I had an MRI scan last week. My right shoulder has been giving me gip for quite a while now and I’ve been progressing through various treatments. I had physiotherapy, which involved manipulation and electrotherapy and ultrasound and heat treatment. After four sessions, it appeared to be improving, but in the fifth session we tried acupuncture, which had no apparent effect, except that my shoulder felt worse again, and after the sixth it seemed back to where I started. The therapist recommended an X-ray.

So I returned to the doctor who agreed about the X-ray and followed it up with a steroid injection. Fortunately I’m not an elite athlete (nor any kind of athlete, as it happens) so there were no ramifications from that. (Whilst in A&E a few weeks ago, on an entirely unrelated matter, I spotted a notice in the triage room warning nurses to check with cyclists from the Olympics road races what medications they were allowed – obviously preparing for carnage in the narrow roads to Ripley and not wanting to have Bradley Wiggins disqualified from next year’s Tour de France.)

The steroid injection eased the pain a bit, but did not remove it, so my doctor filled out a form for an ultrasound scan and gave me the name of a consultant, whom I duly went to see. He discarded the notion of ultrasound and said I should have an MRI scan. We went through a safety checklist. The ‘M’ in ‘MRI’ stands for ‘magnetic’ and it’s a strong magnet in a scanner – three tesla. Doesn’t sound much, 3T, but the ITER fusion reactor only has 13T. You want to keep metal away from a 3T field. So, did I have a heart pacemaker? Any metal replacement joints? Any fragments of metal in my eyes? No I didn’t. “How about mercury amalgam fillings,” I said. Not a problem.

The radiologist went through the list again when I went for the scan, in the reception area before I got near the machine, just to be sure. Then I stripped off my clothes, down to underpants, and put on a gown. This was in a changing room, not the reception area, I hasten to point out. Good job I wasn’t wearing my chainmail pants, I thought. (No, not really. I just made that up.) I lay down on a bed with my shoulder wedged into a support to keep it still and in the right position. I was going to have to lie completely still for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes? I don’t think I’ve ever lain still for twenty minutes, while awake.

The radiologist warned me that it would be loud, like road works. “But we have headphones through which we will play music.” She put the headphones on me, gave me an emergency bulb to squeeze in case of emergencies, jacked up the table and slid me into the tube of the scanner. The music was some easy listening stuff that I didn’t recognise. It didn’t matter. The music was just to fill the gaps between different phases of the scan, because when the scanner started up that was all I could hear. To drown out the scanner you’d need Deep Purple on full throttle, though, come to think of it, heavy metal probably wouldn’t work inside a scanner. (Metal? Magnetism? It’s a… oh never mind.)

The main purpose of the headphones, I decided, was for the radiologist (who by this time was safely out of the scanner room) to talk to me. She announced three bursts of three minutes each. When they were over, she said there were eleven minutes to go. Still eleven minutes? I needed to move something. Would it be okay to wiggle my toes? The minutes dragged on. I stared at the  wide green line just off-centre in the roof of the tube. Or perhaps it was my head that was off-centre, for my shoulder to be in the right place. The line was maybe ten centimetres above my face. That was no problem; I went caving once, as part of a leadership training course, and the gaps were much smaller, the rock right in your face. How much longer to go? My body, inside the machine, felt hot and sweaty, whilst my feet were in the cool of the room. The noise was unceasing, but not constant, varying between continuous and staccato. I decided that I would not make a good secret agent, couldn’t take the torture.

Then it stopped. “I’m just coming into the room now,” said the radiologist. It was over. I dressed and she handed over a CD with the scan results to give to the consultant. So next Tuesday I’ll find out whether I need surgery, or what.