The View From Here

Like many others, I’m mildly claustrophobic. When lying in an MRI machine, even though a mirror is provided so I can see the glass window behind which the radiographers sit, I’m still acutely aware of the bright white interior of the machine. It extends above, beside and all around me. It doesn’t help that the window reflects the machine in which I am restrained and when I become aware of this, I try not to let panic rise up and overtake me. And so I employ my coping mechanism of counting backwards from one thousand by seventeens, hoping that my brain will be distracted enough that I will forget that I am lying enclosed and immobile in a machine with a bright white interior that is so close that it seems that if I blink, my eyelashes might skim the curved wall above me. Even though I realise this is a ridiculous thing to think, that is the nature of claustrophobia. And so I keep on counting…