I think I've spent more time in the MRI machine this month than I will for the rest of my life (I hope??). My right arm increasingly resembles a permanent pincushion, with a series of half-healed spots where we've drawn blood and inserted IVs. I think it's offended that I keep choosing it, but the left arm veins are shite and appear to be shriveling further, perhaps because they sense danger.
This evening was the usual: check in at the front counter, leave SuperGeneticist to his post in the waiting room, change into surgical gown and pants designed to fit the Incredible Hulk, waddle around the waiting room hoping the pants don't fall down in front of other elderly patients who might be sensitive to bare-behinded obscenity. Pop some anti-anxiety medications to deal with Donut Claustrophobia, strap on an eye mask to avoid seeing the Iron Mask-knockoff they clamp over your face, and go to town with the crazed jackhammering MRI sounds.
Two hours after we started, I'd had a full thoracic and cervical scan. I can't help but wonder if they'll come back and say, "You don't have any lesions -- but man, your back is fuuuucked up!"
Somehow, that would make me smile. The other smile inducing possibility? Being told I don't have to have any more MRIs, which means never hearing that ear-bleeding music again. For anyone who hasn't had the pleasure, it's a piece they run on loop inside the imaging room; it sounds a bit like someone is washing your car windows with a dry rubber squeegee, while insane techno skitters across the background, interspersed with the chirps of European house sparrows on meth. Really.
I talked with a good friend the other night about this whole ordeal.
"You know," she mused, "My mom got diagnosed with something pretty serious a few years ago -- like blood pressure so low it could kill her, or something? And ever since, she has to go in for regular blood tests. But they always find something new, like low potassium or elevated WBCs."
I tilted my glass of wine and studied the color, thinking how odd it was that I could nod along because I knew, now, that WBCs are white blood cells.
"She keeps saying, 'I could have lived with this stuff all my life, Kim, and never known.'" Kim looked at me for a moment. "It makes you wonder, you know? How many people are walking around every day, feeling perfectly fine when they're not. How many people live their whole lives like that?"
The unspoken question hung in the humid air. Would it be better not to know? Could I have lived my whole life without ever realizing that my brain wasn't acting the way it should? Would everything have continued just like it was?
This, I suppose, is where I lean on the wobbly stool of my faith. If I hadn't gone into the emergency room for an unrelated headache that night, I'd be sitting here thinking that everything was fine. I wouldn't even be thinking that, because I'd have no reason to. Instead, here we are: some plans changed, others canceled, and still more in the works that might never have been initiated prior to this half-finished diagnosis. I have to believe that catching it early was supposed to happen. I do believe it. But I also *have* to trust that I did the right thing going to the hospital that night, even if everything that came after feels like I went wading on the ocean shore and slipped below my head when the shelf suddenly dropped off.
The weather is beautiful here, so I'm going to play all weekend and deal with the MRI at my Tuesday checkup. Denial is a beautiful thing sometimes.
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