My appointment was scheduled for 6:45 a.m. Now, an MRI before breakfast, before, even, I've managed to shake off the burrs of sleep and insert the day's coffee IV, strikes me as a squalid defilement of all that is human. Why so early? I live in a rural community and the nearest hospital is located in the county seat some 15 miles up the road. The county hospital does not have an MRI scanner, but a truck bearing one comes every other Tuesday, and on this particular Tuesday it was beginning its rounds at my county's hospital. I arrived at 6:30, knowing that when I reported to the reception desk I'd be spending approximately 15 minutes answering the same questions I've answered on previous visits, filling out the same forms I've filled out on previous visits, and signing various documents confirming that I've been told this or shown that—all of which I've done on previous visits. I then took a seat in the waiting room and picked up a stray copy of Midwest Living, just to scan, for I expected to be MRIed at any moment.
At 7:15, the hospital's lab technician asked me to follow him to the lab so he could draw some blood to test for something or other. "Wait a minute," I said, "I've been to my doctor's office twice in the past week and both times she drew blood. And one hour after the last visit, I got a phone call from her nurse telling me they hadn't drawn enough. So, I had more drawn just yesterday at the local clinic. I'm getting a little tired of being poked, penetrated, and tapped. I feel like a toothpicked cocktail frank in a medical buffet." Truth be told, I'm no High Nooned Gary Cooper when it comes to needles. Perhaps I suffer from aichmophobia, the fear of sharp, pointed objects. No doubt, I am an exuberant sulker; as Voltaire observed, I take "pleasure in complaining" and "delight in viewing only evil." But, he checked his records and, sure enough, he had the blood the test required. Next, he began reading a series of questions, all of which, I quickly saw, had to do with surgeries that would have implanted some ferric object inside me—screws, stents, pumps, and the like. After the 5thquestion, I said, "Look, let's save ourselves some time. Other than a tonsillectomy when I was 3 years old, I have never had surgery of any kind." He was, however, a man indentured to the fierce banality of a process for which he was merely a carrier, not the creator. He continued asking, dutifully checking the "no" boxes, and had me sign a form saying I'd been asked the questions. Then back to the waiting room and Midwest Living, which I now began to read.
In the middle of an article about a corporate executive who had fled his Manhattan suite for small town Iowa living and designer bird-house building, I was called for my MRI. It was 8:05. "You know," I told the two attendants who walked me to the truck, "I was told my appointment was at 6:45, and I'm not a little pissed off that I've had to wait an hour and twenty minutes. Now, I know these things happen, and it's probably not your fault, but, damn, an hour and twenty minutes!" "Oh, I'm sorry," one of the attendants said; "it seems a miscommunication occurred between your doctor's office and the MRI scheduler." A "miscommunication occurred." Such a convenient use of the passive voice; how cleverly it obscures assigning anyone fault, how sly its practiced use in hemming the ragged edge of a patient's anger. Well, I was having none of it. I'm not an English teacher for nothing. "That may well be the case," I said, "but, you know, I'm not in the mood to be Strother Martined." They looked perplexed. "You know, the actor who played the warden in Cool Hand Luke? His tag line is, `What we got he-ah is a failure to communicate." They hadn't seen the movie.
The MRI itself, believe it or not, was a warm Pacific slipstream in the thin, cold current of my wintery discontent. Stretched comfortably on the table, covered in two blankets, head padded in place, the on-call bulb firmly grasped in my right hand, I was gingerly slid into the center of the machine—birth in reverse, a return to the womb. Sure, instead of the soothing beat of the maternal heart, I heard only the cacophonous clang of jackhammer staccato and the stiletto chir of dial-tone buzz, but I tried to imagine it as the atonal music of a John Cage or Arnold Shoenberg. Imagination, however, deals with the essence behind reality, and when that ear-assaulting clangor proved impossible to get behind, I resorted to a strategy I have used intermittently in the past in similar situations: a recurrent fantasy involving Salma Hayek and cellophane—a fantasy so potent that, with five minutes to go in the procedure, it got me through being slid out for yet another poking and penetrating, this one with some strange brew to "provide contrast." Fantasy does not genuflect to the imperial demands of reality. Fantasy is dissociation from reality. I've always been good at dissociating.
And then, finally, I am released from the magnetic womb, rebirthed, released into a world where breakfast and a Mr. Coffee machine await. "Good job, Jerry," one of the attendants said, "we've got clear images." This, of course, was the verbal equivalent of a lollipop, my "good job" being only my capacious talent for lying still. Little did they know the role Salma played in that stillness. I did worry briefly that the images I had conjured might, somehow, leave a residue, a resonance, in those magnetically-generated images of my brain, and that, if they did, they had the potential for being WikiLeaked. That could prove embarrassing. Is the mind in the brain? Detached immaterially from it? Well, that's a cirque du soleil of debates, best left to the experts. I shrugged it off as a kind of wrestling beneath my weight class.
It is reported that French novelist Honore de Balzac carried a cane upon which was written, "I smash all obstacles." Upon hearing that, Franz Kafka declared his cane should read, "All obstacles smash me." Were it not for Salma, the efflorescent Salma, the luminescent Salma, the Salma who redeemed my MRI experience with the magnetic resonance of fantasy, I would have exited that MRI scanner truck, halt and hobbled, leaning heavily on Kafka's cane.
http://open.salon.com/blog/jerrydee/2010/12/22/my_mri_experience
