“Hey, Broadway!” My favorite MRI tech knows me not by name, but by the Pandora station I choose to listen to while I’m stuck in a tube. My guess is not many people choose to rock out to Broadway show-stoppers during their body scan. Leave it to me to be the odd ball.
My sensory journey to Cancer Camp today was a strange one: 90 minutes shrouded almost entirely in dense autumn fog. For the majority of the drive, I had no companions on the road. Or if I did, they were just far enough ahead or behind me that I couldn’t make out their lights for the pea-soup thickness surrounding me. There would be no marveling at the landscape of Vermont changing from green to gold, no looking out over glistening lakes and rolling hills during the early September morning. It was literally freezing when I left Whitefield, so I turned on my blessed heated seats and allowed myself to be snuggled in warmth, as if I were still in bed. I left the music off, and after learning enough about Aleppo on NPR to make me thoroughly depressed, I silenced the radio, too. It was as if I was supposed to have the drive to contemplate this adventure in as distraction-free a way as possible. A time for my brain’s own music.
Once you enter Cancer Camp, the scan-land version, it is impossible to find silence. The waiting areas ring out with the rote questions from intake, patients’ names being called across the large room, quiet couples talking, and lots of coughing. CT scans robotically remind you when to breathe and you’re asked your date of birth a dozen times. But MRIs, with their cacophony, are the most disruptive to zen. That’s why they offer you music to listen to while you’re trapped inside the scan.
In order to really get the music loud enough to be heard over the whir and buzz of giant magnets, I’m sure the volume would have to be cranked to a level that is not advisable or permissible in the healthcare world. So after they get you appropriately strapped in, covered up, and stuck with needles, they put headphones on you, with the volume just loud enough to give you the essence of sound. It’s best to pick music you’re pretty familiar with because you’re going to have to fill in a lot of the gaps. That’s why I pick Broadway.
In the quiet space before the scanning actually began, I got to listen to the entirety of “Seasons of Love,” from RENT. It’s a personal favorite of mine, a hopeful song, one that I love singing along to when I’m not stuck in a tube, although it inevitably makes me think of mortality, AIDS, lost friends, and also being 16. Somehow it worked as the foundation to accompany the day.
Many of the other songs were lost under the din of the machine. I caught bits and pieces from Frozen, Grease, Les Mis (always Les Mis), most of Bebe Neuwirth (I love her) and “All That Jazz.” But eventually I had to close my eyes and stop trying to reconcile the musical subtext with the avant garde time signatures of the machine. One scan maddenly staccatoed out a pattern of 14 eighth notes and an eighth note rest which did not at all go with whatever was trying valiantly to be heard beneath it. The magnets buzzed loudly, inserting percussive sounds like dot matrix printers and buzz saws in the keys of Maybe and Probably at the same time, clashing terribly with bright Broadway melodies. The machine created discord, the rhythms didn’t match up, and my inner musical ear started to scream STOP!
Sometimes there is no making sense of this journey, or at least parts of it. The words don’t match the music which doesn’t match the key signature which doesn’t match the time signatures. I hate chaos like I hate bad jazz. It all sounds wrong. But at the end of the day, when you feel like you might explode if you don’t cough and that last cc of fluid they pushed through that IV is going to make you burst, “Hallelujah” manages to make itself heard under the drone, and the key is somehow just about right. I have no idea if it’s from a Broadway show or how it made its way onto the Pandora playlist, but it’s a beautiful song regardless. In this season of love and this time of hope, when some things don’t make sense, close is close enough.
