Open MRI

I keep my mother ’s dentures warm; they fog the plastic case on my lap. Lips pursed, arms raised above her head, she lies on a table about to slide through the doughnut of an apparatus that looks like a spaceship. I hear David Bowie’s voice: This is Ground Control to Major Tom as the contraption begins its magne tic music— an opus of hammers, a staccato hum. What a brave astronaut my mother is, fitted into a coil helmet, going in alone. She waves off my hand to hold, refuses earbuds the technician offers. I’d give anything if we were anywhere else. Strange, the way I now drift above her, the technician and the machine, high enough to almost touch the floodlights, which somebody has thought to dim.
Source: JAMA - Journal of the American Medical Association - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research