I couldn’t really return the gesture, what with my head being held in place by pieces of foam and my chest strapped down to keep me from moving during the scan.
“Okay,” I said.
She left, and I was alone in the room.
What a fucking day. I woke up exhausted, having barely slept. My parents and I had stayed up until almost midnight, saying all of the things that we should have over the past two years. How Mom and I both hid our depression, how it affected us. How we should have been better at sharing our grief and our fears with each other. How we should have talked over our frustrations with each other for hiding things, for pushing too much, or for pulling away.
Was it a perfect conversation in which we resolved all of our issues? Nope. At points, we argued. We yelled. Mom cried. Dad stalked out of the room. I nearly punched a wall. It was awkward and uncomfortable and at times fucking painful. But it needed to happen. We were all better for it now.
Even though we had more shit to unpack and work through – likely with the help of a therapist – I already noticed a difference. I didn’t hide my early morning phone call to Brian from them. Mom and Dad hadn’t hidden their fear from me throughout the day. They’d butted in to ask the specialists questions until they felt like they had a better understanding of the tests and what to expect from the results.
I checked into the clinic at 9 a.m. and met with what seemed like half their staff of doctors. We reviewed the entire battery of tests I needed. They went over the costs in great detail, including what my medical policy would pay for and what it wouldn’t. Thank fuck I’d invested my USFL money well, because even with most of the bill covered by insurance, I was still going to be out of pocket a large sum. After agreeing to undergo all of the recommended tests, I signed more paperwork than I had to buy my house.
And then it began. First up were the cognitive tests. Math. Essays. Comprehension. Recall. They started simple enough and then got progressively harder, until I felt like I was back in college, which I guess was the point since they were trying to gauge my memory and reasoning.
Next came a barrage of physiological exams. They tested my balance, fine motor skills, and even my nerve responses. I ran on a treadmill for a while with about a hundred sensors strapped to my body and a breathing tube taped over my mouth.
“Just relax,” they said.
“You ever tried running with a fucking breathing tube?” I tried to yell back. It came out garbled. Probably for the best.
Afterward, they moved on to emotional tests. They pushed and prodded at me to make me sad, and then angry. I still think it was unethical to have me watch Zach and Molly’s first dance at their wedding while instruments read my brain waves. What right did these strangers have to my grief? And did the fact that I got sad and also pissed register on their test? Was that an expected emotional response to something like that, or would it count as a mark against me?
That I didn’t know the answer and they wouldn’t tell me when I asked wasn’t helping my current mental state, which was completely trashed thanks to the shitshow that unfolded during our lunch break. I got a phone call from my publicist halfway through my meal. Someone had taken a picture of me walking into the clinic, and it had already been picked up by a local news channel. She was in full-blown damage control now, circulating a story that my parents and I were here to inspect the clinic in relation to the charity. That we were considering donating to it and wanted to see what tests they could conduct here, etc, etc.
It didn’t matter. I knew how this circus went. A national news outlet would pick it up soon. Celebrity gossip mongers would have one take, the mainstream media another, and the suits running the sports networks would probably scramble to put together an entire panel of football commentators to pour over why I was here and whether or not they should believe the story they’d been fed.
I hadn’t needed Mom to point out the fact that being a recluse up to this point wouldn’t help me out at all. But she had, in anI told you sokind of way that made my usually cool-as-a-cucumber father snap at her.
We were all pretty close to our breakingpoint.
It was almost a relief to get away from them this afternoon, aside from the fact that it was only because I’d spent the past several hours in scanners. The MRI came first. They didn’t like the results of the inconclusive one I had after Zach died and decided to re-do it with their own specialist. Then there was the two-hour CT scan where they imaged my entire brain.
The one I was getting ready for now was the last test of the day, the new one I’d told Ella about that might render all of the others moot. Before getting strapped in, a nurse had injected me with a radioactive tracer – which I hoped wouldn’t give me cancer further down the road. Now I got to lay here for another couple of hours without moving, while my future was unveiled to the watching doctors.
“Here we go, Ben,” a woman’s voice said over the speakers. “Remember, try not to move.”
“Got it, Dr. Souza,” I told her.
The table I rested on moved, sliding me into a tunnel so narrow that my shoulders brushed the sides. Good thing I didn’t suffer from claustrophobia or the stress of today might have reached heart attack levels. I still experienced a slight moment of panic when the table came to a stop. No one likes to feel trapped. Deep breaths saw me to the other side of it, and I tried my best to relax while the sound of machinery started up around me.
Dr. Souza had been great about explaining this one to my parents. She went into a lot of detail about how the tracer they injected me with worked by bonding to the abnormal tau protein that leads to both CTE and Alzheimer’s. The key difference in how the diseases manifested was that in the former, the tangles of tau usually appeared around small blood vessels and rarely formed beta-amyloid plaques, which was what could make this test so critical for suspected cases ofCTE. If I had any of those tangles in my brain, they should light up like Christmas trees in the scans.
Please, God, don’t let my brain light up like a Christmas tree.
Time passed slowly in the tube. The seconds felt like full minutes, the minutes like hours, and the hours like small eternities. Soon, I lost track of them. Had I been in this thing for twenty minutes? Forty? Three hours? I couldn’t tell anymore.
I tried to focus on the clicks and beeps and whirs of the machine’s components to distract myself. It worked for a little while. And then the anger of being outed by someone with a smartphone returned. I told myself to let it go. To stay calm. That there was no way that person could have known what I was doing here. That if they had, they wouldn’t have taken the picture.
Brian taught me this technique of rationalizing and empathizing with people and their choices to keep from getting angry. It wasn’t really working right now. Because no matter who took the goddamn picture or for what reason, the last thing I needed was media attention while trying to get through this.
I could just imagine the crowd that would gather outside when the story broke, the questions they would hurl at me as I exited the building later. Maybe the clinic had a back door or a garage I could escape through. Who knew what my mental state would be like then? I’d hate to lose my shit, punch someone, and make all of this worse.
I turned my thoughts to Ella to try and calm myself down. I was so used to talking to her every day that it felt weird that we hadn’t spoken. Several times I’d had the urge to text her updates just to keep her in the loop. But what would be the point?
Hi, Ella. I had to take a math test. Without a calculator.
She’d just worry. Or try to make me smile by responding with,That is cruel and unusual punishment! What sort of cockamamie hospital are you at???
