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.