I wasn’t sure what an MRI of my brain would entail, and I hoped it wouldn’t require me to lie completely flat on my back.  I never sleep in that position, because I have a problem with postnasal drip.  In my case, it’s not a thin occasional drip, but a slow, thick ooze that gags me when it reaches the back of my mouth and my throat. My go-to-response when this happens is to sit up.  I’d had an MRI for something else where I had to lie flat on my back, but they’d given me a couple of pillows to elevate my head, and I was okay.

The other issue for me is that I have a tendency toward claustrophobia.  It only becomes truly problematic for me when I need to put myself in a tightly-enclosed space where there could be danger, and the inability to move freely could significantly hamper my ability to cope with it.

For example, I felt this way when I had to locate a water intake line via the crawlspace under the house my wife and I had recently bought.  Because our home was right next to natural land, rattlesnakes were a common problem.  Also, California is earthquake country, and if the house started to shake while I was under it, I’d want to get out as quickly as possible.  

In the face of these combined dangers, I found myself unable, on multiple attempts, to move forward into the more tightly-squeezed areas of the crawlspace.  If I hadn’t finally thought to ask my wife to stand by the air vents (where I could tell her if I’d been bitten by a rattlesnake or pinned down during an earthquake, so she could call for appropriate help), I would have had to give up and spend money we couldn’t really afford to hire somebody else to do the job for me.

I worried that during my brain MRI, if I started to gag inside a large, heavy machine, the only result of attempting sit up to stop the problem would be to bonk my head on the machine—maybe forcefully enough to knock myself unconscious.  I was also concerned that if I just lay there gagging, I wouldn’t be able to talk clearly enough to communicate to the lab tech that I needed to get out—right away.

Since I didn’t find either of these potential outcomes especially appealing, my urgent hope was that the lab would be able to elevate my head in some manner—preferably via pillows, but a bunch of tightly-rolled towels, books, or even shoes would have been okay with me.