The Most Exclusive Club in Berlin
It only took me six seconds to realize the Xanax wasn’t working. There were 44 minutes, 54 seconds left of the MRI, but I was approximately two seconds away from a panic attack. My breaths grew shallow, and my heart felt as though it might pound out of my chest. I moved my arms to the side to touch the all too close edges of the machine. Don’t open your eyes– as soon as the thought entered my mind, my eyes flung open to stare at the machine’s ceiling. It felt so close to my nose that I wondered if I had enough space to breathe.
Before entering the MRI machine, I’d been stuck in a sterile waiting room with an intravenous port jutting from my forearm, steadily collecting my blood in a short tube with a screw-on cap. When the nurse unscrewed this cap, blood spurted out all over her and the machine. She hastily cleaned up the blood with a tissue from a pocket in her scrubs and then placed an alarm in my hand, telling me to press it if I felt myself start to panic.
I thought about the pear-shaped alarm button in my hand, wondering if I should press it and also wondering if the ultra-cool, ultra-Berlin MRI tech could see the tears streaming down my face and flowing out of the plastic, cage-like structure around my head. I wanted to press the button, but German medical professionals are not necessarily known for their bedside manner. Before I fully realized what I was doing, my hand contracted around the alarm’s trigger.
I braced myself for a loud ringing to accompany the clanging of the machine that continued circling my body. It never came. I pressed again. Nothing. Just as I was getting ready to press a third time, my body went limp and suddenly I realized how overconfident I’d been about my German language skills. I told the doctor that I’m claustrophobic– I knew I’d gotten at least that much right. But what I hadn’t fully understood until that moment was that, in response to this confession, they’d given me a muscle relaxer. It must have been covertly administered intravenously through the needle they’d inserted in my arm for the contrast fluid that would light up my insides and help the doctors decipher the puzzle of my organs.
As the muscle relaxer, well, relaxed me further, my brain receded into a delusion. The MRI tech transformed into Trinity from the Matrix, the line tattoos that I’d noticed peeking from her scrubs became more exposed, running up to her shoulders disappearing again underneath the straps of her black, fitted PVC tank top. She came out from behind the tech booth, climbed up on the bed of the machine and crawled her way towards me. She joined me in the machine, which had been transformed into a special dancing cage for pulsing bodies to let the bass reverberate within and through them. No longer was I in a loud, banging, coffin-like medical device in a hospital in the middle of Berlin. No, I was in an exclusive techno-club with a noise music artist headlining, deep in a k-hole and letting the beats wash over me.
The very real, very un-Trinity-like MRI tech’s deep, German voice came over the loudspeaker: “Okay, I’m going to need you to hold your breath again.” A long pause followed, as if the MRI tech was holding her breath along with me. She pressed the intercom button again, exhaled deeply and said, “Also, can you stop puckering your lips and sticking your tongue out? It doesn’t technically affect the exam, but it is distracting me.”
Laney Lenox is an anthropologist, writer, and researcher living in Berlin with her husband. Writing featured in Salvation South, The Anarchist Studies Blog, Burningword Literary Journal and elsewhere. Learn more about her work here: https://linktr.ee/laneylenox