Thud or Adventures in Claustrophobia

Although the tube extends an egregious number of feet, I feel that my head and body are going into the open door of a front loading automatic washer.

Naturally this is incorrect, since I know I will not be rotated.  But I will be mixed up.

In all such front-loaders, your body lies prone on a flat-bed rack which will insert you like some long and distended tongue into the slenderest of tubes.

There is a thin blue line down the length of the tube from end to end right up at the top so you can tell that they have you in there right side up.    There is not much room, and while I am being slid in I try to keep my arms in so they don't get scissored off by the sides of the machine.   All the while I'm in there I don't feel quite comfortable letting them relax.  

There are a couple of post-it's of Tonka toys pasted across that blue line. 

They had given me a big red ball to squeeze just in case I got claustrophobic and could no longer bear the sense of confinement.  I kept thinking, is this what it feels like when you're buried alive?

Well, I guess - except for that blue line.  They don't put that on the inside of the cover of the coffin because it won't matter to you if you're right side up or not.  And they know that.

But to get back to my story I was having an MRI.

I have a headache every day and it starts in my neck and goes all the way around my head unless I take enough drugs to make it all better.

One can confuse the lack of pain with being well.   I often do, especially when I take a really good painkiller.

At least one of my tumors (back when I had them) was chewing close enough to my spinal canal that my oncologist thinks I am potentially a candidate for a brain tumor.   And he would like to verify that my headache is not from that. 

But the pain is in my neck so he ordered a head and neck MRI.

Personally, I think my neck is being problematic, and the only other time it hurt like this it had a tumor deep in it's muscle wall.  Pressing out, and causing all kinds of mischief.  Crunching on my C2 vertebra.

But I could merely have a damaged neck that has hurt more in the last week than in the week before.

Be that as it may I was in for a ride in an MRI and to enjoy the ride I listened to the entertainment and I tried to catalog the sounds as I listened to them.  There were the loud high pitched buzzers that did not seem to predominate.  The sound of an unmuffled  diesel engine; maybe a tractor engine.  It would vibrate at a couple of different frequencies enough to make me think of all kinds of instruments that vibrate for various reasons.   Vibrators for example.

There was a mechanical woodpecker sound.

I would have to say that the tractor and diesel engines along with the occasional: "Whack!" were the dominant sounds.

Let's see - this is therapeutic right?

Put someone in a narrow tube, add loud noise and don't let them move for oh over an hour an a half.

I actually fell asleep in the middle of the noise.  Thus bearing witness to the peculiarities of the human psyche.

But it is over and now I can wait for the results.  But I think I will take a pain pill first.