From within the confines of my
office cubicle, I have dreamt of a secret escape. An escape to a place so edifying
that it forces me to seek answers to the glorious mysteries of life. A place
that makes me realize my deepest fears and understand my core beliefs. And then
I entered a magnetic resonance
imaging scanner.
A doctor recently recommended
that I get an MRI scan of my spine done, so that he could point at a picture
and declare that I have a slip disc. At the risk of sounding like a vegetable,
I have to accept that I was excited. Something about experiencing something I
never have, excited me. The doctor suggested that I change into a hospital
robe. That excited me too because hospital robes are generally loose and airy, giving
you the privilege of feeling thin and frail. I needed to feel so.
I removed every little metal that
was on me, including the all-encompassing bra because the male nurse reminded
me that the hooks might be of metal and metal isn’t treated well by the scanner.
I could have told him that the hooks in mine were plastic but then decided to
just go with his assumption. I was made to lie down on a motorized bed while
the nurse gave me the necessary directions which included ‘Do not move for the next 15 minutes’, ‘Here, press this is you feel uneasy’ and ‘No, your eyes wont dissolve if you keep them open’. My ears were
plugged and my legs were comfortably tucked inside a blanket. Then he left the
scanning room.
Gently, the bed started to move
into the cylindrical scanner, head first. I lay on the bed staring at the
entrance of the scanning room that led to the world outside. There was a sense
of calm and a privileged form of loneliness, the kind a baby might feel inside
its mother’s womb, i.e, if the baby could feel and think at that time. And then
the bed started moving again, taking me well inside the cylindrical dome.
All was well until the machine
started to make a deafening noise. I froze inside, betting that what I was
hearing was the emergency alarm, screaming that there was something insidiously
wrong with the machine. By then I was fully inside the dome, with no light
visible at the end of the tunnel. Just me, a remote in my hand and the machine
screaming from all sides. My mind decided to make it even worse.
My Hippocampus started playing ‘Final
Destination’ and all its sequels. The scene where two women die inside their
tanning booths was particularly urging my bladder to burst. May be this is how
Deadpool felt inside that glass box. May be I would wake up to be an Avatar. My
heart begged me to press the big red button proudly sitting on the remote, but
my intuition asked me to have a little faith.
Slowly my body adapted to the
chaos around me and my mind started to tune it into a psychedelic trance track.
My heart swayed with it and then right in between my artistic endeavour, a
sudden realization hit me. I AM BLOODY ALONE IN THIS.
Life has been a little tumultuous
of late, especially since I am expected to make decisions that are in the best interest of everybody who matter to me. Lying inside this plastic dome made me realize that
through our struggles, we would be alone. No one can get an MRI scan for me. No
one will suffer my decisions but me. People will love you, press their opinions on you and pray for you. But what they cannot do
is live your life for you and suffer for you. So why take a life altering decision
pressurized by the world when in the end, it would be you alone living through it
all.
Who knew an MRI scan could be
enlightening. May be there is a personal Buddha inside each one of us. Bodh Gaya
might be too far, but an MRI scanner isn’t.
Book a scan now!
Image Courtesy- Somewhere in Pinterest.
Image Courtesy- Somewhere in Pinterest.
