Inside the scanner

Text 1: Slice by Slice, by Joanna Pryce

An original contemporary essay.

The radiographer is kind, and young, and calls me lovely, which I decide to allow. She takes my earrings, my watch, my wedding ring, and puts them in a small plastic tray, as if I am being checked in for a flight to somewhere they cannot follow. Then she lays me on a narrow bed, tucks a foam wedge under my knees, and places in my hand a rubber bulb on a wire. If you need us, she says, squeeze.

The machine is the size of a small car and the colour of a new fridge. It has a hole through the middle, perhaps sixty centimetres across, and the bed slides me into it head first until the white curve of the tunnel is a hand’s breadth from my nose. It is surprisingly bright in there. It is surprisingly close. I close my eyes and decide not to think about coffins.

Then the noise begins. Nobody had told me about the noise. It is not one sound but dozens, each arriving without warning and repeating for minutes at a time: a jackhammer, a car alarm, a woodpecker the size of a horse, a deep, industrial knocking like someone trying to get in. Between them come silences so sudden that they are almost worse. Through the headphones, a tinny radio plays a song about summer to no one.

Halfway through, I realise that I am being looked at more closely than anyone has ever looked at me. Not my face, not my clothes, but the inside of me, slice by slice, the brain that is doing the realising. Out there in the control room, a grey map of me is assembling itself on a screen, and somewhere on it, perhaps, is the thing we are all looking for. Or perhaps there is nothing. I squeeze my hand around the rubber bulb, very gently, and do not press it.

Forty minutes later the bed slides out into ordinary light. The radiographer helps me up, gives me back my rings, and tells me that the results will be with my doctor within a week. I thank her. Then I go and sit in the car park for a long time, holding the steering wheel, listening to the engine not running.

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