When Stillness Gets Loud

The good news first: one month after my blood clot and surgery… I’m officially clot-free! Enormous relief doesn’t even begin to cover it. The fatigue is still hanging around, though I can’t tell if that’s courtesy of the clot or just my ever-lingering MS. Either way, I’ve been given the green light to slowly ease back into normal activity, as long as I listen to (and respect) the very loud and very opinionated voice of my body.

So while the blood clot has taken a well-earned spot on the back burner, my MS, ever the diva, inevitably insisted on reclaiming center stage today. No new symptoms, just my annual MRI marathon: brain, cervical, and thoracic scans, with and without contrast. Three glamorous hours of my life I’ll never get back.

Per usual, I stretched out on the table, head locked into that medical-grade vice that feels like a DIY orthodontics kit. Normally I do pretty well with confined spaces, mostly because a screen inside the machine would usually light up with images you might see on a budget Oculus. Okay, maybe that’s generous… it was probably closer to the View-Master I played with as a kid, the one with only two working slides, curtesy of two younger sisters and a dog.

But today, when I opened my eyes, I was met not with stars or galaxies or anything remotely soothing, just an empty slab of white plastic hovering mere inches from my face. Oh boy.

I stayed frozen like a statue, as instructed, and squeezed my eyes shut, secretly hoping I could somehow summon the scenes I’d grown accustomed to: a bubbling creek, soft blue skies with pillowy clouds, and my personal favorite, an ocean panorama with a pod of baby whales gliding by. When none of it appeared, and in a lame attempt to suppress my rising panic, I shifted gears and tried to channel my inner Deepak Chopra… or was it my old Lamaze training? Honestly, I’m a little rusty at both. But still, I focused. Deep breath in through the nose, out through the mouth. Again. Again.

It didn’t help. The entire first hour was spent spiraling into negative self-talk and mentally rattling off my endless “I-need-ta” list. I need-ta do this. I need-ta do that. And before long, my to-dos had multiplied into a list that would take me at least ten lifetimes to finish.

Somewhere around the 60-minute mark, I realized I had mentally transformed myself into a heartless, soulless ogre who was failing at everything. Lovely.

It was then I made a conscious decision: enough. Enough self-pity, enough catastrophizing, enough wasting precious energy on thoughts that do nothing but weigh me down. This last hour would be reserved for happy thoughts only, plus a mental drafting of this very blog post.

And somewhere in that quiet, confined space, something hit me: How much of my day, when I’m not trapped inside a machine that seems engineered to drag all my negativity to the surface, am I still paralyzed by fear, self-doubt, and a completely unrealistic list of tasks?

I don’t know. Probably more than I want to admit.

So in my ongoing commitment toward self-improvement, tomorrow’s to-do list will be a whole lot shorter.

And hopefully, a whole lot kinder.