By Randall A. Wells, randallawells@yahoo.com March 2019.
The other day at age 77 I experienced an MRI scan. A magnetic, or perhaps magical, resonance imaging produces a sort of photograph that helps a radiologist make a diagnosis. (My own turned out OK.) This machine, housed at Insight Imaging in Roanoke, Virginia, was the “open” type, unlike the tunnel I had survived decades earlier with the help of two pills and five fingers—my wife’s, which she reached far inside to keep touching my shoulder. The procedure was “non-contrast,” so it required no i.v. , dye, or chemical.
The aperture seemed maybe eight inches high and four or five feet wide. As I lay outside on firm padding, the radiology technician offered me a blanket to cover my green scrubs. But I declined in favor of cool air, which would defray a sense of stifling. She handed me pink ear plugs, and I gladly accepted a small cloth to cover my eyes, despite the image of a firing line. She also handed me a “jeopardy button” to push if I started to dry-drown. I guess my head somehow went into a framework like an oversize catcher’s mask. Then I was sliding bald-first into the machine, grateful that the attendant had been sunny, for as I closed my eyelids I saw only darkness.
BLAST! I flinched as my pinks pulverized. Then came a firm but courteous knocking, whack-whack-whack-whack. Another explosion as if a stereo had been turned on at high volume. Shaken but OK, I even regretted the waste of a quip: “Tell me when it starts!”
At times the sounds resembled electronic music with an extremely low woofer and an endless variety of sounds either single or combined, often varying chromatically by a half step. At one point the woofer and a hurdy-gurdy sounded back-and-forth. For a long spell, a couple of 33 1/3 rpm measures, seemingly taken from the minimalist composer Philip Glass, were spun over and over at 8 1/3.
I began counting to a thousand, marking each ten on a finger, then each hundred. I twisted ejection cord. Should “jeopardy” have a capital J because that game show gave contestants such a button?
An occasional phase of silence led to sudden noise that fused hammered my staple on to the anvil. I imagined being sealed in the engine room of my friend’s Nordic Tug, its Diesel cylinders working like miniature pile-drivers next to my head. More rapping, as if on the vessel’s parquet trapdoor—perhaps Captain Tom announcing that the boat was docked and the Prusser’s Rum open.
Wells, MRI p. 2
BUZZ! I shouldn’t have sat on the top row of the bleachers. Silence now became a threat, but I was a bit proud that the next sonar explosion failed to shock me. Three hundred and seventy. Ping. Zort. Clunk. One spell resembled jazz with its antiphonal knocks and strange chords, but the duet couldn’t maintain its rhythm—as when the chords came in a half-beat early or the knocks missed the fourth or added a fifth. Another time when the hammering resumed I almost smiled to remember a segment of the old Blooper record: the radio announcer asked the carpenters to quit hammering, read the weather report, then yelled, “All right, boys, wham away!”
Another hundred-count finished on the thumb of my left hand. Several times I resisted the impulse to imagine the ceiling inches above me, a distance that would prevent me from wrenching my head to scramble out. I reluctantly noted the irony that I could just as well be in the tunnel. Could the same brain under investigation try to suffocate me with an image of its own?
Eight hundred and one. I remembered the definition of Esthetic that I’d learned in high school. The MRI had complexity, for sure—a Dr. Seuss orchestra of timbre, timing, and volume. Yes, it was the result of order, a calibrated sequence plotted on a computer no doubt after years of experimentation. But as for evokes an esthetic emotion….
Starting another thousand, I envisioned the minute-hand as it labored toward the half-hour mark….
What? Has the racket ceased? Then the sound of a heavy door opening. As the pallet slides to a halt, I remove the cloth and behold the beatific technician. She helps me sit up into the welcome Open of a windowless room.
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