Mondays with Mike: To your health

Today I went in for my annual chest MRI. It’s annual because way back when I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. When I was scheduled for a procedure called an ablation, pre-procedure imaging showed that my aorta was on the large size. My cardiologist said it might be nothing—I might just be a big-aorta guy. But, to be safe, every year I get this MRI to make sure nothing is changing.

The wacky aorta looks like a…I don’t know.

Each time I lay down on the big MRI tray, I’m more or less immobilized by straps, the tray moves into a tube, and a psychedelic sound show begins. Again and again I’m asked to inhale and hold my breath for short spurts, and a couple of times I’m told to hold it for 60 seconds or as long as I can. Then they squirt some dye/contrast agent through an IV and we repeat. Good thing I’m not claustrophobic, because the first couple of MRIs took around 90 minutes each—that’s a long time if you are claustrophobic (or if your nose itches–don’t ask me how I know).

Not today, though. My technician opened by saying if I’d meet him halfway, he could do it in as little as 35 minutes. This was a novelty–I’ve never negotiated with a medical technician. So, I bit: “What do I have to do?”

“If you’re willing to skip the music, and you don’t mind doing the breath commands kind of fast, I can get you out in around a half hour,” the tech said.

“Deal!” I mean, the only thing weirder than the clanks and sci-fi shrieks of an MRI is an overlay of music that doesn’t mask so much as it adds to the cacophony.

In the past, the technician would call out instructions about when to breathe in and out, but today the tech programmed the whole thing, and an automated voice makes the breathing commands. It all went like clockwork. When he pulled me out of the tube and unstrapped me, he was giddy. “Thirty minutes on the nose,” he said. “My previous record was 32 minutes. You’re awesome.”

These are the kind of things one is proud of when one reaches a certain age. I destroyed my MRI tech’s previous personal best. If there’s anyone who’s good at being still and breathing, I’m him.

I’m also very lucky. I have good health insurance. I have a great cardiologist (the same one who helped save Beth’s life lo these many years ago). I have a great primary care doctor who’s a careful gatekeeper, and who helped shepherd me through my COVID scare.

And, despite some nagging-but-treatable little maladies, I’m fundamentally healthy, despite a lifetime of various vices, decades of motorcycling, and some really dumb decisions in my youth.

Not everyone, including way too many of our friends, are as lucky as I have been. In the last year or two, four people we love have been diagnosed and are under treatment for very serious forms of cancer. Another, heartbreakingly, is beginning to experience the effects of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. And on, and on.

You want to do something to help so bad. And sometimes you feel powerless.

But we’ve learned that the one thing you can do is be there: listen, ask questions when it makes sense to ask questions, and more than anything, enjoy each other like you always have.

Only do it like there’s no tomorrow.