I recently had a brain scan.

This was to evaluate a neurological abnormality.

Note: My sister and a friend also have this condition (which involves hyperactivity of the nerves on one side of your face), so how many people need to share this oddity before an abnormality becomes… normal?

Anyway.

When it started, I was misdiagnosed and told that I had shingles, which would likely erupt in a painful, pus-filled rash across my face. That didn’t sound like much fun and I said this to the doctor. He agreed that it sucked to be me.

Imagine my relief to learn that he’d been wrong. No facial rash for me, thank you very much. But, I was told, there might be something amiss in your brain.

It’s fairly distressing to know that doctors want to look at your brain, to seek out whatever is wrong in there that’s causing other parts of your body to misbehave.

In distressing situations, we often forget that we have control over how we react. We get to decide what our response will be. It might seem that it simply is what it is, but in reality there is choice involved.

Am I going to freak out? Melt down? Panic? I’ve taken this course of action in the past. It doesn’t serve me, doesn’t ease the matter at hand, and leaves me with feelings of regret. Yuck.

OR… am I going to approach the situation with curiosity and humor? (There’s always room for curiosity and humor. Even at funerals. Heck, ESPECIALLY at funerals).

The day of my MRI, I made the conscious decision to 1) Acknowledge that my reactions and handling of a situation are choices that I make; and 2) Opt for curiosity and humor over pointless angst.

One of the best parts of getting an MRI is that you get to wear scrubs. I wondered if they’d let me keep them. They didn’t. They told me I could keep the socks, but honestly they were sub par, as far as socks go.

But I loved the scrubs. I thought about how I’d once read that Nick Nolte shows up to movie sets in scrubs. He’ll have to change into costume anyway, so he figures he might as well be comfortable in the meantime.

I started wishing that I had a job that required wearing scrubs. But maybe not a job that required me to come into contact with anyone else’s bodily fluids.

Then I remembered that I’m a self-employed writer and I work from home. Really, I could just decide that my job requires scrubs.

All you have to do during an MRI is be still. I’m really good at lying down and doing nothing, so I felt well suited to this task. You lay on a platform that slides into a narrow tube. There are loud noises, but they also give you headphones and play music to distract you from how coffin-like your surroundings feel.

For me it was thirty minutes of dozing off and swallowing panic. When the panic would come, I’d remind myself that I can choose how to react and that I’d specifically settled on not panicking. Then I’d coach myself back to calm and doze off, before panic would try to surface and I’d go through the process again.

There’s always humor, I reminded myself. Then I thought of my friend Elaine Ambrose who farted during an MRI. It was loud and stinky and there was no denying it. She knew it, the MRI tech guy knew it, and she was mortified. She wrote a blog about it. It went viral.

Curiosity and humor are magical. They have the power to transform any type of pain. They cost nothing. They are there for us whenever we want to tap into them. All that’s required of us is the willingness and the fortitude to do so.

As far as my scan, I made it through without farting. Also, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with my brain. As to the (somewhat common) abnormality that started all of this, it’s just a quirk. A curious, funny little quirk.