My Telltale Brain

I lie on a conveyor belt which will whisk me inside a cylinder. Despite its formidable appearance, the machine is really just a giant magnet, powerful enough to fling a wheelchair across the room. Some MRI machines are fanciful, disguised as spaceships to distract the patient, making a scary experience more palatable. But this one makes no such attempt.

    My only job is to lie perfectly still. Before we begin, a kind technician named Amal inflates little pillows on my ears to block the anticipated clanging, but this precaution proves useless. When the scan starts, I swear there is a jackhammer inside my head. My doctor wants to check on the status of my baby brain tumor discovered as an incidental finding four years ago. Like the impregnation of the Virgin Mary, I am not sure how the tumor got there.

                                  **********

Intracranial Mass: Enhancing extra-axial mass along the undersurface of

right cerebellar tentorium laterally measures 1 x 0.7 x 0.8 cm.

Mild generalized parenchymal volume loss with mild enlargement

of the ventricles and cerebral sulci.

 For many months, my brain tricked me into thinking I heard my heart beating outside my body. Think Telltale Heart by Poe. The diagnosis was pulsatile tinnitus. Since I had also recently tumbled off a bench and knocked my head on my daughter’s dining room wall, my doctor ordered an MRI.

 If you are privileged to select from a menu of brain tumors, meningioma is the way to go. They are mostly small and benign, unless they misbehave and get bigger causing blurriness or dizziness or headaches. Or contain traces of cancer. Mine was only .7 centimeter wide. Mercifully, forty percent of all brain tumors are meningiomas vs more aggressive ones such as glioblastoma. I am very lucky.

Near the end of the testing, Amal injects my left arm with gadolinium, a rare earth metal that will improve the brain image. Within seconds the gadolinium reaches my brain. I feel nothing. Because it can leave traces, I am advised to drink lots of water for two days.

 Suddenly the jackhammer goes silent. As I do once a year, I think, “what will I do with my one wild and precious life?”