Until recently, I had assumed that whereas everyone else was made of kidneys, intestines and lungs, I was made of lights, immortality and magic. While still generally of this opinion, I am now more familiar with other peoples’ insides following seven weeks of full-throttle anatomical study, as part of my new role up the hospital as an MRI science man.
This means I have left my previous post, of course. My last day was made complex because one of my colleagues managed to jam the patient lift by getting a sandwich caught in the door mechanism. This was remarkable, but not surprising, because things like this always happen to exactly the type of person you would expect to, for example, jam a lift door with a sandwich. When called upon to investigate, I therefore decided not to ask how it had happened, but rather focussed upon what type of sandwich it was (ham) and what his favourite sandwich was (ham and cheese). In an echo of the ‘Would-you-rather?’ questions that theatre staff debate to while away time during surgical procedures, I ended my investigation by ascertaining what sandwich he would have, if he could only have one sandwich for the rest of his life (ham and pickle). I suggested that he might be happier with jam, but he didn’t spot the rather weak joke. I never had a supervisor in my last post, because no one really knew what I did, so I instead gave my report to a patient, who was quite impressed with it.
With the day off to a shaky start, I negated the ‘Would you rather?’ theatre question by instead asking the team to point out the connection between Debbie Harry and Adolf Hitler*. No-one guessed it, despite spirited renditions of Hanging On Das Telephone and Sonntag Girl and, just like that, my time in theatre was over. It was evident that none of my colleagues knew I was going – despite demolishing thirty fucking quids’ worth of cake I had generously left in the staff room before I had a chance to have any myself – as my leaving card was signed only by those who happened to be at work twenty minutes before my final shift ended, many of whom habitually called me Chris anyway. Now I come to think of it, instead of establishing a link between New Wave and the Third Reich, the day’s brainteaser should instead have been what my fucking name is**. Ah well.
And so here we are. It’s seven weeks later. My new job – or to be precise, the expensive tax-payer funded career trajectory I have flatteringly been chosen to follow – is underway. It’s, you know, OK and everything. There’s a lot of studying, slanted for the first few months towards anatomy and physiology. This makes sense, because for all the wizardry of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the primary skill is recognising what you can see on a monitor. It’s nice to know about subjecting hydrogen protons to magnetic fields and interpreting the energy released by the resultant change in relative precession rates – or ‘flip angle’ – as an image on a screen, and it is impressive, technology wise. However, if you don’t know your way around the major nerves in the brain, or what a torn anterior cruciate ligament looks like, you will be hopeless at it.
Working in MRI, I therefore concluded, is an exercise in anatomical recognition rather than quantum physics. Equally swiftly, I concluded after claiming that ‘Physics doesn’t exist – that’s why you can’t see it’ that MRI staff are a bit po-faced about this sort of thing. ‘Of course physics exists’, countered one of my new colleagues ‘It forms the basis of all life’. I replied that ‘I think you’re getting it confused with the Force’ and, while I am no stranger to a filthy look, the one I received in return was fucking rancid. I might follow this up on my next shift by saying that maybe physics does exist, because my horoscope was spot on yesterday. I am curious to see what happens, which kind of makes it a scientific experiment, after all.
Photards:
Main: My commuting transport. I love this bike. Fixed gear, weighs a ton, even without panniers full of uniform, books, food, laptops and so forth. Incidentally, you would never usually photograph a bike from the non-drive (ie chain and sprockets) side, but on this occasion I have because it was standing up entirely on its own, having presumably become sentient, and I didn’t want to make it angry.
Inset top: My current girlfriend’s response to the sandwich-in-lift news.
Inset lower: This is the lumbar vertebrae or, as we presumably call it in MRI, a back. Note the strong signal from the cerebrospinal fluid, which tells me that this is – yes, that’s right – a T2 weighted image. Note also the saturation band to prevent flow artifacts disturbing the field of interest, and my careful placing of volume slices through the spinal fibrocartilage, all but eliminating cross talk.
*The answer is ‘Blondie’. It was the name of Debbie Harry’s band and Hitler’s dog.
**Paul