3. A Disquisition on the Subject of Free Will

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Limbo is annoying, it allows your brain to come up with all sorts of horrific scenarios, it also inhibits your ability for rational thought.  I had, by now ,gone past the point of gibbering to myself "Oh shit, oh shit, I'm going to die"  We are basically fairly unsophisticated animals and despite our towering intellects, or not in my case, 99.9% of our reactions to the world around us are handled by instinct.

We have free will I hear you say, do we bollocks, as both prey and predator we have a very basic fight or flight response to danger. This is how the human race is still here after several million years of evolution, not nestling comfortably inside the stomach of one of the larger cats for instance.

When we sense danger we will get ready to fight or flee. Our bodies drop a shit ton of adrenaline into our system and in the case of say, Mike Tyson, launches him immediately into attack mode. Alternatively if you are me, the reaction is "First I am going to scream, and then I am going to run".  However, and this is important, pay attention now, if the danger is apparently present but does not materialise then our instincts will override our intellect and inform our adrenal gland to politely fuck off and stop producing useless adrenaline and we will, eventually, stop feeling scared. This has nothing to do with free will it's your body doing what it has evolved to do and your brain, frankly, does not have a say in it. 

Not quite sure why I wrote the preceding passage, probably to try and persuade you that I occasionally listened in biology and some things stuck.  I had not reached the, "I'm no longer scared" point unfortunately but at least I'd stopped the fruitless gibbering.

By the end of the weekend I was thinking that they would have to cancel the cancer clinic on the Tuesday because they would need the MRI scan. However, that morning I received a text that told me in no uncertain terms that I should attend the Bristol Royal Infirmary the very next day for a, not at all scary, MRI scan.  Now many of you have told me how easy MRI scans are in these enlightened days and I am now going to, very politely, tell you to fuck off.  All the bollocks about fight or flight written previously applies doubly to the lovely MRI scan. 

Now you may or may not know that I have been a caver for the last 34 years, I have crawled 45 feet through a phreatic tube that is smaller than an MRI scanner, I have had my hat jam against the roof whilst free diving a flooded tunnel, I have become stuck fast by my chest whilst lying in a stream. So right now I can hear you say that I am quite obviously an idiot for doing these things of my own free will, but I have done them, some of them many times, so I am very obviously not claustrophobic. 

To overuse a word, bollocks. I am claustrophobic and even thinking about some of these incidents is making my hands go all clammy, but, and this is the point, I did them of my own free will against my own body's very reasonable objections. When you go into an MRI scanner you are abdicating all responsibility to others and for someone who is claustrophobic this can cause an extraordinarily extreme fight or flight response to the point at which for some people it is almost impossible to do without sedation. These people aren't weak or stupid they just have a more finely tuned autonomic system, so there.

The very next day Helen and I turned up promptly for the MRI scan and again settled in for a long wait which turned out to be all of 5 minutes, the NHS seems to have become very efficient in the few years I have been absent from it's fond embrace.

I was dragged screaming and kicking into a side room to have the inevitable cannula inserted, and since I cannot remember anything about said insertion I am presuming that this was done without any drama.  I was then dragged along the corridor and plonked into a seat to await the horror to come. There was a very nice radiologist and nurse there to hold me down and stop me screaming.  The radiologist explained that they would inject the Gadolineum halfway through the scan. Ooh, I just looked up Gadolineum, it's a clear colourless magnetic fluid, iron filings maybe? They are extremely careful about asking whether you have any metal in your body, I have vast quantities, the following photo will give you an idea what I mean.

MRI scanners use fuck off great magnets and there are about a million warnings not to enter if you are carrying steel objects. If you went into an MRI scanner with a fragment of steel embedded in your eye, the magnets would pull it out. Just extrapolate to a piece of shrapnel in your head. Not a nice way to die. I am presuming that the metalwork in my feet are either not magnetic or too far away from the magnets to be affected. Gives pause for thought however, what if I had some steel splinter somewhere I didn't know about. It would definitely put a crimp in my day and is quite difficult not to think about when the MRI starts up.

I have a coping strategy for MRI scans that has, thus far, been successful in allowing me to get through each scan. It's pretty simple, close your eyes, close them before you go in and do not whatever you do open them again until the bed slides back out. They lay you out on the bed and if you are having your head scanned it is clamped in a sort of cage and you are exhorted very strenuously NOT to move, otherwise it's back to the start.

I closed my eyes before they had deployed the cage and kept them firmly closed. They started up and I lay there thinking "I don't remember them attaching anything to the cannula?" There is no way calculate passing time in the scanner, just lie there and think of England and DON'T MOVE. This went on for at least half an hour with me trying, just, to keep a lid on my incipient panic.  It went on for so long that I thought that this must be when they inject the Gadolineum, I concentrated and could feel something in my wrist, "Yep this is it, it should be over soon".  After another 10 or 15 minutes, the MRI cycled down and the bed moved back, slightly and a voice came over the headphones.  "Just attaching the contrast to the cannula, you are doing well, halfway through".  I nearly started crying, halfway through, I'd been in the fucking machine for approximately half a day.  The next half hour was possibly the longest of my entire life. Not only was I keeping a lid on a very real panic and keeping my eyes closed, but now I had gathering pain in my neck from not moving for so long. 

Eventually, after what seemed like a lifetime, the machine cycled down again and the bed started moving and I opened my eyes slightly too early to find the roof of the tunnel apparently touching the end of my nose. Just enough to give me a nice frisson of fear before I emerged into the light, completely OK, nothing had hurt, I had a very mildly stiff neck. 

See, I hear you say, easy, what were you worried about, well you can with the best will in the world, fuck off. The scan took nearly an hour and although I have been through many operations where I woke up with my foot drenched in blood and attached to a morphine pump, it still rates as one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life and that, I may tell you, includes having to eat boiled cabbage for school dinners.

Now all we have to do is wait and find out what the results are.