the mri

Something about waiting for the mri technician in a room separate from your husband - struggling to close an enormous robe that threatens to unleash your cancerous breast at any moment - at 10pm on a Friday night really drives home the fact that you have cancer. It's the loneliness of the place at that hour, the weird sense of desolation and urgency because these scans have to be done before the appointment with The Cancer Team on Wednesday. I'm sure it happens, but it certainly feels like no one goes to a doctor's appointment at 10pm unless there is a Serious Problem. For me, that Serious Problem is growing in my right breast. There are two things about it that persist in my brain, nagging sensations: 1. I feel fine. 2. I can feel the cancer. I can touch the furthest reaches of the tumor, the strange hardness of it, the new tail it seems to have grown that trails up toward my armpit where a lymph node is so solid and swollen that I can see it when my arm is at rest. I look at it a lot. There it is, this dangerous thing that I can't quite figure out how to digest. I am pretty sure it looks like a very large sperm.

Mostly I have felt fine, practical and reasonable, less frightened than those around me. And then there was the mri. I didn't know I'd have to have an iv. I hate needles, so as I lay on the bed, I wriggled my feet around, squeezed tight the washcloth the sweet nurse had given me, and talked and giggled nervously, incessantly, proclaimed my embarrassment but could not stop. She missed the vein or shot right through it, I'm not sure which. Either way it hurt and she patted my shoulder calmly and said, "I'm going to get someone to help," then ran to the door and yelled a little nervously, "Chad?!" Chad is a horrible name. He had a gross little mustache and I can only assume he spends his weekends in khaki shorts with plaid button-up shirts and straw fedoras frequenting the worst selection of bars our little town has to offer. He fixed the iv, and unbeknownst to me (I wouldn't look until she pulled it out), because I was headed into a huge magnet machine, the spike that was left in my arm was a flimsy plastic tube that curled and bent as it was removed. It looked organic, worm-like.

In order to get a clear picture of breasts in an mri, the patient is asked to lay face down on a platform like the one pictured here. It is significantly less pleasant than this model would have you believe. I have had an mri before and I trembled so much they had to redo half of the tests. I do not like small spaces, but resolved to be tough because, as a grown-ass woman, I can handle this sort of thing. And then the sounds start and the deafening thump and twang of the magnets at work made it feel like I was stuck beneath the floorboards of some evil kids' bad rave. I couldn't stop imagining horrific scenes of earrings and nose rings and metal implants being ripped out of people's bodies. I started to hyperventilate, but managed to calm myself a bit for fear of having to start all over. That's when it really struck me, as I lay face down, magnets and coils pounding all around me setting even my hair and the needle prick sites (is that the metal in my blood, yearning to fly out and cling to the walls of this machine?) abuzz. I am sick. I am sick and I am scared.

So I counted. Each time a new test was announced I started counting the seconds because everything else I tried to think of kept getting interrupted. At some point, I drifted in my counting and I remembered Louise Erdrich's story, St. Marie, "I was rippling gold. My breasts were bare and my nipples flashed and winked. Diamonds tipped them." I pictured the beach, sun glinting off of the water and my husband and dearest friends, one with her tiny daughter, out swimming in that big beautiful lake, tossing around huge numbers, jumping onto enormous 4s and 27s and 33s as they burst through the waves. And I counted them all until it was over.