Head Case Read Free Page B

hall to where the MRI machine is housed, making small talk about how our birthdays are close together and cracking unmemorable jokes. He takes me to a small changing station. “You’ll need to leave anything with metal in it here.” He pushes back the cloth drape and walks away. I part with my hair band, my belt, and, with resignation, my underwire bra.
    If you’ve never had an MRI, here are two contradictory facts to know: it’s very loud, and you must lie very still for half an hour. You are given earplugs, which mainly serve as a placebo. The machine never makes this sound on medical dramas because you can’t speak over it but in actuality the sound of a processing MRI machine closely resembles industrial music from the mid-1990s: repetitive, patterned, mechanical buzzing at various low frequencies, sometimes broken up by long, grinding atonal drones.
    Trent Reznor stars in the music video I make for my MRI while lying very still. He is backlit in a light blue antiseptic shade of neon light, looking sternly into the camera. Reznor’s cameo is spliced with black-and-white medical imaging of my brain, which is interrupted by the requisite stuttering jump cut to graphic footage of ongoing brain surgery. When I grow bored with that and start to become really aggravated by the process, I pretend to be in a space shuttle. If you ever have an MRI, at some point during the procedure it is obligatory that you pretend that you are being shot into space. It won’t provide a great deal of entertainment, but it will help you keep your sanity while lying very still enclosed in a metal tube forced to listen to grating, repetitive mechanical bursts at great volume.
    The curly-haired waiting-room attendant had befriended my dad while I was in the tube, telling him stories of past patients. Dad and I say good-bye to his new friend and head for the car.
    â€œHe was funny,” I say absently on the way home, looking out the car window.
    â€œI think he liked you.”
    â€œI guess that’s why he asked me to take off my bra.”

 
    May 30, 2007
    PET Scan
    The MRI takes pictures of your brain as a static organ—you could take an MRI of a dead person’s brain. But a PET scan captures brain activity or inactivity. A PET scan is a test that doctors on TV shows don’t order as often as MRIs. The process of performing a PET scan isn’t as dramatic or compelling. I have heard the term before, but I don’t really know what one is, even as I arrive for my appointment. The technician wears pink scrubs and white sneakers with pink laces and has pink streaks in her hair. I’ll call her Pink. She leads me to a small, closetlike room with a cot in it. She has some papers, which she repeatedly ruffles and refers to. I don’t care what’s on anyone’s papers about me anymore.
    â€œHave you had a PET scan before?” asks Pink.
    â€œUm, no.”
    â€œOK, well, we’re going to put this fluid in your body, and it will tell us if the cancer is still there.”
    I laugh nervously. “No, you see, there is no … I don’t have…”
    She looks at me skeptically. “Well, that’s what the doctor put down as a possibility on your chart.”
    I laugh harder, then harder. I need her to join in to signal that she’s in on this joke, but she stares blankly at me. I’m alone in this coat-closet room in a hospital laughing with relief so hard that I’m going to cry because I’m so scared of cancer, scared of death. It’s as if this misunderstanding could call the cancer into being and only our shared laughter will keep it at bay. I’m scared of being mistaken for someone who is dying quickly because I’m not ready to think of myself as someone who is dying ever, at all. I take a deep breath and reiterate my stance. “He just put that on there to get the test covered by insurance.”
    She grudgingly accepts my