MRI – Miniscule Room Inside

My name is . . . . . . and I’m a claustrophobic. And I have an MRI scan coming up.

This is amazing technology. It agitates the water molecules in your organs in such a way that they can draw accurate picture of them using some very big magnets. I hop onto google and search.

My parents were radiographers. I should be fascinated by the biology and physics, not to mention scanning inside a body.

But I’m not concerned about any of that. I’m not even concerned about the massive magnetic forces potentially pulling out my stent, my fillings or that paper clip I swallowed as a kid, still embedded in my intestine.

I’m not even particularly concerned about what they find – blocked arteries, dodgy valves, the soft centre of my emotional being, a string of sausages. Whatever. Search away.

No – all I’m concerned about is the narrowness of the tube I’m about to be launched into.

When they slide my horizontal body face up, head first, with my arms by my side, how many millimetres will there be between my face and the ceiling of the hole I am in? 12 inches would be tolerable, six would be a nightmare, two would be ….. I don’t even want to go there. In fact I don’t want to go anywhere near this torture chamber.

It’s hard to tell from the plethora of images and videos I find on the internet. Some look like Marble Arch, others look like hula hoops. My wife doesn’t help by saying it’s like a giant polo. The biggest polo they could make, would still be excruciatingly small. Then I think about the inside of a smartie tube and my heart misses a beat.

I have a history of panic attacks – albeit a long time ago – connected with being stuck in small confined spaces.

I will enthusiastically pay an extra £20 a flight for a guaranteed aisle seat. I will not lock a toilet door, if there is no other way out. I won’t sit in the back seat of a two door car. You’ll invariably find me on the end of a row at the theatre. As for small metal tubes – any plane with less than a dozen seats is a no no. And that would be positively spacious compared with the inside of an MRI scanner. A small narrow tube without enough space to even move your arms.

As I drive to the hospital, I am helped by the option of playing music during the procedure. I have brought my phone and a good audio book. I will attempt to immerse my mind into this story as my body is immersed into the tube.

A friend suggests I should ask for a sedative. The Merlot in the wine rack looks tempting. But I’m driving so that option is off the table. Unlike me – I’ll be on the table soon, Immobilised and encased in steel. I park up and walk into the prison.

“The gown opens at the front” , says the nurse as she sends me into a cubicle to get undressed. I’m grateful for the advice – the one I wore for my angiogram was to be open at the back. Now that was unpleasant enough – lying on a table with an x-Ray machine swooping across my body like a vulture checking out its prey. Never-mind them sticking a catheter up inside your arm and into your heart. But I could look up to a lovely high ceiling and count the tiles. Give me that option any time. Make it as painful as you like.

And so here I am, lying on the table, on my back, on a conveyer belt, ready to be sucked backwards into the tunnel of doom. All dressed up like a turkey at Christmas ready to be stuffed into the oven.

The nurse says something about rubbing gel on my chest. I have no memory of her doing that, which shows how elsewhere I was. Nor of the canula pushing into my arm – and I’m not great with needles.

They could have shaved my hair and tickled my feet. I wouldn’t have noticed. My head was whirring round one thing and one thing only, and flashing big red noisy danger warnings to my body. The small child inside me shouting and screaming silently. Noooooo.

I asked if I could listen to my audiobook, or some music, a Bulgarian football commentary – anything. “No – you need to be able to hear the instructions”. How long would it take ? “Up to 40 minutes”. The hazard warning lights in my brain were going crazy. In my current mood I wouldn’t last 40 seconds.

My heart sank and my pulse quickened and adrenaline flowed like molten steel through every vein in my body. Let’s see how that shows up on your precious MRI.

She put some headphones on my ears. I mentioned something quietly but passionately about suffering from claustrophobia. She told me to relax and it would be fine.

I wish I’d thought of that. Of course, yes – just relax ! All my troubled would be over. Or rather they wouldn’t be – it’s a bit like telling a man strapped to a table to sit up.

I wasn’t strapped in so I did sit up. “I don’t think I can do this” I said in a small voice I hardly recognised. I think it was my 8-year old one.

“Let’s slide you in, and see how you are” she said in a seemingly sympathetic voice. Probably thinking “we’ve got a right one here” In my right hand was a rubber panic button, rather like the old fashioned cameras used to have to open the shutter.

I could squeeze that any time I wanted to, and I would be out in seconds. Although, they told me, if I did, they would have to start all over again. I suspected this was not true – just a white lie to stop patients hitting it every 5 minutes, okey-kokeying in and out, like a pizza in a pizza oven.

Somewhere in my 8-year old brain, something about this procedure reminded me of Scott being transported backward Into Thunderbird 1.

But this was real, and about to happen. I took my last look at the ceiling in its plain white beauty, far above, and tried very hard to breathe normally.

Of course, I knew exactly what was actually happening. I was having an MRI scan to check for any residual issues in my heart. It was perfectly safe. The tube was open at both ends, so I was not enclosed. I coul dget out at any time.

But my amygdala was detecting a perceived threat, stimulating adrenaline and cortisol to prepare me for fight or – more likely – flight. My heart was quickening and my breath was in short pants (yes I was still wearing those – and bizarrely my socks and shoes).

