I HATE MS: What Doctors Do Not Know #2

MRIs are the ultraviolence.

Yesterday, I was in an MRI machine at Community Radiology in Silver Spring, Maryland, at the Medical Center location. I was literally feeling the vibrations of the machine on the bed I was lying on. I thought to myself, “I guess there is a first time for everything."

I have been getting MRIs since 2013 when the doctors at Penn suspected that I had multiple sclerosis. They ran test after test and then upon diagnosis, MRIs every six months to make sure the meds were working. Often they did not or started to and then stopped. Increasingly, MRIs felt like a high stakes test of the MS progression. As a consequence, I felt greater anxiety every time I had to get one done. This anxiety, however, was written off as “claustrophobia” in need of medication to overcome.

Cue the Ativan prescription.

Over the years, I have had MRIs done at University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Northwestern (Chicago), Rush (Oak Park, IL), Rush Medical Center (Chicago), Sibley Memorial (Washington, DC), and Community Radiology (Silver Spring, MD). Administrators spend thousands of dollars on MRI machines, yet the experience of lying in an MRI machine varies a lot from place to place and even within the same facility!

As if being forced to lie completely still is not bad enough, for my brain MRI, I have to wear a helmet to keep my head completely still.

Types of MRI face masks that they make you wear inside of the machine.

It reminds me a lot of wearing a muzzle or one of those facemasks people would make enslaved people wear to prevent them from speaking, eating, or drinking. I think of the cover of the anthropologist John Burdick’s book Blessed Anastacia. It is about an enslaved Brazilian woman who is venerated there as a saint.

Technicians want to just say you are claustrophobic and that you need to ask your doctor for anti-anxiety meds to help you “go in the hole.” Perhaps. But in all honesty, that machine is not just claustrophobic. If a person were going through a tunnel with a headlight, at least they could see ahead of them or they could turn around and see what’s behind them. But the MRI is worse than that. You cannot see anything beyond your feet or above your head. They’ve essentially put you into an all white coffin, and said, “Good luck!”

Well, who wants to be in a coffin and feel like they are being buried alive? Nobody.

The best MRI machines are ones in which there is a mirror that attaches so that you can look outside of the machine. I had my first MRI as a child suffering from migraines due to unreasonable demands placed on a twelve-year old. Although I was initially scared, I calmed down once I looked in the mirror and saw the adult techs waving at me and speaking to me through the microphone. The same is true today. When my brother accompanied me to get my MRI at Rush Medical Center, that mirror calmed me down a lot. Being able to look outside of the machine helped remind me that I am not in an all-white tomb waiting for angels to roll me out.

I recently went to Sibley Memorial in DC. They were playing jazz music that was a little jarring in its syncopation. However, they had a helmet with a mirror that attaches to it. Unfortunately, they did not have it facing the technician. Instead, it faced a wall with alternating landscape paintings.

I loathe landscape imagery.

While it’s beautiful to be in a space out in the open surrounded by flowers and greenery to behold the beauty of the world that the Lord created, I cannot stand landscape paintings. Combined with the icky jazz music, the paintings, and the MRI tube itself, I suddenly felt like I was in that book turned film, A Clockwork Orange.

Scenes from A Clockwork Orange.

It was giving “ultraviolence.”

“Get me out of here!” I tried to maintain composure as I said to my friend who was accompanying me. I said to the tech, “I cannot do this.” However, inside I wanted to scream, “Why are you doing this to me?!” We chatted about anti-anxiety meds but inside, I wanted to jump out of my skin.

Landscape paintings were the straw that broke the camel’s back.