As I looked up at the tubular shape enveloping me, I tried not to think about the similarities between my current predicament and getting stuck in a small municipal water line.

For a little while, things didn’t go too badly for me.  But before a minute was up, I started feeling the mucus move downward toward my throat.

I hadn’t begun to gasp yet.  And by staying extremely still and passive, I somehow managed to at least delay that response’s arrival.  

Weirdly, for me, being passive takes a lot of conscious effort—and after I’ve done it for a certain amount of time, I’m ready to take a break from it.  As part of taking a break from my new form of carefully-controlled breathing in the MRI machine, my automatic response was to allow myself to take a deeper breath.

Not a good choice.  As soon as I let myself indulge in the kind of breathing that’s normal for me, the mucus flowed again.

I stilled myself once more, and the viscous advance paused.  After a time, though, my vigilance lapsed, and the ensuing involuntary deep breath triggered a quick resumption of the flow.

I again managed to catch myself before gagging set in.  At least I was learning a method of holding it at bay.

I would have to continue practicing this technique for more than an hour, though.  And what would happen if I slipped again? How big was the threatening snot glob growing in the course of all this postponement?  It was all too easy to envision how my body’s reflexive jerk upward in quest of a breath during a more powerful gagging attack would cause my head to bash with extreme force into the top of the snug tube that held me down.  Would I pass out at the same time my breathing was blocked?  What were my chances of survival in that event?

For that matter, what if an involuntary lurch upward during a gagging fit somehow damaged the machine—and rendered it incapable of releasing me from the tube in which I was constrained?

I found myself confronting a daunting array of possible ways things could go downhill if I wasn’t able to continuously maintain a very strange combination of vigilance and passivity.  And how in the world could I make it through more than an hour of this, when a single involuntary slip might trigger such dire consequences?

While mentally casting about for a way to get through this threatening process, I happened to think of Senator John McCain, who had recently been in the news a lot following his death. His media obituaries had all mentioned the brutal treatment and unending torture he’d voluntarily and stoically endured after his fighter jet was shot down by the North Vietnamese.  

“If John McCain could get through all he endured at the Hanoi Hilton,” I thought, “I ought to be able to make it through a medical procedure that’s just meant to help me.”