Under the overhead fluorescents, I close my eyes and inhale. One…two…three…four. “Hold still,” the technician says, “or the images will blur.” He’s my age, a sturdy man with a soft demeanor, and we make small talk about having sons. He’ll do three scans. The chest and hips will take fifteen minutes each. The last will take thirty. They’ll map every bone, head to toe (cranium to phalanges). In one hour, a machine will know more about my body than I do. He says when the scans are done, I can stand and stretch while the doctor decides if they need more.
“That’s when I panic, right?”
I mean to be flip in an, I’m made of scar tissue and indifference way. But instead, I snort-cry, and tears roll down my cheeks, dripping along my jawline (maxilla), following the creases of my ears, pooling on the thin waxy paper beneath my head.
This morning, he pushed a syringe of radioactive tracer through a vein on my left arm (never the right because of missing nodes). During the three hours required for tracer to seep into bone tissue and surround abnormal cells, I could have gone to the French cafe around the corner. The one where my firstborn and I ate crepes after Mommy and Me on Thursday afternoons. I’d marvel at his honey curls and fleshy peach cheeks (zygomatics) as he made a mess of whipped cream and chocolate syrup. Year upon year, that toddler-turned-boy poured tea into ceramic mugs and did homework in the space between our lunch plates, trying not to drench spelling words in sticky sweetness. I could have ordered a cappuccino and wallowed at how my body had betrayed me. Instead, I went home and folded gym socks into pairs and loaded the dishwasher because how do you thank a barista for heart-shaped foam art when a quietus may lurk within the ache in your spine (thoracic vertebrae)?
On the drive back to the Nuclear Medicine lab, I listened to a meditation for “scanxiety.” A soothing voice spoke of placing worry inside balloons to be released into the sky. Before the meditation ended, I parked in the underground lot and tunneled into the basement of a building where, seven years earlier and one floor up, my youngest, then three, had an X-ray taken of his elbow after falling from a scooter onto concrete. My husband and I heard the screams while setting up a tent beneath tall pines at our favorite campsite — #37, with the massive downed redwood our boys balanced root to tip, heel to toe (calcaneus to metatarsal), summer after summer, toddler to tween. In the radiology department my pre-schooler’s fingers gripped mine as he placed his arm under the electromagnetic rays and wailed. But when his bones (radius, ulna, humerus) lit up the screen, he fell silent in astonishment at his inside-out self. “Pooky keleton, Mama!”
In the belly of the gamma camera, I don’t look at my bones on the screen. Not even once. I try to visualize balloons, but instead see faces of women. Severed branches of a tree that in school I didn’t know how to complete. The grandmothers, aunts, mothers, my mother, whose cells would have flooded with tracer and lit up like constellations on this scan. My dad used to say, “You have your Mama’s long legs.” (Fibula, tibia, patella, femur.) I relished the thought of her as part of me.
With arms cradled in plastic molds and knees resting on a pillow, I become my inside out self. Illuminated bone branches (ribs, sacrum, pelvis) reaching through time. Here is the French cafe. Here are the once-boys, now with chiseled cheeks, strong hands, broad shoulders (mandible, metacarpal, clavicle). Here are three ceramic mugs brimming with cinnamon-sprinkled foam art.
In a future bridged by bones, I hold still.
