And the Beat Goes On

1998

BOOM BOOM BOOM clackclackclackclack. BOOM BOOM. 

“Okay you are done!”  A cheery disembodied voice from nowhere made this announcement as if I could do anything but breathe. They had told me the test would take about an hour in the torpedo tube machine called the Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machine.  Space aged jargon for a torpedo tube in a hospital that makes fancy pictures that cost quite a large amount of money and sounds like it is going to explode with you inside.  The Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona is a geriatric marching ground for the not quite dead and somehow I just did not fit in as a member of the green Jell-O set.

I was marched through a battery of tests to figure out what was wrong “under the hood” so to speak.  Samples of every shape and substance, tests with electrodes tapped into my brain like acupuncture without the wisdom of a thousand of years of eastern medicine’s practice.  Going from one nameless doctor to the next, the one constant being the tuft of gray hair tinkling every day at the grand piano in the lobby like some misplaced sidekick for Benny Hill.  I wondered if he was just propped there with a hidden player piano mechanism somewhere nearby.  Perky.  Cheery. 

This place smells like old people and death in some odd dance of efficiency and stool samples.  The one nameless face I dreaded most was the neurosurgeon commandeered to investigate the alien in my brain.  On the third day of a four day run of the machine called super expensive health care I met with the man in white to discuss the results of the MRI film that I had sent prior to my visit as well as those from the torpedo tube in Scottsdale.

He breezed into the room, a geek with glasses who unfortunately looked like he could have been a regular on General Hospital as Doctor Mcheatonyourhusbandwithme.  As I gave in to his bespectacled blue eyes I became aware that he was talking and pointing at the colorful images in the viewer.

“And here Mrs. Bucey is the culprit.  A tiny nodule about the size of a pencil tip.  nicely sharpened.  The neurosurgeon referred to you by your neurologist is a bit daft to suggest the necessity for removal of this.   Chances are this will grow a millimeter every ten years, and the only reason it was found now was because of the swelling in your brain caused them to go poking around up there with an expensive camera shaped like a torpedo tube.  Good news is we have verifiable proof you have a brain.”

Did you say daft?  After all the years of school these guys do?

“Should anyone ever suggest that you need to have this removed please come see me.  I will either be here in Scottsdale or at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  Look me up.”

He flashed me a smile that was worth more to me than his fancy education and extended his hand to shake mine.  Locked in a gaze that was knee buckling handsome and immensely reassuring at the same time, I was grateful to be sitting down.  He breezed back out of my life not yet to be seen again.  I am saving that one for when someone practicing medicine decides they need to stick forceps up my nose and go fishing.