We Are All Disabled - Part 4
The Girl Who Blinked...
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| My MRI |
It’s raining outside and my shoulder, elbow and
arm are really sore again. They just hurt. Before LA, I went to a clinic and
had an MRI scan to figure out exactly why I was hurting. As if I didn’t
already know that a lifetime of playing the guitar too much might one day have
a cost.
They put me inside the MRI machine on a kind of stretcher.
What I mean is, they insert you into the machine. And the machine takes
pictures with a noise that fills your head. It’s so damn claustrophobic.
You have to stay completely still, just staring at a rounded metal tube
inches from your face.
I began blinking every few seconds, and then panic set in.
In desperation, I kept my eyes closed with all my might and for some
reason started hearing music that brought a calm over me. It was a song I
wrote for a girl named Diana who had been in a terrible accident and was
completely parlayed from head to toe. The only thing Diana could do for the
rest of her life was open her eyes and close them again.
Thinking about Diana allowed me to open my eyes without the
panic that made me close them. Soon, I was in a taxi headed for the
airport and a trip to LA where I would play my guitar, free to follow the music
wherever it took me. Diana would never have that chance but I knew even
in the simple act of blinking, she was free to imagine her own world, as freely
as I live mine. And I understood for the first time just how disabled I have
been by anxiety.
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