- WRITTEN BY PULASTYA
Had the recent displeasure of having to go to the hospital with my mother as she was unwell. Post investigation by the neurologist, it was determined that she needed to get an MRI done so that the neurologist could get information from its result post which the further line of treatment would be based on it. My mother is an anxious type of person and one who can’t stay still for long! We prepare her for the MRI scan procedure with great difficulty and the technician proceeds to start the scanning. It may be of little comfort to you when you’re getting ready for an MRI exam. You’re stripped of your jewelry and credit cards and asked detailed questions about all the metallic instruments you might have inside of you. You’re put on a tiny slab and pushed into a hole that hardly seems large enough for a person. You’re subjected to loud noises, and you have to lie perfectly still, or they’re going to repeat it to you all over again. With each minute, you can’t help but wonder what’s happening to your body while you are in this machine. Could it really be that this ordeal is truly better than another imaging technique, was what I was thinking of all the time I was imprisoned along with my mother in that room. As her accompanying guardian, I was instructed to be in the room where the MRI machine was, but prior to that had to off load all metallic objects from my body as well, in order to have no interference with the scanning machine. I was instructed to sit on a chair adjacent to the machine and was handed a pair of ear protection muffs attached to vacuum pipes as the sound emitted by the MRI scanning machine during its operation is very loud & unbearable. Since it was my first experience of such a machine, I was rather naïve in thinking that how loud could it be. How wrong was I! The first few seconds itself started with loud knocking sounds which then converted to pulsing beats which one hears in most types of EDM music. This went on for a couple of cycles, each varying in duration from 1 minute 20 seconds to as long as 6 minutes 44 seconds. This procedure kept getting interrupted as my mother kept moving her hands and legs or talking as she was clearly agitated lying in an uncomfortable position for long coupled by a feeling of claustrophobia. Having being trapped in that room, I too was getting irritated as A) Was annoyed by the delay in completion of the scan due to my mother’s constant movements which were making the technician repeat the scans and B) The ear muffs provided were small and non adjustable resulting in my ear lobes hurting like crazy. Since I had no option, I just had to grin and bear it and that’s when all those random noises began to make sense in EDM songs. I was trying to compose an EDM song with all those random noises made by the MRI scanner and was thinking that did the EDM genre start like this? The first MRI scan was done on the 3rd of July, 1977, EDM genre as per info available on the internet about the same time. Co-incidence? Kind of shocking isn’t it? After going through this torture, let the magnets of this mighty machine draw you to the EDM songs that most of the young generation listen to. I hope its never the case! I sincerely hope no one has to go through such an ordeal and may technology hasten the change in the method of the whole concept of undergoing painful scans in the near future, so that we never have to relate music to such torture!