Is it just me or are hospital staff looking a lot rougher these days? The big guys walking around in their scrubs today had deep black and scarlet neck tattoos, like they should have been bouncing at the Cabooze rather than escorting frail people down corridors. Then again, why not lean on the rocks of some biker dude when you're feeling down and out?
I filled out another set of forms and had to go through the metal detector checklist for MRIs. "Please answer yes or no to the following":
knee replacement
hip replacement
heart pacemaker
insulin pump
shunts
penile implant
Tee-hee. Except there was a Somali family with a translator and a Hmong family with another translator beside me and I bet no one was tee-heeing when they got to decoding that line.
At the beginning, they set my head between some soft clamps, slid a cage over my face and neck, stuffed my ears with silicone, and pulled me into this NASA-quality tunnel by conveyor belt. I thought about that love-hungry astronaut and decided I would never be able to pee in my own diapers. Then I thought about that writer, the genius savant profiled in the NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/15/garden/15savant.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) who controlled the debilitating effects of his outside world by reciting the number pi to 22,514 digits. He actually envisioned himself inside the world of pi. I tried adding numbers by two but I only got to twelve.
This deafening test took 45 minutes. The technician told me to keep my eyes closed. I asked if I could sing; he said only if I didn't move my mouth. The opposite of lip-synching, I guess. The beat of the imaging machine was like rap, then industrial, punk, then new wave, always missing a beat it seemed. It was John Cage-electric, then something like Devo* (crack that whip!) and I had so much trouble keeping up. I just breathed deeply and scrolled through a bunch of my 30-second memories. I wondered if they could see funny little images rolling by on their monitor (like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Dorothy's dreams of the witch biking through the storm). There goes my bus trip to San Diego; there's me praying before bed; here's another when I got sick on calamari in front of a whole group of people I wanted to impress, a little like George W.
I felt a kinship with Hannibal Lector, all bound up like that, and when they finally pulled me out, congratulating me on what a nice job I had done, I stood up and asked, "Anybody got a nice chianti?"
4 comments:
*I've been corrected. It wasn't The Knack!
*Luckily my observant friends keep me in line--it was Papa Bush not the Dub-Ya.
Wild episode.
One of my colleagues went through that same process not long ago. He's claustrophobic too, which strikes me as odd since he does some inspections of sewer systems...that is, he'll go 40 or 50 feet below the street and hunch through pipes that may be failing, and he's fine with that.
The tube was a bit much, though. Drugs worked well, though. And I think they may even have put a cloth over his face the way one might put a blanket over a bird cage....
-cK
We know why the caged bird sings. I'll take MRI tunnels over old viaducts any day!
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