They were checking to see if I were an alien life form.
I appreciated their efforts because I’d always wondered if I might be one.
I was placed on my back and slid headfirst into a magnetic tube. It looked as if it’d be possible to get a tan while I was in there.
I’d never been in a luge, but I felt as if I was in a sled on which one races in a supine position.
By the time I’d gotten to the MRI, I was cognitively overloaded.
In the “Star Trek” TV series, when Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, of the Starship Enterprise, examined an injured or ill member of the crew; he used his trusty medical tricorder, which was a handheld scanner he waved over a patient for a quick diagnosis. It was magical, even though the thing many viewers remember about Dr. McCoy is him saying to Captain Kirk, “He’s dead, Jim.” That’s not something even a pretend doctor wants to be remembered for. DeForest Kelley, who played Bones, said he hoped “He’s dead, Jim” didn’t appear on his headstone. It didn’t.
The tricorder was an advanced multi-function handheld computing and scanning device used to gather, analyze and record data. An MRI is as portable as an upright freezer. A Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner visualizes the internal workings of the body and is useful in diagnosing brain, cardiovascular, oncological and musculoskeletal ailments.
My recent MRI wasn’t my first rodeo. Before my initial one, years ago, another patient joked, “A dog can’t operate an MRI, but a cat scan.”
There was no audio, video or TV remote involved with my MRI. I wore hearing protection because of the loud banging produced by rapid pulses of electricity, which caused the gradient coils to vibrate and created the required magnetic field. I was happy to learn it wasn’t gremlins.
I needed to remain still during the procedure.
I can stand almost anything for 20 minutes. The MRI lasted 30 minutes. If you’ve had an MRI, what did you think about while in that tube?
The mind is like an attic – there’s stuff up there. I thought of the wonderful people in my life and how much I love my family. I considered the number 143. Mister Rogers said the number was special. He explained, “It takes one letter to say ‘I,’ four letters to say ‘love,’ and three letters to say ‘you’.”
I thought of good things – hands-free, step-in shoes, my rustic walking stick made of sumac, and that I needn’t worry whether my yacht had enough Perrier on board.
I paused for applause while I thought of something that happened the other day. When I say “the other day,” I mean any time between yesterday and 10 years ago. I met a man in Florida who wore a pink T-shirt to raise awareness for people like him who forget to separate their red laundry from the white. He had a parrot on his shoulder like a pirate. He said the bird’s name was Keith Richards. I asked him if he was a fan of The Rolling Stones. He said he liked them, but he liked Jimmy Buffett more. I wondered why he’d named his parrot Keith Richards. It was because the bird outlived everyone. Then he went off to see the Pig. He was big on the Pig. The parrot rode along.
The name Piggly Wiggly might have originated when its founder, Clarence Saunders, looked out a train window and saw several little pigs struggling to get under a fence, or when Saunders was asked why he had chosen the unusual name, he replied, “So people will ask that question.” Piggly Wiggly began in Memphis in 1916 and was the first self-service grocery store, allowing customers to browse aisles and pick out items on their own. This empowered shoppers, letting them see prices and read labels.
In my mind, I waved at the grinning face of Piggly Wiggly’s beloved mascot, Mr. Pig, as I drove out of town and, simultaneously, my body emerged from the MRI.
None of the MRI technologists asked, “Are you sure you had a brain when you came in here?”
That was good, because I’d left it at the Piggly Wiggly.
Photo by Al Batt
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