Don’t know who invented the MRI scanner and who came up with this amalgam of sounds produced by the machine, but they sure had lots of imagination.

When I entered the MRI room I was met by a sound that could very well have been the beat of some groovy ’80s tune. It never stopped and kept the rhythm throughout the entire procedure. It went: cherry boom-boom, cherry boom-boom, cherry boom-boom.

Inside the scanner there was a low buzz like the buzz inside an airplane. With my eyes closed and the help of the cool breeze produced by the air-conditioning I could imagine I was traveling. Once the actual scanning began, there was an entire rhythm section, each instrument producing a different sound and a different beat. I am sure an electronic music composer would have had a blast in there. If only I had the words to describe all those different sounds. There was drilling, buzzing, wailing, pounding, knocking, shaking, plus a lot of machine gun sounds. At moments, I felt like laughing. The sounds were so unexpected and bizarre I felt like I was mocked by the machine. I mean I distinctively recall a sound that was like a duck quacking and biting my butt. I swear! Not that I was ever bitten by a duck. I had to tell myself, “be serious, be serious” to keep myself from jerking.

I was told I was in there for one hour! It felt like half with all that rhythm section jamming. I wondered whether I had dozed off.

[MRI results came out good; tumors reduced after chemo. I will soon be going to surgery]