to the patient. I preferred the believable compassion route, but I'm sure that if everyone treated me that way, I'd wretch on an empty stomach.
"Patient," by the way, is a wonderful name. In as much as my life has changed, so has my profession. At the moment, "patient," is my career, my daily worry and reward, and "patience," perhaps the flickering human quality that best predicts success or failure--not of health necessarily, but of happiness and sanity. I can only do well or poorly in relation to this job; everything else in life flattens, looses a dimension, as a sphere to a circle; everything else becomes a banal, facile narrative of humdrum unsickness.
Of course, I say to myself, this is not true. The rest of my life does matter, and it some ways, it only matters all the more. It is not only my health that matters. So says the foolish babbling of the good old head, while the heart screams its maligned and unwanted bits of truth.
The mask--I lie in front of another tube, this time with a black rack for my head. The niceness keeps coming,"Winter's here, eh?" as she guides me down,and tells me each thing that will happen, very slowly, very clearly, how someone speaks to kindergartners: I am going to put you in this mask, I am going to press it on your face, it is going to be warm, then it will get very tight as it cools. She sounds deeply thrilled about this. She props up my legs with a bright red foam pillow, tells me to hold still.
I finally have a job. This mask is used to lock me down, hold me in a precise point in space, so that the radiation can line up where it needs to, so its rays find their mark. This is the middle of my brain--think snipers, not napalm carpet bombers. Precision. Precision. At this technical wizardry, I am amazed and horrified. I feel lucky, and jinxed. Precision, I think. Don't move, don't swallow. If there's anything I can do to save myself, any part I can play in this drama, this is it: don't move.
She presses the mask down on my face, and it is like a hot warm plastic bath. As it cools, it feels like a snake slowly constricting around my face. Soon, the plastic has hardened and I have a new face, a new skin. I am scanned again, this time with the mask. I wonder what I look like from the outside, with this white plastic mask with its consistent pattern of holes. I can breath through this, I think. I don't know why this is surprising, but it is. I can breath through this.
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