In the cozy, silent base of tranquility, the sleek MRI torture chamber awaits

David Sherman

When the joints ache, pain not preceded by recent good times, I’m known to bellow, “Ayoye, ça me fait mal,” title of a hit by the Québecois pop group, Offenbach and its front man, Gerry Boulet. He died at 44 from colon cancer so he had lots to scream, “Ayoye, ça me fait mal,” about.

It’s a rough translation of “Oi vay, it’s killing me.” Most medical people up here in the Great White North understand Yiddish about as well as Gerry Boulet did. The admin at the osteopath knows me as, “Monsieur ça me fait mal.”

Good for a laugh before the osteo shakes my hand and kicks into the serious torture part of the day. It’s amazing the positions you can be contorted into when there’s no sex involved. And still be left with your head and limbs attached.

Often, the laying on of hands doesn’t work. Then drugs stop their blessed relief. They may work but they also may make you want to jump in front of a bus. They will then try to get you to swallow anti-depressants.

You won’t be pissed, Canadiens losing won’t open the tear ducts or have you hunting for bullets for the rifle hidden somewhere. Winning the lotto won’t make you smile, either. They’re rolling  around in back of a dusty drawer with the bottle of acid-reducers they prescribe so the anti-inflammatories don’t eat through your esophagus or stomach lining. Problem is with few acids to digest, eating is less pleasant and there’s that pesky news they’re linked to dementia.

If the pain doesn’t get you, the drugs to manage it will.

Besides, I’m washing down enough little blue tablets. Soft blue because tests have shown blue placebos work better than some “real” drugs in other colours. We dig blue. It soothes the savage breast you’re now wrestling with to pay life back for the good times a few lifetimes ago, lifetimes that don’t seem that far away.

And, when scans have shown your discs and joints have been eroded by good times long past, your medical repertoire has dwindled to surgery – let’s just pop that knee out and put in another, no problem.” The MRI, kind’ve like be stuffed into the power plant of a nuclear submarine, is waiting.

You will find yourself in a curious place of calm and serenity except for the part of you screaming silently: “They’re going to find a tumour. I’m going to die! Let me out of here.” 

The MRI resembles the scanner at the airport without the macho custom agents sharing the scent of their lunch as they paw you. 

No one compares to the crew at London Heathrow where forgetting your sunglasses in a shirt pocket will ignite the belligerence of England’s colonial past. One guy in uniform was debating removing the fillings of my teeth for my sunglasses transgression but luckily hundreds behind me were about to launch another revolution involving the fabled isle. So, they went back to a more effective security measure -- pawing young women.

So, when all else fails to subdue stubborn joints, you will find serenity is a most unlikely place — the grey room of chilled people in hospital gowns waiting to be slid into the MRI, a white innocent looking tube that detects soft tissue disease and damage while they rhythmically blast a fog horn suitable for the Titanic into each ear.

It’s Sunday morning. We’re a tiny gathering who chose the god of technology over the god of imagination and literature.

The anonymous purveyor of claustrophobic nightmares, dressed in jeans and cloaked in indifference, gives little yellow ear plugs before she presses, “start.” Other than removing a touch of lost wax, the plug insures your hearing remains in the MRI while you’re climbing in your car trying to remember from which planet you were spawned.

The machines are used nearly 24/7. There are only two or three of us in airy hospital gowns where what you see among your air-chilled parishioners you’d rather not.

There are no TVs, no radios, no thumping bass to electrify the nervous system. No posters, nothing but grey walls, black chairs, sublime silence and silent fear. “They’re going to find a tumour. I’m going to die. It’s going to be a slow and painful death.”

This is its own church of quiet reflection on the odds of what the white mechanical people eater is going to discover between bone and discs, joints and organs.

You can pray, if that’s your thing, prepare a will or remind yourself to invite so and so to dinner before you take up residence in a corridor or over-crowded room where overworked everyone decides what and when your fate brings.

Alas, the grey room of Tranquility Base is a warmup to climbing through the gates of Hades, a place of torment for the wicked and anyone else with a thorough doctor and six months or so to wait for the results.

An MRI is a diagnostic tool and an instrument of torture, even for the non-claustrophobic. As it rolls and slides, it accompanies itself with a symphony of discordant bangs, horns, ticks and IED-like explosions. 

A friend once bolted after about three minutes in the white, screaming casket but returned to be slid into the jaws of the MRI only after his doctor prescribed a bottle of Ativan.

He sailed through the MRI and took only two days to wake-up. He may have swallowed a few more Ativan than the doc prescribed.

Research on the MRI machine explained the cacophony brilliantly, I’m sure, but I didn’t understand a word. I did determine the skull-fracturing marching band of noise seems to be of necessity.

I left the aural destruction chamber with less hearing than when I entered. I sat a minute in what was now an empty room. There was a TV on the wall. But it was black. The walls were clean, an unemotive grey. No pictures, paintings, posters. And the room -- silence. No stimulation.

Exactly what one needs after being swallowed by an MRI chamber. Maybe it’s exactly what we need every day. A moment of calm, a breath of silence, a touch of serenity.

Skip the MRI.