Tight Quarters

I’m lying in a hospital johnny, on a white plastic bed, earplugs stuffed deep into my ears, breathing hard through the surgical mask.
The MRI tech’s lips are moving but I don’t hear what she’s says, because my, already construction-deaf, ears are plugged; plus, I’m checking out a room I actually know pretty well but haven’t seen for twelve years.
She smiles a taut, I’m-supposed-to-smile-at-this-point smile, leans forward, and installs hulking, white headphones over my ears.
I stare up at the ceiling of backlit, photographic ceiling panels trying to pretend they’re a fake deep-blue sky, with a smattering of brilliant white clouds; providing a sort of canned hope, in a room where hope of any sort is often in short supply.
I know this, because I managed the construction of this room, and the whole building it’s located in. Back then, I, mean-spiritedly, argued against spending the extra $15,000 for this little parcel of manufactured hope to help the oftentimes deathly ill patients, who spend time in this room getting their failing hearts imaged.
“Now,” the MRI tech’s voice crackles over the headphones. “We’re going to start. If you need me, just squeeze the little ball in your left hand.”
Then the top of the plastic bed starts to magically slide into the magnet – way too fast!
Suddenly I’m in a two-foot diameter tunnel, the top of which is just above my face. My surgical mask billows, then rapidly tightens across dry lips and into my mouth, as I pant for air!
I have to get the mask off!
But the tunnel’s so tight, it’s hard to get a hand up to my face.
It’s too much.
I can’t stand it for much longer.
My fingers start to tighten around the little soft ball in my left hand.
I repeat a Zen mantra: The three false pillars upon which we lean: Wanting, Lusting, Fearing.
Right now, I’m all over Fearing!
But then, in a blinking instant, the karma of Irish claustrophobia-trauma transports me thirty years and three-thousand miles away from the two-foot tunnel of an MRI in Boston to the boot of a Ford Escort parked on the gravel outside the Castlebar Rugby Club.
It’s after midnight on the Sunday night of some summer bank holiday weekend. We’ve been near-continuous lorrying pints of Guinness into our ourselves since the lads all arrived back in town Friday night; breaking only for a few hours of no-rest-drunk-sleep, and two penitential hours of hangover sufferance, before we’re back leaning on the counter in Hoban’s Bar, sipping a hair a the dog.
The Rugby Clubhouse closed a while ago; the disco crowd already drunk-driving all over the barony of Castlebar. We didn’t leave right away, ‘cause we were goofing
around on the field; playing rough-touch rugby in black darkness, using a tied into a bad-knot jacket as the ball.
Then it’s time to go.
There’s nine of us. Way too many to squeeze into the only car left: One of the lad’s old Ford Escort.
Walking the few miles into town gets nary a second of consideration.
Instead, with the bleeding-edge insight one gets after fifteen pints of Guinness, we Clown Car it: Jamming two into the front passenger seat and five into the back seat. With two in the driver’s seat a bridge-too-far, even for fifteen-pints-us, there’s only one alternative left.
I climb into the boot.
The lid is slammed closed.
Immediately, I regret it.
But the muffled sound of the Escort’s door closing and the rattle of the engine trying to start let me know that now, there’s no way out.
With panicked-regretful-me in a crumpled fetal position, the Escort weaves chaotically through the townlands of Horsepark and Mount Gordon, my head taking the odd ding as the driver warms up the tires – racing driver style.
Then we hit the Westport Road.
I know, because even in my tight quarters, with my mouth as dry as a gravel pit, every drop of liquid in corporeal-me now standing on my skin as sweat, I still get the rush that comes to a nineteen year-old brain from a car rapidly accelerating.
But as that rush wears off, I freeze with panic at the thought of the car hitting something, flipping over, and my being stuck in there, upside down, the smell of petrol permeating my tight quarters, as I wait to get barbequed alive.
Propped up, drunken-badly on one elbow, I strain against the boot lid, delusionally.
