Only when I’m leaving the house, foot on the bike pedal, kissing the children before pushing down the front step and out onto the road, do I realise how little I want to do this on my own. My seizure was four weeks ago, and besides that midnight ambulance ride to the creeping, bleeping, whispering hospital - in the fresh morning light in our hospital room I say to J, “The night is dark and full of terrors,” and we laugh, like that can capture waking up to paramedics in my bedroom, or the drunk man threatening police along the hospital corridor, or my minutes-long vegetative state - I’ve felt fine, never better. But cycling away from the house, the children calling I LOVE YOOOUUU through the letterbox as they smell my fear, I am frightened. I focus on pedalling; cycling was a good idea, even if I can’t lift my eyes more than two metres in front of me, my heavy heart, my heavy head, my heavy eyes.
At the hospital I cycle round and round looking for the bike stands, marvelling at the bloody-minded dark humour of these places: the unavoidable decay, the unstoppable entropy, the inevitable death. Toppled laundry racks, broken beds, rusting tanks.
At the MRI unit, someone shows me where I can lock my stuff up. When she comes back in for me, I’ve somehow looped my bra strap twice round one arm with the other one wedged into my jumper sleeve, elbow-first. She says, “Apparently you can leave your bra on.” Inside the scanning room, the radiographer tells me how, even as a fan of the franchise, he nearly walked out of Terminator Genysis when they not only turned an MRI scanner off and on again (impossible, he explains, that’s weeks of refilling the helium), but also *up*. I laugh. He looks at my trainers as I lie down and says, Runner? And I say yes, because why the hell not. At the top of my head cage, there’s an angled mirror showing my feet, and the desk where the radiographer sits. I don’t understand why they give that mirror until I’m fully in the machine, and the roof and walls are inches from my face, and all I can think is Look in the mirror and breathe, just breathe, look in the mirror and breathe, and I can’t even fall asleep because if I close my eyes it feels most like being buried alive. At one point I see him take off his glasses to more closely examine something on screen - is he surprised by something? - and I wonder if I’m sick in here would they be able to get me out before I choked on it.
Tssssss tkk tkk tkk tkk unggghhhhhhhhhhhh it goes, for twenty minutes, while I try to stop swallowing and breathing and thinking and feeling. The body temperature air being blown over my face, and the hard plastic vibrations, and my chewed-on fear: all of these make me feel like I’m back on a long-haul plane. Then it’s done, and I’m out, and if I’m talking too loud it’s only because the device is so damn deafening, despite the ear plugs and pads he gave me. I cycle home. We eat Snickers ice creams in the garden and plan tomorrow.
