Large Format

I loosely grip the gray rubber bulb around its stem to prevent triggering the sensitive call system (“otherwise we’ll be here all day,” Dave from radiology said) as I half heartedly gaze up at the mirror above my head which is positioned to reveal what I assume to be a “Where’s Waldo” puzzle. My vision swims before me, adding an additional element of difficulty to the visual game. I slowly exhale and flutter my eyes closed, feeling the slight relief of the darkness of my eyelids settling on my otherwise throbbing head.

Around me the catastrophically loud electronic screaming of the MRI machine pushes through the padding and earplugs. I imagine myself standing before the subwoofer at an EDM show like the ones I used to go to with friends before I stopped going anywhere crowded. The rhythmic metallic clicks remind me of the rapid-fire shutter of a digital camera.

I count breaths to distract myself from my throat which feels both bone dry and uncomfortably full of mucus threatening to clog my trachea. A chronic cough is a bummer in a test that requires absolute stillness for 40 minutes. I push down the body’s natural panic at the feeling of choking and maintain even breaths. In my mind I’m posing for an open shutter, longer than the shutter speeds I usually use, but what is a MRI but a large, expensive camera, anyway?

The experience of photography and medicine is bound tightly together in my life. I make images of myself in hospitals, at home resting, before surgeries, after them, during treatments, on good days, on the worst days. I use test results in my photographic practice similarly, I imagine, to how doctors use them to puzzle over the nonsensical ways my body falls apart when it seemingly has little reason to. I create self portraits to return selfhood to my body when medicine objectifies it.

As the MRI bangs away around my head, I float untethered through the wells of my imagination, floating on a tide of migraine medication side effects, acute pain, and a cultivated intentional practice of vivid daydreams. In my mind, rather than a call button I’m cradling a cable release next to the roar of the Laurel River after a good rain. I’m breathing slowly and evenly, drinking the mountain river’s spray through my nostrils, across my slightly parted lips, as I wait for the warmth of the sunlight to feel just right on my eyelids. Stones press into my vertebrae, the spaces between them expanding with therapeutic popping as I settle into the earth.

Dave from Radiology opens the door, pulling me from my imagined other time and place. He urges me to keep my head still as I track him with my eyes, two of him standing in my double vision by my left arm. He asks me how I’m doing and I croak out some variation of “I’m fine,” with raspy vocal chords dehydrated from carefully controlled hospital air. Metallic heat hits my groin as Dave administers IV contrast and I’m put back into the camera.

As the contrast flushes my face, I imagine a different day, a cable release in my hand on a friend’s back porch. The cows are meandering down the hillside for the evening as the sun lingers at the top of the hilly walls of the holler. Wind whispers through the tall wild grasses. The heat of the contrast across my face is replaced by the sweet pleasure of the remains of a pint of local beer as I stare down the 4 x 5 I am tethered to. The large format camera regards me as I contemplate my own gaze, a breeze fluttering against my button down, the sun bright in my eyes as I squint against it. My arm is locked out straight, enabling the shutter release to reach across the expanse of space between myself and the camera. I take a deep breath, hold it, and squeeze the release.

My IV is flushed with saline, sensation flooding back to my deadened arm as the saline rushes along my bloodstream and I can unlock my elbow from the uncomfortable position it had been held in. Dave helps me up with an arm and I pull earplugs out of my ears, the pulsing thrum of the MRI machine on standby a cacophony in my ears. I’m wheeled backwards out of the room after transferring into the metal wheelchair they brought me down with. I regard the machine, wondering how the photographs came out.