This reaction was all quite normal. And in my case apparently accentuated by childhood experience(s) of abandonment, entrapment etc. All very understandable and explainable.

In a few seconds – a minute at most – my conscious mind would persuade my unconscious mind that the perceived threat was simply a memory place and there was no need to panic. My mindfulness methods would remind me that this was not me, not mine, it was just a feeling which would pass like a cloud in front of the sun.

Then I would relax, chill, lie calmly in my success, and maybe design a railway layout in my head, like my brother-in-law, had when he has his MRI, to relieve boredom. I must ask to see that.

All good logic. Unfortunately my unconscious was having none of it. It was shouting at me to run. Red alert. Man the lifeboats. Abandon ship. Panic !

By some supreme act of will, I stayed still and let them slide me in.

The panic button worked perfectly. I was out in 3 seconds. I was all ready to go and do something less scary, like jump out of a plane or wrestle in a pit of snakes.

The doctor had a suggestion. He removed the pillow, so that my face was a couple of inches further from the top of the tube. He recommended I keep my eyes closed, until I was all the way in, and then I could look up and would be just about be able to see the ceiling out of the other end if I strained my neck.

So that’s what we did. That’s what I did. And I stayed there. Hand around the rubber panic button. Eyes closed. And breathe.

A voice in my head “pause breathing”. Was I going crazy? No – it turned out to be a real voice in my headphones. An instruction from the MRI machine . It was easy – as I was hardly breathing anyway. “Breathe out” – easy again as there was no air in my lungs. “Hold your breath”. Now I was in the realms of oxygen depravation.

Perfect – trapped in a a tube and unable to breathe. Then nine loud beeps, as whatever the machine was doing, did what it had to do. “Please resume breathing”. A strange point to start being, polite I thought. I was hardly going to argue. Deep breath. And breathe.

This procedure repeated about 30 times. Not quite the page turning novel I had planned – but it was some sort of distraction in my ears at least.

After about 10 minutes my conscious mind was finally gaining some control of the classroom. I was not exactly calm, but I was thinking a little more clearly. I was keeping my eyes closed – because I knew that was the best thing to do. It was hard as my nerves were making my eyelids flutter. But I was okay. I was okay. It would be over – just take one set of beeps at a time. Repeat after me. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Breathe again.

I imagined myself lying on a beach facing the ocean. Thankfully the air was cool and fresh, like a sea breeze. That was the fan blowing through the machine. The light through my eyelids was the sun shining. I was sunbathing. My wife was holding my right hand.

I song came into my head “above us only sky”. Imagine. I replayed that phrase over and overm on a short loop and imagined.

A real human voice came through my headphones “you are doing really well”. I was doing okay.

After an indeterminate period of time, the conveyer belt edged me half way out for them to inject dye into my heart through the canula. I was no longer craving for it to be a sedative. Progress. The doctor said “ten more minutes” and they fed me back inside. I could do another 10 minutes in solitary confinement, I told myself. “Please resume breathing”.

In the end it was probably 15 minutes – he was trying to be nice. I forgave him for that.

As we got near to the end, the table beneath me started to vibrate and there was a loud humming noise. I felt like the floor was rising up. I knew it was on a hydraulic lift. Time for a close-up? Surely not. Please not.

They were pushing me up to the ceiling. I opened my eyes for a milli-second. Big mistake. Huge perceived threat. Massive flood of adrenaline. My amigala had been right all along – and determined to have a role in the final scene.

Fortunately it was a brief encore, and suddenly I was rolling out into fresh air and liberation. Like Andy emerging from the sewer pipe having escaped from jail in the Shawshank Redemption. Here was Dave, sputtering out of the MRI tube into liberty and freedom.

I wanted to take off my gown, throw up my arms and bask naked in my freedom. Just like Andy. Fortunately for the staff, my conscious mind stepped in quickly and reminded me I was not eight – I was a responsible adult who had just had a risk free and painless, routine, non-invasive procedure. Such a reaction, like all of my previous possible reactions today, would have been rather disproportionate. I’m glad my consciousness won that battle of dignity, at least.

I stumbled off table, stood up and felt rather faint. So I sat down and was offered a glass of water, whilst they cleaned the machine for next candidate. At least my bowels and bladder had behaved.

I returned to the cubicle, to remove my gown, calmly and in private, and pulled on my normal grownup clothes, reconnecting with reality. I felt like a child waking up from a bad dream and realising everything was just fine. It had been having a nightmare.

But before he pulled back the curtain to head back home, that small frightened child sat down on chair, and had a little cry.

All I needed now was a “well done” sticker. Well done indeed. To this day I have no idea how I stayed in they tube for each of those minutes.

If we can face our fears – real or perceived, it makes little difference. …

If we can survive – however weak, fragile and frightened we feel….

If we can come out of the other end of the tube of fear – still alive and breathing . .

Then a sticker is the least we deserve. We deserve a gold medal. Several gold medals.

I settled for a kit kat from the hospital shop and headed outside for some lovely, unimaginably beautiful – blue sky.