OCT 22, 2006

What a difference a few days makes.  On Wednesday, I was lying on a beach on a remote, idyllic Caribbean isle, a lush rainforest behind me; clear, cerulean, water stretching enticingly, enchantingly, to the horizon; my toes languorously wiggling their way into the cool depths of the world’s whitest, finest sand; a slushy cocktail in one hand and a sublimely trashy novel in the other. 

Oh.  No.  Wait.  That was where the travel magazines I was reading suggested I should be. That where I wished I was, where my imagination told me I was, though it should be noted that I was under the influence of a profound lack of sleep and the lingering effects of full anesthesia two days prior. 

In reality, I was just about the furthest one can get from a tropical waterfront; through the haze of it all, I now realize that I was, in fact, in bucolic Rochester, Minnesota, getting ready to enter the World’s Scariest Medical Machine (dentists’ drills excepted), known to the layman as the “MRI.”    

The MRI was my third major test in three days, the other two being a colonoscopy and a CAT scan on Monday; these were inconclusive, and therefore a session in the big machine was deemed necessary.  I’d never had an MRI before, even though I thought I had been subjected to every test and every procedure yet invented.    

I have, after all, spent more time than I care to recall drinking gallons of gag-inducing liquid, of which the best-case scenario result, the intended consequence, is a case of diarrhea so severe that every last bodily fluid will be expelled, along with alarming amounts of seeds and other indigestible matter that you know you have not consumed within the last decade; if you are very fortunate, said expelling will occur in the proper place (i.e., the toilet), or at least within a more conveniently-located receptacle such as a trash can or, in a pinch, a potted plant.  Meanwhile, you’re not allowed to eat any real food during this period, only “clear liquids” – Gatorade and Jell-o get really old, really fast – and therefore have only minimal energy for your never-ending sprinting; you will likely pass the entire day in a constant shuffle, at varying velocities, back and forth between the commode and the kitchen.  Or, you can just set up your spread of lemon sorbet, non-red gummi bears and other gourmet treats right there in the bathroom, and have a grand old day confined to the smallest room of the house.  Exhausted though you will be, you won’t be getting any sleep, what with the manic colon and the accompanying cramping, so you will likely pass the night in this room as well.  Take a book.  A long one – if you’ve always wanted to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, this is your chance. 

And that, of course, is merely the preparation for a colonoscopy.  I won’t go into the details of the procedure itself.  I’m sure you know the drill.  They borrow a big hose from Firehouse 7 down the street, rinse it off once or twice, and then shove it up your rear.  Or something like that; on this occasion, though not always on others, I was fully, happily, anesthetized, so I don’t know all the details, and didn’t get to see the live video feed, which frankly is fine with me.  (I did TiVo it, though.) 

Anyway, that was on Monday, and it all proved inconclusive.  And so, on Wednesday, at 6:30 a.m. – a time when, it turns out, all the lights in the waiting room are off and no medical staff can be found – I presented myself for further inspection.  The MRI, the doctor hoped, would reveal all.   

An MRI, as it turns out, is a scary thing indeed, although it does have certain merits, chief among them the lack of invasion of your rectum.  Here’s how it works: they take your pants, shove chemicals into your arm, place you on a gurney, and then shove you into a distinctly sarcophagus-like contraption (where you can see a bright light at the end of a long white tunnel) by which point you are convinced you are a corpse, until they turn the sucker on and it makes horrific racket and you are suddenly eminently aware that you are alive, although frankly the noise of that machine could wake the dead.   

You're stuck in this clanking coffin for forty minutes, or so you're told (though it feels like years, and you can see whole decades of your life flash by, all in slow-motion).  If you are not claustrophobic when you go in, you are within a matter of seconds.  The walls seem to close in.  The light beckons.  The whirring and screeching of the device provides no solace, only a suggestion that the whole mess of parts will suddenly come undone, in an explosion of magnets and radiation or whatever the hell is in there, either hastening your demise (and how) or transforming you into a superhero. 

Thankfully, the machine did not come apart, and I did not, ultimately, determine the source of the white light.  Someday, my hearing will be restored; until then, I am happy to live in the age of e-mail and text messages. 

Of course, my survival also meant that I did not become a superhero.  Indeed, the MRI, showed me — or at least my colon — to be all too fragile. 

The MRI is not the villain here, of course, but somehow, with all its power and menace, it seemed more appropriate for the part than my meek little colon, the true culprit and, in the end, the real foil to our dashing young protagonist.  The MRI just told the story, and someone forgot to tell it that said handsome protagonist was supposed to emerge victorious — there was supposed to be a happy ending.  Duh.  I mean, that's how things work.  If it couldn't make me a superhero, the least it could do is show my colon to be clean and healthy, a specimen of gastrointestinal perfection. 

It did not.  It said things were worse than anyone had expected.  Not a lot worse, but still.  I had gone to Mayo thinking it a place of miracles and wonder; sometimes, reality intervenes with best-case scenarios and flights of fancy.