While laying in a tube, diameter just larger than a human body, with sounds similar to a jackhammer rattling my brain, I fall like Alice in Wonderland, down a “rabbit hole” and land in an unexpected, but peaceful place.
I discovered this rabbit hole during my first MRI and am thankful I did every two or three years when I again find myself encased like a poster in a cardboard tube. Just after I am slid into this tube, claustrophobic gases seem to fill the space around me and soon enter my nostrils, my mouth my lungs, I want to squeeze the “help” ball which is in my right hand to communicate,
”GET ME OUT OF HERE!”
Just before I squeeze it, I breathe the imaginary claustrophobic gas in and find myself in my own peaceful, soulful MRI world.
Some might call where my mind settles meditation, others prayer; for me it’s a bit of both. I float. I think of the people I love. I visit my favorite places…always stop by Stanley Lake…where my soul consistently wanders when needing to be soothed.
I hear the jolting MRI machine sounds morph into a symphony played by a heavy metal orchestra (if there was such a thing). I do not like heavy metal music, but from my magical MRI world, I do; and so I float on the music that is no longer obnoxious noise.
This is how I get through the hour and a quarter I spend in the tube. Last night when the technician said “One more image to go. It’s a short one, just four minutes and we’re finished”, I popped up through my rabbit hole as excited as can be that it was over. After they got me out of that skinny pipe and helped me to my feet, I realized that I felt like peaceful dust (non-allergenic) was still floating around me.
I dread MRIs, but, I am surprised every time to find that rabbit hole to peace in that claustrophobic, obnoxiously noisy, narrow, tube..
Those of you who have had closed MRIs, how do you make it through without squeezing “THE GET ME OUT OF HERE!” ball?
*Mom, thanks for sending me your prayers at exactly six o’clock. They arrived and I think they seeped into the MRI machine with me. Oh yes, I can’t forget to thank you for not lighting a candle so I wouldn’t smell (envision) the smoke from states away and start a coughing fit in the middle of the tube–wink!
