Mom, If You’re There

The last time I was in an MRI, I walked out different than I walked in.

Not emotionally. Physically.

I overheated. My spine felt like it had been lit from the inside. When it was over, I could barely get off the table. Standing took effort. Walking was unstable. The technicians noticed. So did I.

So when the next scan came due, my body remembered before my brain did.

When they slid me into the tube, I was terrified of overheating again.

The last MRI felt like torture. My spine lit up. My neck gave. My legs became unreliable. I left that machine wondering if I would ever feel steady again.

Before we began, I told the technician what had happened last time. I expected dismissal. Instead, I got eye contact.

He told me he had once endured an hour and forty-five minute MRI himself — electrical pain from his hip to his foot. They were evaluating him for something similar to what I have.

Multiple sclerosis.

I asked him if it was okay to ask.

He nodded.

There is something grounding about shared vulnerability in a room filled with magnets and noise.

When the scan started, I whispered to my mom.

“Mom, if you’re there, please watch over me.”

It wasn’t a new thought.

It felt like something I had learned long ago — a childhood prayer in Polish.

Ty zawsze przy mnie stój.

You always stand by me.

Bądź mi zawsze ku pomocy.

Always come to my aid.

Not something I had practiced in years.

But in that moment, it came back.

I’m not even sure what I meant by it. Protection from pain? Forgiveness for something unnamed? Permission to be afraid?

My head began vibrating against the face cage — rapid, mechanical, almost violent. My body was trying to hold still while my nervous system was doing something else entirely.

The radiologist later wrote:

“Assessment is mildly limited by patient motion.”

A calm, efficient sentence.

Inside the machine it didn’t feel mild.

My head was knocking against the cage while I tried to keep it still.

I could feel heat building in my head again — the same warning signal that had terrified me during the previous MRI. This time it stayed just below the point of panic.

Present.

But manageable.

I wasn’t calm.

I wasn’t stoic.

I was bracing.

The machine hummed.

The table stayed cool.

And my body held.

⸻

The results came back faster than I expected.

I had barely made it home before the notification lit up my phone.

No new lesions.

No enhancement.

Previously active lesions shrinking.

Even the posterior pons lesion — unchanged.

Unchanged.

It’s a strange word. In oncology, unchanged can sound like a threat. In multiple sclerosis, unchanged can mean something closer to peace. A scar that isn’t growing. A storm that has passed and left the shoreline intact.

Six months ago, those same lesions were enhancing. Active. Inflamed. Lit up like warning flares in the right frontal and parietal lobes.

There was also a lesion in the corpus callosum — the bridge between the two halves of the brain.

At the time, I didn’t fully understand what that meant.

I just knew something was off.

I would stand in the kitchen trying to read a simple note while someone spoke to me, and everything would break down at once. Reading, listening, moving — things that should have felt automatic — no longer lined up.

It wasn’t weakness.

It was timing.

The signals weren’t arriving together.

What still feels surreal is that six months ago, doctors weren’t convinced by my attempt at self-diagnosis.

I couldn’t even remember the full name of the medial longitudinal fasciculus. I just kept calling it the MLF.

But I was certain about one thing.

My lateral rectus muscle felt wrong.

It hurt in a way that reminded me of a strained hip flexor — like something wasn’t firing the way it should. And I kept telling myself that had to be why my eye wasn’t working.

I was thinking in terms of muscle.

What I didn’t fully appreciate yet was that the problem wasn’t the muscle.

It was the wiring.

Still, I kept pushing the idea — CN III, CN VI, something connecting them, maybe the pons.

It surprised even my doctor.

At one point he put neurology on speakerphone, and I listened as they corrected him in real time.

Dr. Lee is actually a great doctor.

By the end of that appointment, he wasn’t dismissive. If anything, he seemed genuinely pleased that I had connected as much as I had so quickly.

I used to joke that he reminded me of Ken Jeong — someone who understood both medicine and humor as a way of carrying difficult things. I later learned that comedy had been his way of coping while his wife went through breast cancer.

I always respected that.

And I still do.

The irony isn’t lost on me that they both happened to work at Kaiser.

This time, the images were quiet.

My cervical spine was clear of cord lesions. Just the ordinary wear and tear of being forty-two. Mechanical. Not inflammatory. A reminder that gravity and time apply to everyone.

The only new finding in the report was almost comical in its simplicity:

a sinus infection.

Remnants of the fever I caught from Benito just days earlier.

one of its worst flare-ups — what I used to call a pseudo-relapse.

It never felt “pseudo.”

It felt real.

I later learned there’s a more accurate term for it: recrudescence.

Just another word to add to the list.

Another reminder that I’m still learning this system in real time.

And that maybe I don’t have to punish myself for not having all the answers yet.

The same fever that had me lying on the couch thinking about my mother.

That was the night I realized something I hadn’t understood for years.

I had forgiven her.

But I had never asked for her forgiveness.

And maybe this is my way of doing that.

Grief is a silent teacher.

I thought progression was inevitable.

It isn’t.

At least not today.

The lesions remain. They may always remain. But they are scars now, not wildfires.

There is something profoundly stabilizing about seeing proof that your immune system can be contained. That treatment can work. That fear doesn’t always predict outcome.

I want a long arc.

One my kids can look back on without feeling like their father dramatized his own body. One that tells the truth without theatrics.

The truth today is simple:

The storm has quieted.

And for now, that is enough.