My grandmother is as healthy as a horse. Even so, once a week she goes to the doctor, just as once a week she goes to the hairdresser and once a week she attends the sale at the department store at the mall.
Shopping for bargains and getting her hair done and going to the doctor are weekly rituals that are as important to my grandmother as going to church is for some people. Without these routines to get her out of her maintenance-provided condominium, my grandmother would be as much of a shut-in as my paraplegic rabbit.
Years of specializing in being a patient, a department store customer, and a beauty salon regular have produced some interesting results, some obvious, some less so.
The most conspicuous result of my grandmother's routine is her hair. It doesn't look like real hair at all. It is thin, stiff, and slightly pink, more like cotton candy than human hair. When the wind blows, it does not. When it rains, she becomes anxious and wraps her head in a plastic bag.
Less obvious than her unusual hair, but also a crown of sorts, is my grandmother's great status at her doctor's office, where she ranks among this businessman's most valuable customers. All he is required to do for my grandmother is keep a few current magazines in his waiting room, ask her about her two grandchildren, and give her some pills to take home.
Finally, my grandmother's limited but repetitive activity has given her an incredible knowledge of manufactured goods. If it is for sale in a department store, she knows everything there is to know about it.
So it was only logical that when I asked my mother for a new pillow, she, in turn, being conscious of expenses now that my father was unemployed, asked her mother for advice on what kind of pillow to get.
Naturally, my grandmother wanted to know why I needed a new pillow and why her firstborn grandchild was spending so much time in bed. After a long and increasingly tense conversation with my mother, my grandmother concluded, somewhat erroneously, that I was merely moping over the condition of my run-over rabbit.
"But what else can I do?" my mother lamented to the woman who had raised her almost single-handedly from the moment she was born.
"Simple," my grandmother, the fountain of child-rearing wisdom, snapped back. "Fix the rabbit and you fix the girl."
And this is how I wound up one day after school waiting with Orwell to get an MRI.
MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. It used to be called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging but the "nuclear" part scared everybody so they changed it. What MRI is, is a way of taking pictures inside your body using a giant magnet and radio waves. The pictures that you get are better than X-rays.
Getting these pictures, however, is a lot more complicated than X-rays, and the more complicated something is, the more expensive it is. That's why most people just get X-rays even though the pictures are not very good. That's why Orwell just got X-rays even though when the veterinarian looked at them he couldn't see what was wrong.
Fortunately for Orwell, he was now associated with me, and I was associated with my grandmother, who had connections with a successful doctor who had invested in an MRI facility right across the street from his office where my grandmother hung out every Thursday morning, rain or shine, plastic bag or no plastic bag.
"We sometimes get people with teddy bears," the technician said, ushering me into what looked like a storage room for big metal parts. "But we've never had anybody with a rabbit before."
"His name is Orwell," I explained.
"I hope he's not claustrophobic," the technician said.
"Why do you ask?" I replied.
The place was beginning to remind me of my one and only trip to the emergency room, when I had gotten a raisin stuck up my nose. I was a lot younger, of course.
"We have to put you in there and it takes a while," the technician explained.
"In there" turned out to be a metal tunnel as big as a Volkswagen. "A while," I was soon to learn, meant forty-five minutes. And "you" did not simply mean the injured Orwell, it meant me holding the injured Orwell.
Nobody had mentioned this part to me.
"You have to keep him very still or the pictures won't be any good," the technician said.
It's noisy inside an MRI machine. It clatters and bangs and burps. When it's doing what it is supposed to do, it sounds just like it's broken. And when it stops, and you think it's over and you're going to be freed, it starts right up again.
Like luck stuck on going from bad to worse, the cycle keeps repeating.
Despite the noise, or possibly because of it, Orwell snuggled down into the cavity in my chest, like a rabbit in a grassy nest in a meadow, and went to sleep.