Talking About Old English During A Routine Fluoroscopy

So I went in for my second MRI, which was a “fluoroscopy,” which is where they inject your hip joint with some sort of weird dye that may or may not be magnetized (the nurse who was assisting didn’t know, which was the second of several unsettling moments that occurred during this relatively unpleasant experience. The first was when I checked in at reception and the lady wanted me to fill out a “Do Not Resuscitate” form. I said “do I have to?” and she said “no but it does help us out if…something…happens.” I imagined them calling my husband to tell him I had died during my routine fluoroscopy and did he want them to do CPR, and how that would be a pain, so maybe it was worth filling it out. Also, wasn’t it tempting fate to assume I wouldn’t need a DNR for a routine fluoroscopy? Perhaps the obituary files of our nation’s newspapers are littered with people who brazenly died during routine fluoroscopies without filling out DNR forms, thus leading to myriad intra-familial squabbles. Nonetheless, I said “something probably won’t happen of this magnitude today though, right?” and she said “no of course not!” and we laughed, oh, these silly bureaucrats and their Do Not Resuscitate forms! Then I said “Although, I guess any of us could die at any minute” and she stopped laughing and said “that’s true” and then looked REALLY BUMMED).

Anyway I took off all my clothes in a small changing room with a “PULL FOR HELP” chain on the wall, and put on a voluminous hospital gown that tied in the back awkwardly, and I shuffled down the hall to a small cold room filled with machines like those in that one scene in “the Exorcist” when she’s laying on that table screaming while Ellen Burstyn sobs behind a window. I sat on the table swinging’ my bare feet like Huck Finn on an ol’ river bank, and the radiologist brought over a bunch more forms to sign, one of which authorized her to “dispose of” any of my “body parts” that she might “remove” during the procedure. She apologized for this form, saying “I don’t anticipate removing any of your body parts today.” I waved my hand and said “Well if you do, you may throw them away.” I was being very lackadaisical with my physical body today! First my refusal to make my surprise demise easier on my husband via the simple signing of a form, and now by telling a doctor she could throw me in the garbage if need be! Well I say, if you’re going in for a routine fluoroscopy, you should throw caution to the winds and really try to enjoy yourself.

So a fluoroscopy is like, you lie on this table, which goes up and down and zooms all around in ways you can’t really predict or follow, as the doctor shifts you to get the angle just right for the ACTUALLY GIGANTIC NEEDLE ATTACHED TO A BIG HOSE OR SOMETHING she’s trying to insert all the way inside the joint of your hip. There’s a live X-Ray of your pelvis on the screen above you where the doctor can see it. Unfortunately this also means that you can see it, which, believe me, is not preferable. First the doctor takes a paperclip taped to a tongue depressor and uses it to find the exact spot for the injection, which she then marks with a sharpie (don’t you find it SO DELIGHTFUL how often doctors use jerry-rigged tools like this? It’s like, they exist in this unbelievably high-tech environment, using machines and tools more sophisticated than you can even comprehend, and yet sometimes nonetheless all you really need for a particular job is a paperclip taped to a tongue depressor, why make a big deal out of it?). Then she scrubs the area with iodine or whatever it is. Then she prepares like a thousand things over on a tray you can’t see.

Meanwhile, we were having a disheartening conversation. Whenever doctors ask you what you do, and you say you’re a music history professor, you get a big reaction, but the nature of that reaction differs. Sometimes they are wistful, like, they used to play the piano but they had to give it up for their vocation. Other times it’s more like they see you as a kindred spirit; both of you engaged in higher-level thinking and interests, and even like both of you have a job that entails the betterment of society. In this case, however, her reaction was all about how great it is that some people devote themselves to keeping alive art and music, so that “the rest of us” (meaning scientists) can have a little bit of enrichment in their lives, as they go about their actually-important work. She kept talking about music the way you’d maybe talk about donuts. Like, obviously a great thing that is so nice to have, even though it’s completely superfluous and pointless. I didn’t feel like engaging in some big debate about culture and history and critical thinking and “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” and archeology and posterity and theory and hermeneutics and citizenship and whatever because she was at this point prodding my groin with her finger while holding a “needle” that looked more like the biggest thing on earth so I just said “yeah”

She was nice and smart. It just made me sad, this dumb made-up gulf between art and science.

ANYWAY somehow then she started talking about Beowulf and we both revealed that we’d just read that awesome NYer article about Tolkien’s translation. The nurse or tech or whatever dude said he liked Seamus Heaney’s translation and I said it would be interesting to compare a poetry vs. a prose translation and we all agreed. Then the doctor pointed out that “it’s not every day you’re in a room with three people who’ve all read Beowulf,” which is true.

After injecting your hip joint with lidocaine, now it’s time for the REAL needle, which is more upsetting even than that first needle. It takes a long time for this needle to go in. It goes in, then it goes deeper, then deeper, then deeper, and you’re like, is this thing gonna come out the other side and like poke into my other leg or WHAT. It doesn’t exactly hurt, although it hurts a little, but it’s more just that it feels repellently disgusting. It reminded me of my arm wound when I could feel the tugging of the doctor stitching up the muscle, offensively deep inside the arm where no sensation should ever be. At this point you make the HUGE MISTAKE of looking at the x-ray machine, where you see something that looks like a huge pair of scissors bisecting your entire groin and sticking right into the ball of your femur, and at the other end it’s like a huge hose spiraling off to parts unknown. “Ok now this might feel weird” says the doctor and then she starts pumping your leg full of dye. It feels like your leg is a balloon filling with water. It is gross and weird. She says “tell me when that gets too tight” and you’re like, what is “too tight?” Nothing that is happening right now feels good or correct at all, so how should I know. What if I never say anything and my leg explodes. I am reminded of how my mother–who prides herself on her high pain tolerance–was told by a gynecologist burning cysts off her ovaries to “tell [him] when the pain got too bad,” and she of course resolved to never say anything no matter what because that’s how you know you’re a real badass, so then suddenly he starts dropping F bombs and she looks down and SMOKE IS COMING OUT OF HER YOU-KNOW-WHAT and the doctor is FURIOUS at her.

