This white man has been busy of late. Busy with a fantastic and blessed pastoral role at Camberwell Salvos and busy keeping up with two boys at home. I have to say that life has an amazingly rhythmic relentnessness about it - a bit like your heartbeat...just keeps pulsing away...100 000 times a day...just keeps going. But my issue over the past week has nothing much to do with my heart but more to do with my neck.
After having served a ten day sentence of 'singleness' with Phuong, Kim & Luc having a holiday away on the Gold Coast with my parents and sister's family, they came back on Wednesday last week. That particular day I awoke with a stiff and sore neck; nothing too much to be concerned about as it wasn't the first time I'd had one of those 'slept wrong' things happen with my neck. Grin and bear it for the day and things would rectify themselves by next morning. Even one colleague quipped that perhaps my family returning was the cause of my discomfort - that subconsciously I woke realising that the 'pains in the neck' were imminently going to be rejoining me!
Well one week after I'm still as stiff and sore in the neck, shoulders and left arm as last week so something is quite awry. Went to the doctor and he diagnosed a bulging disc in the upper vertebrae of the neck. Fair enough...but the definitive manner this could be confirmed was via a MRI scan. Again, fair enough...Have scan, get results, do treatment, get it fixed...it should be that simple right? Or perhaps that's just the 'bloke' in me who would much prefer to simplify the whole thing rather than over-complicate or over-think it all. So anyway, today I went for the MRI scan...and that's where the simplicity of my little 'get better' scheme started to unravel a bit!
Because other than a brief chat with my Mum a couple of days ago regarding the basics of what an MRI scan entails, I had no idea what I was about to get myself into. So there I am, lying flat on my back with head and neck immobilised as I slide into this tube-like machine that encompasses you from all angles. Like being inserted into a white sterile shaft of noisy, beeping white machinery, lodged in there with a feeling of nowhere to move and nowhere to go. It immediately took me back to one of the most terrifying experiences of my life - being a tourist crawling through the famous Cu Chi Tunnels near Saigon, Vietnam. These amazingly complex and very narrow maze of underground tunnels served as a hiding place for Viet Cong in the Vietnam War. Tunnels that a typical Vietnamese person can navigate with relative ease - but more challenging to larger Western tourists like a certain white man! That day I first discovered something deep within that I wish I'd never discovered - a degree of claustrophobia. Today those inner fears reminded me that they hadn't gone anywhere.
Those first five minutes in that MRI machine were a mental torment more acute than anything going on in my neck. It went like this - heart beating faster, breathing rapidly quicker, irrational thoughts like "this is what it feels like to be buried alive, I can't move my arms, I feel like I'm suffocating and having a heart attack"...Irrational? Absolutely...Real? Yes...And all that before the 25 minute scan had even started! Honestly, the only thing that kept me in that contraption was the fact that if I aborted the scan then I would not get back one cent of the money I had paid for it. And as crazy as it sounds, especially for those who know me, that fiscal barb stuck in me much more than wanting to stay in there for the sake of my 'manly pride'! If the scan was a free procedure then I'm sure I would also have been 'free' of it's clutches in a flash! So the dollars kept me in there and thankfully the scan process did get easier after that first five minutes of mental and emotional assault to the psyche.
But I guess what today reminded me is that many of our fears remain dormant fears inside. And they can come out at the most relatively inconvenient of times. But conquering fear in many ways (and regardless sometimes of the motivation for doing so) is an invigorating experience worth savouring. But I'm not kidding myself - today I may have won a battle but the war is far from won. As for my neck? I'll find out about that on Friday! For now I soldier on with my rickety neck and a chin I'm trying to keep up!