Panic compounds; hyperventilation; heart thumping the chest.
We skid to a stop the at the traffic light, the only one in town. I can hear muffled laughter, the engine revving for a green-light-launch.
I try slapping the inside of the boot to get their attention, but the space is too tight for my hand to get any momentum.
More head dings, my ear drums palpitating with wild heartbeats, as we hard-left at Heatons, swoop down through Market Square into Newtown; tire screeching hard-rights onto Chapel and Linenhall Streets; then outta nowhere, a sudden, crunching jam to a stop.
My good-for-nuthin-no-more body bundles forward.
Car doors slam.
There’s laughing outside the boot. I hear someone yell; “Is Chipadora open? Get me a steak n’ kidney pie!”
A hand slaps down hard on the metal.
But now, I’m not worried.
My brother is in the group; he’ll get me out of here; and he does.
The sound of the key grating into the lock is the sound of the rest of my life outside of these tight quarters.
“Are you awright there boss?” the driver asks.
“No worries,” I lie Guinn-rageously, my shirt clinging to me with sweat. “Sure, doing the Circuit of Ireland Rally in the boot of your car is all in a day’s work for a fella like me.”
Back in the two-foot MRI tunnel, it’s all worries.
I’ve been in there for what feels like three days now. If the thing didn’t keep shaking and making a series of rhythmic thuds, I’d a thought it was broken, or that they’d forgotten about me and gone home.
Coming to the hospital, even in the middle of a pandemic, I was beyond happy: Being driven there by my soulmate, taking care of myself in a way that I normally never do: It all felt good and right.
As might be imagined, with the self-esteem of someone who elects to climb into the boot of a car, I don’t do a great job at the taking-care-of-myself stuff. And is it any wonder?
As kids we were taught not to take up too much space in the world: That space was made for other, more important people. Doctors, doctor’s offices, and hospitals were most definitely only there for those important others.
One of my sisters walked around for four days protecting a broken arm from the ever increasing, swarm-of-bees-attacking pain that comes with a broken bone.
“Don’t be going up there to that hospital, bothering them doctors!” Da snapped, shaking his head with that resolute belief of his that we were to run low to the ground, and never stray far from cover.
Finally, sanity reigned and a “bothered” doctor got the broken arm into a cast.
A friend’s father was asked by an officious ICU doctor if his dying mother should be revived:
“Ah, give it the wan try anyway,” was the father’s humble answer.
The ailment, that has me bothering doctors today, is a careless-middle-classes “new normal” condition: A disc herniated, as my world, like that of a great many of the luckier people, got a pandemic-shrink to the tight quarters of our dining room tables.
All my bothering the not-to-be-bothered-doctors got me sent into an MRI; a staggeringly complicated piece of technology that can see inside our bodies by using a pulsing magnetic field to send the protons in our atomic structure off on the booze for a few milliseconds, and then, like a judgmental parent or spouse, record how the protons behave getting back home as a measure of our health.
It’s amazing, and terrifying!
But now inside my two-foot home, back from my trauma-holiday, the tightness of the tunnel doesn’t feel quite so bad, compared to the Escort’s boot; the MRI’s clicking and clacking seems tame enough compared to the Escort’s engine revving and tire screeching; and the little soft ball in my left hand replaces that yearning to hear the key grating into boot’s lock.
Who needs Zen, when you’ve got a warehouse in your brain full of fucked-up memories?
“Ok, we’re finished now,” the tech’s voice crackles in my ears.
Magically, the plastic bed slides out of the tunnel, as I quickly replace the surgical mask.
I lie there staring up, somehow begrudgingly proud of the $15,000 fake sky; my surgical mask now back to normal levels of billowing.
“Now that wasn’t too bad, was it?” the MRI tech says, faux-pleasantly as she removes the hulking headphones.
“No worries,” I lie traum-rageously, my johnny clinging to me with sweat. “Hanging out in a two-foot tunnel? All in a day’s work for a fella like me.”