Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
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I kept my eyes shut as the MRI machine started its loud, rhythmic banging.
Two weeks earlier, I expected to be quickly in and out of the hospital for my routine CT scan. Instead, as soon as it ended, the technicians asked me to wait.
The room changed. People who had been brisk became oddly gentle. One of them patted my arm. “Hi honey,” she said, smiling too brightly, “please wait outside, we’ll be with you shortly.” The kindness felt misplaced, which somehow made it worse.
They called me back for a second scan with contrast. When it was done, they sent me home.
“Babe, that whole thing was really odd,” I said to my partner, Vanshika, as we drove away.
“Don’t assume anything yet,” she said. Her calmness didn’t erase my fear, but it kept it from swallowing the car.
A few hours later, in the middle of a meeting, my phone rang. My doctor. My stomach dropped, then my heart started racing. I called back and hit an automated message. “Your call is important to us.” Then my e-mail inbox buzzed.
The subject line read: URGENT MESSAGE FROM YOUR DOCTOR.
I opened it and met a wall of clinical language. One line jumped out: a mass. The report listed possibilities that looked like a lineup of threats: ischemia, cerebritis, demyelination, neoplasm. Big words, bluntly delivered, with no human voice attached to them.
I sent the images to my neurosurgeon friend for his thoughts. His reply came fast: Any vision problems? Headaches?
No and no.
Then he sent a voice note. I listened to it like it was a life raft. He explained the scan in plain language, translating panic into patterns. The phrases I clung to were simple: no enhancement, no mass effect. Not lighting up. Not pushing on anything.
Still, I needed an MRI. And then I had to wait.
That waiting did strange things to time. Nights were easy. Mornings were brutal. I woke up with dread before my feet even touched the floor. I started noticing every sensation in my skull. A twinge became a symptom. My brain ran worst case simulations all day.
Ten days later, I got a call. A slot had opened up for the next day.
In the MRI room, they lowered a head coil over me, a plastic frame that felt too much like a cage. I asked for water, already bargaining with the panic, but I was sliding into the tube before anyone could answer. I kept my eyes shut and tried to breathe in counts.
My mind went to my grandmother and then to death, as if fear has only one destination. I caught myself and tried to come back to the only thing that was true in that moment: I was alive and I was inside a noisy tube.
When the scan ended, no one rushed in with urgent compassion. The staff were efficient, normal. They slid me out and moved on.
Days passed. No call. The silence that had been terrifying started to soften. It became, slowly, a kind of comfort.
The results arrived through my online patient portal. It was not brain cancer. There was no tumour.
A couple of weeks later, the neurologist ran me through physical tests. I passed. But he wanted another MRI in six months.
That night, Vanshika looked at me and asked a question so simple it cut through everything else.
“Trust your body,” she said. “Has it given you any signs that it’s sick?”
I stopped. I checked, honestly, and the answer was no.
It didn’t erase the appointment on the calendar, but it changed my relationship to it. The next months were still a question mark, but they weren’t a funeral countdown.
We got engaged before that six-month scan. When I went back into the MRI, I had more calm than fear. At one point, I even opened my eyes, watching the smallness of the machine.
The neurologist later told me there were no changes. What they were seeing was likely an old scar, something only discovered because they happened to look. He mentioned a higher risk of seizures, a final reminder that bodies carry history even when they feel fine.
He scheduled one more follow-up MRI for 18 months later.
Life kept moving. We got married. The distant scan date sat in the background like a muted notification.
A week before the last MRI, I felt nerves, but they were nothing like the first time. When I walked into the hospital, what I felt most was gratitude. For Vanshika. For my family. For my friends. And for myself, for the year I had carried the looping thought of endings and still kept showing up to my days.
Inside the MRI, I did something small and symbolic.
I opened my eyes.
The end will come. It comes for everyone. But it is not now. And when it does come, I want to meet it the way I met that machine: awake.
Sameer Bharde lives in Toronto.