Episode 6: Tunnel to Nowhere

The bed was made of hard plastic, the kind that you find in hospitals and nursing homes.  Probably made from recycled milk jugs or coke bottles or something.  Not cold, but certainly not alive, either. 

Alive.

That’s why I was there, to see if someone behind the glass in the other room could tell if my head showed shadows around my neck, or if large swaths of my brain had gone dark.  They needed to see inside my skull, and I needed to remain perfectly still for, well, I can’t remember for how long they wanted me to be still for.

“Have you ever had an MRI dad?”  Her question snapped me out of my daydream.

I smiled.  Of course, I’d had an MRI. I don’t know how many I’ve had, but I’ve done time in that tunnel that goes nowhere.  Whenever they slid me in, I flashed back to horror movies that I watched when I was a kid, the kind where a crematorium was a central prop to the scariness of the movie.  I needed to be still like a corpse.

“Are you scared?” I asked.

“I don’t like tight spaces, and those machines aren’t too tight.  But I get nervous.  I need to be really still.”

“You’re not scared you’ll have a tumor or something?”

Emma had grown so much and so quickly, the doctor wanted to make sure the fast growth wasn’t something other than a late growth spurt.

Everyone wants an overnight success but growing fast in nature can be found in gardens where weeds and cancer grow.  The best kinds of growth happen slow and calm, without noticeable change.

So, I felt like I was sitting in the waiting room for about three weeks, instead of the 45 minutes I actually sat there. 

Emma came in the room.

“Everything ok?”

“We won’t know for a couple days,” she said. “But I sat still, and I wasn’t nervous.”

“I think it’ll be ok,” I said.

“Yeah, but what does ok mean?”

“Maybe you don’t have a tumor.”

“If they gotta do surgery on me, I’d just want them to go ahead and do it. Get it over with.  Quick.”

I didn’t say anything but whispered a silent prayer that time itself could slow down.  I want Emma to grow up, to change.  But not so fast.  I’m not ready for it to be over. Not quick.