Flashbacks

Yesterday I had an MRI at 9:30 pm (what genius came up with that schedule?) for my sinuses as a last-resort attempt to discern the reason for my loss of smell. While waiting for my turn in the claustrophia-inducing machine, my mind started wandering to previous MRIs and scans I’ve had. Flashbacks such as these are a common occurrence for me whenever I get anywhere near the hospital and have historically been a source of much anxiety and fear. Before my bone marrow transplant, as a matter of fact, I met with a psychologist friend who taught me some cognitive strategies to deal with these PTSD-like symptoms.

Typically, the body’s natural response to negative flashbacks is to try to push them aside and ignore them, which never works very well. My friend taught me to instead recognize the fears caused by these flashbacks and consider both the expected outcome and the realistic outcome, which helped me to focus on the truth rather than on past experiences.

I’m currently reading Life of Pi, one of those national best-sellers that I tend to be skeptical of, but once I give in and read it, becomes one of my favorite books. The Harry Potter books fit in this category. The Twilight books do not. My favorite chapter so far is about fear, and I’d like to quote a large chunk of it here because it so completely describes the feeling I’ve battled incessantly for the past two years and how to overcome it.

“I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know...It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy...Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you’ve defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over you.
The matter is difficult to put into words. For fear, real fear, such as shakes you to your foundation, such as you feel when you are brought face to face with your mortal end, nestles in your memory like a gangrene: it seeks to rot everything, even the words with which to speak of it. So you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.”

So yesterday, instead of trying to push away the flashbacks of past MRIs that went wrong and consequently only delaying an inevitable resurgence of fear, I allowed myself to reflect on those experiences. The result was that I felt sadness as I remembered the times I threw up in the middle of a scan, couldn’t breathe, had to go without contrast because of my failing kidneys, or couldn’t lie flat enough to even complete the scan. But I also felt a sense of amazement and gratitude as I realized how far I’ve come. I got an MRI yesterday to diagnose an inconvenient and troublesome issue, but not a life-threatening one as in the past. I went into it feeling fine, and though it was uncomfortable having to lie still with my head securely fastened to a plastic mask-like contraption inside a narrow tube for an hour, I was able to go home with my husband afterwards rather than back to a hospital room. When I consider how much of a better position I’m in and how much God has healed and blessed me, flashbacks no longer have to cause me the anxiety and dread they once did.