Goodbye to Youth

So they finally cut away the last vestiges of my youth. Jewelry is a big no-no in MRI scans....although they didn't seem so bothered at Chase Farm during my diagnosis MRI - if you feel the earring being wrenched out of your ear press the buzzer...An MRI scan is of course one huge great magnet. MRI's for a trial are obviously taken more seriously. I'd worn earring's since the first heady flush of late seventies rebellion. A pierced ear and a packet of ten number 6 were the sum total of my uprising. This particular earring had been welded into place at a proper piercing shop at the top of Edinburgh's Grass Market some many years ago and it now seemed impossible to remove. We need some cutters said the MRI attendant, come on we'll pop up to the plastering room, they'll have something. So up and down corridors, through wards of ill people, past the broken limbed all the way to the plastering room. Now you'd expect a request involving technical names for the cutters, or at least catalogue numbers but no...have you got those big cutter things in the shape of two cupped hands accompanied by an impression was the limit of this medical knowledge. What d'you want to cut? was the response and my earring was duly pointed out. Oh, you'll need these then and out came the untitled big cutter things in the shape of two cupped hands. Seconds later and my teenage rebellion that had stretched into the eighties, nineties and beyond had at last been laid to a respectable rest as two broken halves of a gold ring lay on the cutting room floor.

Back at the scan I settled down to an hours clunking. banging, whirring that is the state of the art MRI machine. First time I heard it it sounded like my long awaited collaboration with Brian Eno. But this time without my youth swinging from my ear it felt like a noisy row. Apres scan (is that a trend I could start?) at the trial centre is the now usual collection of weird tests. Then it's just the minor point of randomisation. Of course having succeeded in US blood tests and the French corridor walking championship it is inevitable that I fall at the final fence and end up on the existing drug Beta Interferon 1a as part of the study group. Hey ho, ho hum. At least I can't throw a teenage strop.