There’s life before…and now. And they are very different indeed.

I arrive at 8:10 for my 8:30am appointment.

I finally look up at the familiar glass entrance, after walking in a confused circle for more than a block, despite having been at this very place more than once before. I am distracted enough that I forgot to wear, or bring, a mask. People scurry in and out of the extra-large revolving door, and on the nearby sidewalk, all with some appropriate facial covering. Except for me.

As I approach the reception desk, though, the young woman there knew without my even asking, and she hands me a neatly compressed white mask the thickness of a flimsy coffee filter. I loop it around my ears with a quiet “thank you” as I trudge toward the elevator.

Am I trudging? I am not walking with any air of pleasantness, that much is certain. But can anyone else see the weight? Feel it? No. Of course not. They are all carrying their own.

Elevator to 3. MRI, Radiology. The big machinery of diagnostics.

The self-check-in kiosk is out of service. I absolutely do not feel like making polite conversation with the radiology desk attendant, and yet here I am. I have been reserving all of my potential pleasantness for the staff who will conduct my MRI soon, and here I have to expend some of it before I even enter the diagnostic space. Dammit.

The same COVID-19 questions. The same date of birth questions. It’s all so very familiar. Not just to me, and not just to someone having some tests at a hospital, but familiar to everyone, all the time.

She directs me to wait in a set of vinyl-covered chairs. Chairs that are now spaced even further apart than they used to be, thanks to the virus. Chairs that leave heaps of uncomfortable space without the buffer of more chairs or tables.

I take a photo of my shoes.

I’ve been doing that since the beginning. Chronicling this experience by snapping a photo of my legs and feet as I sit in the too-numerous waiting rooms. While it may seem odd, I do this because I learned quickly that no one looks anywhere else in these waiting rooms. There is no eye contact. No
nod of greeting or even acknowledgment. We don’t want to see or be seen. Every gaze is downward, even when one is feeling hopeful.

So, another photo of my legs, feet, and floor to add to the dozens and dozens that came before it.

As I start to post the photo to Instagram with a bland caption, the tech calls my name. I rise and submit to the same line of questioning as moments earlier. Name, date of birth….

I follow her down the narrow, door-lined hallway, surveying plastic placards naming rooms and facilities. Patient Dressing Room 1. Restrooms. A large red sign warning that a powerful magnet is ON AT ALL TIMES. She gestures me into Patient Dressing Room 3, a closet-sized space with a computer station, six lockers, and a chair where I will answer the same questions and many more. Any metal in your body? Yes. A hip replacement on the right side; it’s titanium. In your eyes? No. Any family history of… I have no family history, I am adopted. (Look of surprise, settling back into questioning.) Weight, height, age at first pregnancy, last pregnancy, how many months of breastfeeding total, current emergency contact, and on…

The tech, whose name I learn is Amy, was a pleasant woman of considerably larger size than me, who comments on my weight and that she loves my naturally gray hair.

“I can’t do that,” she says, twisting her smile into something grotesque.

“Sure, you can,” I say. “I worked with my stylist for about a year to get it just right. I didn’t do it all at once. We eased into it until I finally stopped any sort of coloring at all. You totally can.” I find myself reassuring her, distracting myself from my own need for reassurance.

“Do you want music?” she asks. I say I do, but when she tells me I could listen to anything, any artist, I blanked. I finally land on James Taylor. Then I immediately wonder if I will ruin listening to James Taylor forever because I will have listened to him under duress. Too late to change my mind and wreck my affection for any other artist.

She helps me out of the thin gowns. I wear one opening in the front, one opening in the back. She shows me how to climb onto the bright-white MRI table, grasping two handrails, positioning myself facedown. The earplugs go in, the headphones on over those. She adjusts my body, smoothing out the skin and fat near my breasts for the machine.

Amy tells me that Darnell would be running the MRI. That they won’t be able to hear me unless they, too, are communicating with me via the headphones. She reminds me about the stress squeeze ball that will alert them if I feel like I am in trouble, and then she leaves the room. Starts the music. How ironic that the first tune is “Something in the Way She Moves.” Huh.

As I feel the table nudge me forward into the magnet tube, I sigh heavily. And begin to cry.

Not sobbing, just weeping. I am not claustrophobic and I am not in pain. And yet the tears come, risking a nose that will surely, certainly drip salty, gelatinous mucous into my paper mask.

Darnell’s voice cuts in on the headphones, interrupting “Sweet Baby James” to tell me that the next section would last about four minutes. James Taylor finished my favorite song.

The music stops suddenly—partway through “You’ve Got a Friend”—so that Darnell can tell me the next section of the test will last roughly eight minutes. I can do this, I think. The music does not start again. Just the heavy clanging of the MRI machine. Bang, bang, bang. The metallic echo surrounding me. I start to count in beats of eight. Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight, onetwothreefourfivesixseveneight, along with the banging. I think I can keep track of how many eight-beat measures there were. I fail. I begin to sob.

I am embarrassed but can’t help myself. I wonder why I bothered to wear makeup. Surely, it will be completely spoiled. Like my day. Like my life. Ugly and ruined. There is no distraction to stop me from ruminating on the cancer I’ve had, and to fear it all over again. Why was I so dismissive last time? How could I have been so sure it was a one-off? I decide that if I have anything again, even something small, that I will not treat it. Who could do that twice?

The sound stops. The table eases backwards and I wonder if Amy will scare me when she comes in and touches me? Will she tell me when she is here or will I just feel her? How long will it be? Is it safe to move my arms away from over my head to wipe my face? She will think I am silly for crying; I am sure of it.

Amy touches my shoulder before moving to slide the headphones off. “All set,” she chimes. I lift my head, and sure enough she says, “Are you crying?” and looks at me like I am an injured child.

“Yeah, sorry,” I say. “I’ll tell you this much; I’d rather get a hip replacement once a month than to ever have cancer again.” She looks at me kindly but does not reply.

I tell her that everything was going pretty okay until the music stopped, and that after that I couldn’t help but get “all in my head.”

She nods. “I’m so sorry,” she says. I know she was, or Darnell was, but I had nowhere else to go without that song to distract me.

I am instructed to push myself up using the same handles that I’d used to pull myself onto the table. The warm blankets are no longer warm, and they fall off my body, leaving me exposed. Amy gently wraps me in the gowns again. My rubber-soled socks stick me in place on the floor until I am willing to pick up my feet to move.

Amy says something encouraging, something friendly and warm, before telling me that my dressing room is the second one on the right and that once I am changed back into my clothes, I should just exit the way we’d come in. No check out needed. Just have a good day.

A good day. By 8:30am my day is not good. It isn’t awful or excruciating; it just is not good. I feel bad for making Amy feel bad, if I even did make her feel bad. But then I stop caring about Amy’s feelings as I leave the dressing room and head down the same hallway. Because I always do, I take a wrong turn and another smiling tech points me toward the exit, which I follow.

Stainless-steel elevators back to the first floor. It’s called the Plaza. I walk through the bright, glass-enclosed atrium back to the giant glass revolving door and out to the street. Everyone, going about their day, in their masks, with their purses and children. Moving to and from busy streets, and me heading vaguely toward my house.

I try to recite James Taylor lyrics in my head. To finish the song that was interrupted. To put an end to the procedure in a concrete way. I can’t. I walk silently home.

Some people talk about how they are “cancer survivors” and that’s okay. If we survive, that means we are not dead. But to be clear, there is no life after cancer. I am not post-cancer.

I just am.

We just are.

A morning spent in the machine is surviving cancer. I get it. Because there is before cancer, and then there is now.

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