I went in for an MRI today—I’ve been having strange headaches on and off for the past few months, so my neurologist thought it would be prudent to take a look between my ears and make sure I still have a brain.

So, a ten minute drive and six hundred dollars later [brief aside: today I paid for my entire insurance deductible and it's only the second week of January. This means I am now obligated to engage in near-constant high-risk behaviour for the next eleven and a half months to make sure I get my money's worth], I’m sitting in a dark, cold waiting room with a nurse, an elderly couple, and what appear to be three successive generations of the same mousey woman [another brief aside: I can't seem to find consensus on whether or not "mousey" is a derogatory term. I don't mean it to be, but I can't think of another word that better describes "person who strongly resembles a mouse"].

Warning: angry magnets.

The hours tick by, and we all sit rapt by a microwave-sized CRT suspended from the ceiling that happens to be vomiting up the same fifteen minutes of grade F local news coverage over and over again. Every once in a while, the nurse reappears to shuffle someone back behind the large metal doors plastered with warning signs featuring large, angry-looking magnets. I’m not sure where they’re all going; I know there’s only one machine back there.

My thoughts wander back to the tiny shards of metal holding my intestines closed in lieu of an amenable appendix. I hope those little staples aren’t feeling particularly ferrous today—I suspect death by evisceration from the inside out is even more painful than it is slow.

In the midst of my contemplations, my turn arrives, and I proceed through the iron curtain and into a small preparation room. The nurse asks me if I’ve had an MRI before, and if I’m claustrophobic (negative on both counts). My clothing is deemed acceptable, despite its variously-metallic festoonery, but my phone and credit cards have to stay outside, lest they be demagnetized.

At last, the time is nigh! I am settled onto a sleek white board swathed in blankets. The technician places a sort of strange, smooth plastic crown on my head, and then I am fed into the machine like a torpedo. The crown has a mirror on it, so I can see my awesome Chuck Taylors (and not much else). Concentric circles of futuristic technology whir rhythmically around my head. It occurs to me briefly that the machine sounds not unlike being lowered head-first into the depths of an inkjet printer.

Over the course of the next ten minutes, I remain completely motionless, while the machine does its job (which, I assume, involves Vita-Rays in some capacity). Then, it’s over, as quickly as it had begun. I’m released from the confines of the machine and allowed to depart on my merry way.

Before I left the imaging facility, though, I asked for a copy of the disc with the scans on it. I’ve turned two of the more interesting segments into short animations, which you can see here and here. There it is, the sum total of my humble existence contained within a few pounds of grey matter…