I remember getting a brain MRI when I was a kid. My pediatrician, a lovely man with a divine voice, was concerned regarding the frequency of my bad headaches. This was how I ended up lying flat on my back, wearing a sterile dressing gown, with the majority of my then-small body languishing within an enormous white tube. First there was silence, aside from the instructions given by the radiologist, then there was a great cacophony, an immaterial industrial factory that pounds great sheets of metal against my eardrums. It felt as though I was on a spaceship within a malfunctioning cryogenic hibernation pod; I was awake, immobile, and doomed to experience the spacecraft’s engine for the next thousand years.
My clamorous vigil was paused, and the radiologist asked me how I was doing with the test. After a second’s pause, I requested, in a small and terrified voice, if my mother could come in and be with me during the last part of the test. After removing all of her metal jewelry, my mother entered the sanitized chamber, within which I had transformed into a white-plastic cylindrical behemoth, with two foot-and-ankles protruding from its mouth. She gingerly took hold of my ankle, sending me some comfort as I continued my static journey, until I was human again.
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