Nov 4, 2022 4 min read

So I’m lying there in my paper shorts and thin cotton robe, opened in the front. And my legs are in the tube, but they left my head out, which is a good thing because I might be a teensy bit claustrophobic.

It was an MRI scan of my knee, which has a torn meniscus that needs fixing. The MRI was to confirm what the doctor suspected.

“It will be 25 minutes,” the technician said before she put a fat pair of headphones on my head. I asked for classical music, which seemed to be the best opposite of what that machine would sound like once the magnets got to clanging.

Twenty-five minutes is a micro-millisecond when my column deadline is looming. And 25 minutes is four miles on the bike trail. When I’m busy, those minutes fly by.

But when I’m lying with my leg in a noisy tube, the time is a vast and empty road that stretches out ahead of me. As the technician walked out of the room and shut the door, I wondered how I’d pass the time. These 25 minutes were going to take forever.

Lying on my back, all I could see was the ceiling (white and featureless with a few lights), and the top of the MRI tube. In gray letters were the name of the company that made the machine.

SIEMENS

First, I wondered how much an MRI machine costs; probably a couple hundred thousand. That mental exercise took 30 seconds. Then I thought about what would happen with those magnets if there were a metal pin in my leg and I hadn’t told them that. I didn’t want to think about that, so I still had 24 minutes of lying here.

And then I stared at the name for a moment. There, in those seven letters was the answer to my dilemma of how to pass the time. How many words can I make from those seven letters?

Men, men’s, see, seen, mine, mines, sis, miss, mess, seems, is, sees, in, ins, sin, sin, I, sine, I’m, me. Was I missing anything?

As I made the words, I kept track but was running out of fingers. Counting on my toes was probably not a good idea because I’d been asked to keep my lower extremities still. So I made a mental note when I reached 10 and started counting on my fingers again. I’d made 20 words out of that one word and in so doing, had used up almost all of the 25 minutes.

The door opened and the tech came in to tell me I was done. I thought about asking if all the patients play the word game, but decided that would just be weird. She lowered the table, took off the headphones and sent me to the dressing room to take off the paper shorts and robe.

The next morning, the doctor called to tell me that the MRI showed I have a bit of frayed meniscus that’s been causing my knee pain. He’s going to scope it in a few weeks, to trim the frayed part.

“You’ll be back on your bike in a couple of weeks,” he said.

After the call, I thought about that SIEMENS word, and wondered if I’d found all the little words inside it. I wrote the word down, because I’m weird like that, and started listing all the words I’d found while lying there in the tube.

There were at least two I’d missed: emesis, which is another word for barf, and nemesis, which is another word for enemy.

And that’s how I will think of that rogue bit of frayed stuff in my knee: my nemesis. But not for long.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.