God's Palm

April 8, 2013

Having grown up in Manhattan, I am not surprised that you can get an MRI at Cornell-New York Hospital  on Sunday evening. Last evening, I was only at NYP long enough to have an MRI at 6:30. I was greeted with a smile, taken promptly, and out of there by 7:15.

What I want to share here is what the actual procedure of having an MRI is like for me--because it just might be of use if you  have never had one, do at some point need to have one--and are anxious or plain terrified about being in that noisy clanking tunnel for half an hour or more.

Where do I come off?  I had my first MRI in the fall of 1994, when my neurologist ordered one to rule out MS. The report said, at some length, what the test showed that I did not have MS. Then, in a remarkably brief paragraph at the end, it mentioned that I had a sizable tumor on my pituitary gland. Some "by the way!"

I postponed having pituitary surgery for a year and a half , even though the neuro-opthomologist told me plainly that if the tumor, which "rested on" my optic nerve, broke through it, I would require surgery within twenty-four hours--or likely go blind. One day it occurred to me, what if it happened on the Fourth of July?  I had the surgery.

A complication of that procedure--known medically as a "side effect"--plus a few other issues have ended up with me having about two dozen MRI's in the past nineteen years.

But let's go back to that first one. As I was instructed to lay down on a sheet-covered "thing" that  looked like a narrow table,which would take me inside the depths of the machine, it occurred to me that I didn't know if I was claustrophobic, and wasn't dying to find out. But I am far too easily embarrassed to scream that I had changed my mind and decided, to skip the test, thank you very much anyway. So I lay down and they covered me with a blanket which in no way lessened my chills. But as the "table" slowly moved me inward, it changed. Its flatness rounded, curving just enough to hold me. . .safe. The flat thing had become. . . the palm of God's hand. There, I was of course safe, from powerful magnets and anything else in that tunnel. "Anything else" turned out to be the loudest noises I'd heard since I baby-sat my oldest nephew for the first time. Kevin's screams scared me stupid--stupid enough to hold his chubby eight- months-old self up at the front window for the entire time his mother went to a matinee in the city and came home over seven hours later. During that first MRI, the sounds receded into the distance, and in what seemed only moments, a technician was pulling me out of the machine, saying "You're done."

It happened again last evening, God's lending me a Hand.