The Panic

It’s not a bomb. It’s a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine. It’s worse. In a bomb, your dead. In an MRI, they bury you alive in a round metal chamber. Then they turn on whirs and bangs so loud that no one can hear your screams.

Claustrophobia is like “Magnaverbaphobia”—fear of big words. It’s such an academic word. Nowhere in it is the sheer terror of no escape.

They tried it once before on me—clamped my head into a restraint as daunting as Alexander Dumas’s iron mask and shoved me into a hole as confining as Uma Thurman’s grave in Kill Bill: Volume Two or as horrifying as the fate of that Dutch Couple in The Vanishing. No way. I escaped.

No Way Out

This time, the benevolent torturers insisted—my cardiologist, who is otherwise a nice guy and my newly acquired neurologist—personable, competent—she could be your nice aunt Barbara. My family urged me. “It’s a good idea. Just to confirm nothing is wrong.”

“If nothing is wrong, then why do I have to—” My logic fell on unconvinced ears.

Strategy and Tactics That Won the Day

“Drug me out of my mind.”

“We’ll give you something.”

“That’s not enough. Give me more.”

“We can give you Ativan or Klonopin. Which do you prefer?”

“Both.”

1. Drugs. They ended up giving me Klonopin. Small dose. Two pills. “Take one an hour before the MRI and a second one when you get there—only if you need it.” What a silly “only if.” I took them both.

It’s strange. I didn’t feel its effects very much. My wife and daughter said except for slurring words, I seemed quite normal. It was nice of them to drive me, although I had the sense they stood ready to restrain me in case I bolted. They probably had rope in the trunk.

Maybe the drugs were enough. It all worked out, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I needed more ammunition.

2. “The Coin Toss.” The second weapon in my anxiety arsenal was remembering the coin toss. It was a little trick I learned once before. (I wrote about it in my Paris Affair article.) Every time the panic grabbed me, I thought of it as one side of a coin. The other side was I’m healthy, I have good doctors, my family is with me. Heads. Tails. Heads. Tails. Flipping the coin was a way of getting through the many panic attacks I had in the days leading up to the MRI

3. Non-visuals. When I got into the MRI room, I diverted my eyes. I never looked directly at the machine. That would be like going to the gallows and admiring the hangman’s noose or being a prisoner in the courtyard of the Hotel DeVille and asking to see the Guillotine.

I greeted the technicians as politely as possible. “Hello, nice to meet you. Do you have a blindfold?” I was carrying a COVID mask to cover my eyes just in case, but they had one which they immediately put on me. I guess I wasn’t the first prisoner to ask to have my eyes covered.

They also did two other nice things. They gave me ear plugs and wrapped a warm cloth around my neck and ears—sort of like a spa. I laid down on the table and began my third tactic.

4. The Counting Game. It’s an old judo trick. Contrary to popular belief, the brain cannot think of two things at the same time. What it does is switch from one thing to the other and back again, creating the illusion of multi-tasking. In judo, if you stubbed the toe of one foot, you would continually bang the other foot on the mat until the pain in the first foot was a distant memory.

What I did as soon as the MRI began (even before) is I devised an elaborate counting scheme to fully occupy my brain—I gave a slight twitch to each finger as I counted 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. To further occupy my brain with thinking, I continued the orderly count all the way up to 59 and 60, to mark each minute. Just to be sure my brain would be fully occupied, I kept track of the number of minutes by keeping the appropriate number of fingers together touching each other—after two minutes, two fingers were touching, after three minutes, three fingers were touching.

Complicated? Of course, it was complicated. I didn’t want that slippery brain of mine to backslide into panic. It tried. An image of horror flashed before me in a picosecond of brain time. It was like having PTSD from Guadalcanal. I wasn’t at Guadalcanal, but I saw that movie, too. Here I go again. Backsliding. Where was I? Four fingers together. Four minutes—no wait. It’s the second time around. Fourteen minutes and counting: one–two–three . . .

The Reprieve

Then suddenly, a voice interrupted my counting. “You’re all done.” My brain engaged. I realized where I was. For one brief moment the panic rose in my body, until I felt the table slide out of the machine. Cool air surrounded me. Off came the head harness and the blindfold. Aretha Franklin was singing Freedom and I was sitting up.

I offered to buy everyone hot fudge sundaes, but there were no takers.

Aftermath

The next day, I was scheduled for a follow-up echocardiogram. A young woman rubbed warm oil and massaged my chest with a vibrating rod.

“Are you okay?” She asked.

“Oh yes. Yes I am.”

The Mass General Hospital is only about a mile from the North End of Boston, where the streets are still filled with pushcarts full of fresh produce. I walked there in the noonday sunshine to a little deli down a narrow alley off Hanover Street. I bought a sandwich called a Panino—a warm, foot-long baguette with crisp crust, stuffed with fresh-cut prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella, covered with arugula and sliced tomatoes, sprinkled with olive oil.

Sitting out on the Rose Kennedy Greenway eating my sandwich and drinking my coke, I realized I had beat the panic gods. Drugs, the coin flip, non-visuals, and the counting game turned out to be a winning approach, every bit as effective as the country’s defense-in-depth strategy against nuclear attack.

My next MRI will be a piece of cake, or maybe a hot fudge sundae, or a panino sandwich. I hope yours will be too.

Joseph K. DeRosa is a storyteller, and a writer of fiction and nonfiction. He is author of Vera’s Story: Escape to Freedom. He has also been published in several short story anthologies in the 2013 and 2014 Chatham 02633 series (Lulu Press) and has essays available in Medium. Raised in Boston, Massachusetts, he currently lives in Cape Cod and South Florida. As a leader in information systems, he has taught courses and given talks around the world. Much of his writing is derived from his travels. Web Site: jkderosa.com, X: @derosabooks, Email: derosabooks@gmail.com..