The Philip Glass MRI Concerto

Me, and the Machine

The lockdown left me with one of those gifts that keep on giving. A shoulder that has not been completely out of pain since the summer of 2020. That was the summer the gyms were closed down for the remainder of the year. That is when I moved from the paranoia of Los Angeles, out to Bakersfield. In February of 2021, I found a local gym that had erected one of those huge tents in the parking lot in front of their building, and filled it with equipment and weights. At last, after 8 months of attempting to exercise at home, I was able to get in a workout without banging into a chair, or trying to power walk in the heat or cold. 

I am grateful for the leadership of In Shape gyms for having the guts to stay open. 

To tell my story, we have to back up a bit, to when I had Covid in January of 2020. At that time, there were rumors of a brand new virus, but no one knew for certain. It wasn’t a bad illness. It was the “after effects” that got to me. The brain fog was not pleasant at all. Of course, the vaccine brought it on again, but it cleared up after a month. But the worse after effects of them all was not brought to us by the virus, but by the dangerous bureaucrats who think they know best.

They do not know best. They do a fine job of bullying, though. And, they managed to triple the suicide rate. And, leave me with a bum shoulder that radiates pain down my left arm. 

Finally, after a second round of steroids to help with the pain, this past Saturday, I walked into the MRI trailer at Kaiser and the nice workers there put me into the machine. I shut my eyes tightly, because I am on the claustrophobic side. And then this horrible music began.

The odd sounds, and rhythmic patterns of the magnets tumbling around in that miracle of a machine, gave me a focal point away from the fact my body was encased in a coffin. As I listened, all I could think of was Philip Glass.  Glass’ “music” used to leave me dumbfounded. Yet now I have an understanding of Glass that I did not have before. He writes for the machine. Beethoven took on nature, Glass takes on the factories, the city traffic and the beauty of the MRI. 

Last year, I had my first MRI, on my brain. This too, was a Covid reaction in that before anyone knew about the brain fog, I experienced a very frightening period of the fog. This culminated in an episode wherein first responders were called because my dear friend thought I had suffered a stroke. I was confused and frightened due to my inability to put words and speech together. It was determined I had not had a stroke. I called my doctor, and she sent me in for a scan of the brain. This is still in 2020 whilst I lived in Los Angeles. The scan showed that there was some sort of mass in my brain. But this is in the middle of the time of Covid, and there are no doctor appointments available unless one is dying or about to die of something. A mass in the brain has to wait.

Fast forward to the summer of 2021, and I get, finally, an appointment with a neurologist to follow up on the purported brain mass. The good doctor tells me the only good picture of the brain comes from an MRI, so he orders one up. Most doctors now ask their patients if they have an issue with tiny spaces. I nod my head, he writes some script for the calming drugs, because they will not allow a glass of wine in the MRI machine. 

More’s the pity, since I can function after a glass of wine, and not lose the day. The drugs do me in. During the brain session, I fall asleep inside the tomb, so I did not hear the Glass concerto. The good news from that picture is, my brain is fine. No mass to clutter up my thinking, I can do that all on my own. 

As for the shoulder, after two years of pain, we see there is a tear in the rotator cuff. And calcification is other places. It isn’t too bad, just enough to cause pain if I don’t keep moving it and stretching my shoulders. The remedy? An internal shot of the magical steroids. It is back to the imaging place, where an expert will use the machine to guide the juice into the injury. If this works, I am good to go. 

In spite of the pain, there is something learned here. The shoulder has allowed me, once again, to experience the result of the geniuses who have created these machines that allow us to look deeply into human, and animal, bodies. Even if the noise reminds me of a Philip Glass piece, I finally understand Glass. He doesn’t rage against the machine. He accompanies it.