radfrac_archive_full

Looking at an MRI of myself felt blank. I couldn't really associate that image with the inside of the Me. The shape was too familiar from television, and yet too alien as a representation. There was nothing to identify with. A monochrome map of bone and tissue; a surface, but not my surface. The only thing human about it was the bright outline of the fine hairs along the back of my neck. I didn't know they were there, and they looked silly against the diagrammatic precision of the maze inside.

I could see the bulging disc easily enough, though.

Here's what the neurosurgeon proposes: they go in from the side. They shift over the various tubes (breath and speech, food) so that they can come at the disc from the front. They scrape out the disc and use bone from my hip (!) to fuse the two vertebrae.

Okay, I'm willing. I don't get a Bad Feeling about it. It's more than I expected, but if that's the treatment, it's the treatment.

It's just.

I'll tell you what I'm worried about. It concentrates down to this: It's thirty years from now. I'm sitting bolt upright, because that's the only way I can sit, and I'm being interviewed on the CBC with a panel composed of a nanosurgeon, a medical ethicist and a popular science writer. The writer is saying "Can you believe they performed this surgery on thousands of people? Can you believe that these are people walking around with fused vertebrae because for ten years there was a medical fashion for doing this procedure? It's barbaric. It's absurd."

"And how do you feel about it, Mr. Fracture?" Asks the host. My mouth feels dry, and when I start to speak it comes out thin and a little broken.

I'm not worried about being impaired. I mean, of course I am, but injury, impairment, that's something that happens all the time. I'm afraid of being embarrassed. What I mean is, of not being able to work out the right thing to do. Of not being able to see into the future.

You know. Of choice.

I already have anecdotal case studies for and against. That's not what I need. I need to be a neurosurgeon and a medical ethicist and a clairvoyant.

The only thing I don't need to be is the popular science writer, which is too bad, because that would be cool.

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