Along the Way: MRIs put skittish patients in a tight spot

You’ll want to hang with me on this one if you have claustrophobia.

I think I can trace my fear and dread of being scrunched in narrow spaces to retrieving a baseball from one of those concrete tubes — ducts, pipes, whatever you call them that carry spill-off water after a big rain.

I got the baseball but discovered there wasn’t enough room to wiggle back out using my arms and elbows. Talk about a tight spot! I never forgot that little panic attack. Hootie or Robby or one of my buddies grabbed the U.S. Keds or PF Flyers on my feet and yanked me out.

Those old heebie-jeebies came back the other day when I had my first MRI.

Here I was in the mouth of this tube, an honest-to-goodness roaring monster, about to be swallowed whole.

All I could do was lie there, motionless, and listen to Vivaldi through headphones. Willie Nelson was not an option.

There’s noting wrong with Vivaldi that twin fiddles, a steel guitar and dobro wouldn’t cure.

But when you’re undergoing your first MRI scan — and you happen to be so claustrophobic, you can’t even go through a grocery check-out line without sweating and shaking — you need something more familiar and comforting in the hearmuffs than Vivaldi.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging is a technique that looks inside you while you’re inside it, and hopefully it finds out what, if anything, ails you.

In my case, it’s a Baker’s cyst, a lump behind the right knee caused by a buildup of the fluid that’s supposed to keep your joints moving. It’s been around since the early 1980s — the MRI, not my Baker’s cyst — and it’s a marvel for sure.

It just doesn’t do a lot for anxiety or panic attacks.

That’s where Vivaldi comes in.

You close your eyes and listen to music. Hopefully, Vivaldi will drown out the beeps and burps and booms of the MRI machine while the thing takes pictures of your innards.

Luckily, I only went into the mouth of the monster, feet-first, as far as my neck. That was enough. I had mapped out a secret escape route in my mind just case the thing swallowed me more than what was promised.

I made it fine. But I was happy when the session was over, believe me.

Barely into the “Four Seasons,” Vivaldi’s 300-year-old baroque masterpiece, I began to think about a 35-year-old, less-than-masterpiece of a movie called “Soylent Green.”

It’s a futuristic fright and in one scene, Edward G. Robinson is going through what I supposed you’d call assisted suicide. In “Soylent Green,” when you’re over the hill or real sick or just fed up with things in general, the government gives you a fantastic last meal, straps you down, shows footage of something pretty (a meadow in the mist, that sort of thing) and plays your favorite music.

While it kills you, of course.

Well, I hadn’t been served what I would ask for as a last meal — chorizo and eggs with a mug of Dos Equis — but I was strapped down, so to speak.

There was nothing pretty to look at and no Willie Nelson in my ears, just the old Italian they called “Prete Rosso.” Did you know Vivaldi was known as “the Red Priest?”

Did you care?

Me, neither.

All I cared about was surviving this 30-minute mental challenge that seemed more like 30 hours, because of the not-too-friendly confines of the MRI monster.

The princess in a famous Hans Christian Andersen tale could feel a pea through 20 mattresses. Well, you need to prepare yourself for an MRI or you can feel a pee less than 20 seconds into the procedure. It’s that scary.

Thankfully, the pre-game preparations had me prepared for that possibility.

They give you an emergency signaling device in case you can’t stand being cramped up another second. I squeezed it so tightly that I thought a couple of times I had set off the signal. But I didn’t.

As we are old and revered, Shakespeare suggested in “King Lear,” we should also be old and wise. A few of us are merely old.

But, hey — I could actually feel the accelerated grimace on my face — and I probably looked like those pictures of astronauts overdosing on gravity.

The growling, howling, burping conveyor belt thingamabob fed me and my creaky knee into the mouth of the MRI.

When your doctor suggests an MRI, take it from a card-carrying scaredy-cat, it really ain’t that bad. It’s all in your head.

Try to look at it as an hour or half-hour nap.

Just ask for music you like and have them turn it up loud enough to drown out the noise of the machine.

Try not to think about lost baseballs or horror movies. Oh, and make certain you’ve made a potty-stop before they hit the “start” button.

Corky Simpson was a Tucson Citizen columnist before moving to Green Valley last year. He was the first inductee into the Arizona Associated Press Sports Editors Hall of Fame. His column appears Fridays in the Green Valley News.