Anyway meanwhile you are still entertaining that conversation about Beowulf; the doctor doesn’t like the gross Zemeckis all-CGI movie version of several years ago for example, which is of course quite right of her, and you kind of want to say something about how that film introduced this really bizarre subplot where it was implied that Beowulf had RAPED Grendel’s mother years earlier, such that the poem was transformed into some sort of truly bizarre reverse-Oedipal Freudian nightmare wherein Beowulf is trying to rid the world of the evidence of his sexual transgression, and like, what the fuck is wrong with Neil Gaiman, honestly, I hate that dude and do not understand his insane popularity, and can you BELIEVE he wrote that piece of shit Beowulf movie, plus he’s married to that asshole Amanda Palmer!!!!!!! but you don’t say any of this, because you’re clutching your hospital gown and going “ugh! UGH” until the doctor is like “ok that’s good.”

The needle comes out and you are like THANK YOU GOD. Then the nurse/tech dude rips off the giant bandage that had been isolating the injection area and some of your pubic hair comes off with it but who’s counting at this point.

(At our family reunion my mom noted that women of her generation NEVER, NEVER shaved above the knee, while women of my generation shave all the way up the thigh. I noted that women of the generation younger than me take it all off, pubic hair and everything. WHERE WILL THE MADNESS STOP. Anyway I say this because I was thinking, if I was some stupid-ass 22 year old that bandage would have had no pubic hair to rip out. It was a real no-win situation)

THEN, out of the blue, a rad hospital worker lady comes boppin’ in with a wheelchair and just immediately starts delivering jokes right and left, cracking the doctor up, cracking the tech dude up. If this was a movie, she’d be played by Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids. “Don’t worry–I won’t do any wheelies!” She put me in the wheelchair and said “Well I told you no wheelies, but nobody said anything about SPEEDING! Hope you like wind in your hair!!” I said “I DO!” and then she goes “Beep! Beep! Beep! COMIN’ THROUGH!” while everyone died laughing. It was such an abrupt shift in tone that I felt drunk–it was like when “Frenchy” shows up at the end of the “Burgundy Loaf” sketch on Mr. Show and transforms the fancy atmosphere into crude scatalogical cockney madness. “YOU WILL LOVE FRENCHY! WE ALL DO!”

She wheeled me down the hall, and kept yanking the back of my gown closed. “Your skin’s hanging out! Lets fix that! Might be some creeps around here tryin’ to get a look at your skin! Who knows, might be some NICE people who want to see your skin too, I don’t know!” She wheeled me into the MRI room and immediately started singing “857-6309/Jenny” while riffing comedically on the song, at the techs sitting in there. They responded with more gales of belly laughs. Clearly every person in this hospital is just utterly delighted by this lady. It was wonderful.

Then I got the MRI without further incident. Then I went home. The hip ached for 2 days and now feels okay.

Can’t wait for those results, see how much permanent damage is going on in there! Fun stuff. I expect I will have many fluoroscopies in the years to come, plus much worse things. Nothing but laughs.

Today the power is out all over but not at my coffee shop! I think this is the last time I’ll be in this coffee shop. I want to bring these girls a present but what do you bring to the staff of a coffee shop? Starbucks gift cards? LOL JK but let me know if you have any ideas.

We are leaving on Thursday. We’ve decided to camp instead of staying in hotels. All our life together we’ve half-assed everything. We don’t take care of our yard; we don’t paint a room if the color is gross; we constantly say we want to do stuff and then we never do it–garden, bake bread, fix our speakers, build a bookshelf. We always put shit off. Oh, we’ll do that when we own a house. Oh, we’ll do that when we get real jobs. It’s bullshit. I am almost 40 and still waiting for everything to be exactly right before I do all this shit I want to do. We’ve said we wanted to go camping for 11 years and we’ve literally never done it once. We’ve decided that as of this moment, our new life motto is “anything worth doing is worth doing right.” If it’s worth driving 5 days across the country, then it’s worth doing that drive in the coolest way possible, which means camping in national parks, not watching TV in some stupid La Quinta. If it’s worth living in Massachusetts, then it’s worth buying Danner boots. Jesus.

Last night we watched 127 hours and I can’t stop thinking about cutting off my own arm. Growing up in a seriously badass rural mountain environment, I of course have heard such stories all my life–the logger who had to cut his own leg off with a chainsaw and then drive 50 miles to town using an axe handle to push in the clutch is one that really sticks in my memory–but it’s a real failure of imagination that I never actually thought about what that would LITERALLY entail; breaking tendons and feeling them snake up into your arm; smashing your arm bones; wrenching the whole thing off like a tree limb; blood spurting into your eyes; the howl of glory at newfound freedom, like some trapped animal dragging itself away on three legs after gnawing off a paw with blank-ass eyes. I felt traumatized. Also, outdoorsy people are FUCKING INSANE, there I said it. I grew up with these people and they are all crazy, every one of them. They are delightful and decent and the best people ever but they are absolutely out of their minds. Climbing a mountain with a goddamn ice pick for a hand. Jesus Christ learn to sit quietly for a second