Tales from the MRI

I got an MRI on Wednesday, as a precaution, because I've had calcifications that are "probably benign" on my mammograms for the past year and a half. An MRI can't display more calcifications, but it would show if there is any small cancer. This has to do with trusting your medical advisers. E tells me that hospitals don't like to do MRIs on breasts because there are so many false positives, which require radiologists to perform biopsies, and they don't like doing biopsies because they are labor-intensive and not profitable enough. Can this be true? As the lady in the joke says, An MRI couldn't hoit. My first MRI was a very big deal, partly because it involved waking up at the crack of dawn. This was my third, and in the afternoon, and I went by myself. All three times I've taken a Valium because I'm claustrophobic. So much so that I bolted down the the skinny winding turrets of Gaudi's La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, as well as a person can bolt when there's a crowd climbing up in front of you and behind you. I probably could have made it to the top of the cathedral if I'd had a Valium with me in Spain.

[La Sagrada Familia]
There was confusion and ignorance at Fancy Hospital, so I ended up wasting 45 minutes waiting for someone to find the order for me to get blood work done beforehand. I take the one medicine that can interfere or interact in a bad way with the MRI dye, and they needed to figure out the level of it in my blood. It turned out that the receptionist had sent me to the wrong place to wait. The surgeon's nurse figured it out for me and then they took my blood and sent me to wait.

A young woman came into the waiting room with a hat on. The kind of hat that could be used to protect against the cold and also to cover a bald head. It was tightly-woven knit or maybe felt, light blue, with a flare around the edges. She was eager to talk. She had had stomach problems and was losing weight but waited four months before going to her doctor, who gave her some pills. They worked for a week and then she couldn't eat, she felt like something was in her throat. She went to the ER and one of the Saint hospitals, where a doctor told her she had stomach cancer that had spread to the rest of her body and that her chances of survival were 50/50. Then the doctor left the room.

The girl told her mother to take her to another hospital, which she did, which is how she ended up at Fancy. There she was told that the cancer had not metastasized, and that she was going to get chemo to shrink the tumor, which was the size of a baseball. And so she cut her beyond-shoulder-length hair, as she and her mother and brother cried, and she got chemo and more chemo. A friend of hers who'd had breast cancer warned her in a voice-of-doom fashion that her hair would fall out in the shower and that she'd lose her eyebrows and eyelashes. Finally she told this friend not to call her any more, because she was so negative.

The girl asked her mother, Why me? I'm not a bad person. I'm not like gangbangers who are shooting each other and don't value their lives.
Her mother said, Only God knows.

Below the hat you could see her dark eyebrows and eyelashes, and under the hat she had very short dark hair. Her tumor has shrunk so much that the doctors are telling her that it's a miracle. I told her about my temporary tattoos on my scalp during chemo, but didn't tell her about the protest in the middle of my head, US Out of Iraq. I was afraid that she might support the war and put an end to the good feeling between us. Was that cowardly? Probably.

I was supposed to get the results of my MRI within 48 hours, but did not and now it is the weekend. Another demerit for Fancy Hospital.

The Housewives of the 60s

I finally got my hands on some generic Valium in preparation for my MRI. I was looking forward to seeing what it was all those unhappy housewives had used to get through the day. (I don't think the Feminine Mystique touched on this, but I haven't read it for a while.) Such a disappointment. It didn't even allay my slight anxiety, just made me sleepy. This was just one of many of the day's surprises and my misapprehensions. The Breast Center people had told me that I would get my results right after the MRI. (The MRI should reveal whether the calcifications in my right breast, the "clean, good" breast, are malignant.) The MRI people told me on the phone that it was not an open MRI. The MRI person told me there that the MRI was doughnut shaped. I thought for a moment I would have to curve my body inside it. I found out: I'll get results in a few days, it was an open MRI, and I did not have to curve my body inside a hollow doughnut (or bagel).

My gracious friend P picked me up and drove us to Fancy Hospital. The staff was very friendly and efficient. I was singing "Mother's Little Helpers" while changing clothes, still hoping for a Valium high. The MRI was the tube everyone talks about, but it was white (I'd imagined it like a black iron lung) and it was doughnut-shaped, but the doughnut was perpendicular to the floor. I lay face down on a bed-like thing, which had holes for my breasts to poke through (blue mesh "baskets" containing them) and a pillow for my head. I turned my head left and the bed was pushed into the hole of the "doughnut." I fell asleep from time to time. I had imagined that P would read The New Yorker to me (or, if I couldn't follow the articles in my retro-housewife haze, from Italo Calvino's Italian fairy tales) but the MRI-related noise was too loud for such a thing. She sat in a chair near my head and read The New Yorker to herself. I drifted off, drooling on the pillow, with intermittent noise coming somehow from the machine. It sounded sort of like a fire alarm inside a bulding. Like very loud buzzes. Every so often the tech would ask me... something. What did she ask me? What could she have asked me? If I was OK, maybe. Or maybe she warned me when there would be more noise. Then it was over. I felt I was in a spacious cave open at both ends but when I lifted my head up a bit I realized I was only a few inches from the "ceiling" of the tube.

It was quite uneventful except for the anticipation. Afterward I had hiccups and was very sleepy. We stopped for coffee at The Cool Italian Bakery-Cafe in Gentrificationland. We were sitting at our tables talking all about breast cancer and wondering what histology was. P thought it was the study of cells. A lovely young woman studying at the table next to us told us that it was the study of tissues and that pathology is the study of diseased tissues. She's a third-year med student who is thinking of going into OB-GYN. When we walked to the car, I said ours would have been a wonderful conversation for one of my students to have overheard and transcribed. I assigned them overheard conversations the other week. One of them was sick all week and so wrote down a dialogue she'd heard in her dream. P and I wondered whether all the voices you hear in dreams are necessarily in your own diction and rhythm. Once when I taught at the Arty School, a student turned in a description of a dream, but it was typed single-spaced, which I don't accept. I told her it had to be double-spaced. When she gave it back to me, I saw that she had physically cut out every line and then pasted each on a piece of paper, with space in between them. I think she had some out of sequence, too, or upside down. It was very funny and dream-like.

So our household has been disappointed lately in the efficacy of our meds. L twisted his back and is waiting for the muscle relaxant to kick in. I grateful that I don't see Valium addiction in my future.

**
I just looked in the index in The Feminine Mystique. Valium, depression, drugs, medication--all not listed. Closest was "anomie," which is caused "by never achieving the hard core of self that comes not from fantasy but from mastering reality." This causes boredom, "purposelessness, non-existence, non-involvement with the world that can be called anomie, or lack of identity, or merely felt as the problem that has no name."

All of my women friends have a purpose and we are using our educations, and most of us are also on anti-depressants or anti-anxiety medications. Explain that.