Act Your Age... Getting an MRI

First appeared in the April 1, 2011 issue of Retirement News Weekly

When I saw the advertisement on Kijiji looking for people willing to get an MRI, there were many things that went through my mind. What if I had a “special” brain and this MRI revealed how unique I really am? What if I had a brain tumour and this MRI saved my life? Wouldn’t a picture of my brain make a cool Facebook profile? What never crossed my mind was the need for concern.

It was without concern that I signed up for the research study which promised to pay $90 and provide a set of pictures of my brain. Without concern, I visited the lab for the first time for various cognitive tests and word games. And it was without concern that I was led by a young German woman to the Neuroimaging Lab on my second visit to have my MRI.

However, when I was sat down in the viewing room and a man began to go over my medical history, it finally donned on me that perhaps I should have been more concerned. The man focused on questions that would help determine if there was any possibility that metal could be inside my body. He explained that the magnetic resonance imaging machine (MRI) worked with giant magnets and if there was any metal on or in me it would be pulled into the machine. However, to get to the machine, the metal would likely travel through my brain in the process and kill me on the spot.

“I’d hate to be the next guy getting an MRI,” I joked uncomfortably.

We determined that I was metal free and I finally entered the room with the MRI. The machine was enormous and seemed to take up half the room. If you’ve never seen an MRI machine, imagine a giant, long marshmallow made of plastic lying on its side. In the middle of the marshmallow is a hole and in front of the hole is a table on wheels. At the top of the table is a much smaller tube, slightly larger than a person’s cranium.

I pulled myself onto that table and the German girl taped a Vitamin B tablet to my forehead. Apparently it’s sometimes difficult to determine which side of the brain is left or right and the tablet would shine brightly on the MRI and identify the left side. I then lied down on the table and placed my head into the smaller tube. The technician who would be running the MRI (a man who would be played by Judge Reinhold if my MRI was made into a movie) pressed baseball-sized pillows around my head so I didn’t have to hold it steady by myself. I was then manually slid into the larger tube.

I point out that I was manually slid into the tube because there is a machine that would have slid me into the tube at the push of a button. However, the technician had warned me that sometimes it didn’t work when the patient was too heavy. They requested two additional technicians to help push me into the MRI. Very flattering.

The inside of the tube seemed almost black. My arms could not bend at the elbows without hitting the roof of the tube. And given that my head was lodged firmly where it was with pillows, I wasn’t going anywhere. Yet I was still fairly calm. Looking straight up from my lying position, all I could see was a mirror positioned directly in front of my eyes. This allowed me to see outside of the tube and into the viewing room. A radio in the headphones I was wearing allowed me to keep in contact with the experimenters, while playing a local radio station when we weren’t talking.

“What radio station do you want?” they asked. I’d recently been hanging out with a quirky lady who was a part-time promotions girl at Q104 so I asked for that station. The soft rock music began to play through the set. They let it play for a few moments and then it abruptly cut out, while they warned that the first scan would start soon. The music returned, but was soon drowned out by the whirring of the machine. It sounded like a piece of heavy plastic being flicked every few seconds. It was a grating click, click, click sound.

It was during this first scan that I panicked. I was lying in this tube, unable to move, with the radio playing in my ears. But what got to me was the fear of being bored. I’d spent six months applying to jobs, getting over a horrible break up, and ultimately just trying to keep pushing forward. Trapped in this tube I was suddenly without distraction and faced with the weight of everything I was trying and failing to do. I took a deep breath. I took another. And I forced myself to focus on Neil Young’s Heart of Gold.

Before too long, the clicking stopped and I was calm once again. The experimenters asked if everything was okay and I told them to crank the music. They adjusted the volume, made a few reassuring comments, and then the next scan began. Each scan took 7 to 14 minutes and I would try to lie as still as possible.

Other than this minor panic, the MRI was no problem. During the third scan, I felt my nose start to itch and as carefully as possible, without moving my head, I lifted my right hand to scratch. Around the fourth scan, the rhythmic clicking and soft rock lulled me to sleep. After 80 minutes in the tube, the radio turned off and Judge Reinhold’s look-a-like told me the MRI was over. Four technicians entered my room and pulled me out.

Judge said with a smile, “You looked relaxed.”

“No problem,” I told him. I was debriefed, given another $30 and three days later my Facebook profile was a picture of my tumour-free, typical brain!

The Intrepid Tales of a Blond China Doll: The finale in a two part profile of Hannelore Headley

As published on Retirement News Weekly/Niagara on July 2, 2010.

During last week’s interview with 74-year-old bookseller Hannelore Headley, I asked her if she could narrow down her love of books to a favourite novel or author. It took her a moment to mentally go through decades of reading before she finally concluded, “I enjoy reading the stories of intrepid women whose sense of curiosity and adventure drove them to want to travel to places that were not open to women.” This week I have returned to Hannah’s bookshop on Queen St. to discuss with her how she ended up in St. Catharines. Living as a refugee in Shanghai, travelling to Canada, and living across the country makes Hannah one of the women she so enjoys reading about, at least in my books.

Hannah begins her story with a date; her birthday. She was born a leap-year baby on February 29, 1936 to Heinz Egon and Paula Kato in Berlin, Germany. It was a tumultuous time for this Jewish family at the brink of World War II. At the age of three, Hannah became a refugee as she and her family fled the country to Shanghai, China.

Always a book seller, her father opened a bookstore in Shanghai during the war. While Hannah doesn’t remember this store, after the war he opened a second on the bottom floor of their two-story home. Hannah spent hours in this store reading everything she could get her hands on, including a book that her father considered unsuitable. She laughs as she tells me that when she was 13, “I picked up a book called Forever Amber, which was a really steamy, steamy book back then. My father took the book out of my hands very gently and said, ‘My darling, this isn’t the book for you.’”

When the communists took over China, her father once again had to close his store and the family realized that they could economically no longer stay in the country. They applied for an exit visa to Canada, where Paula had relatives, and after two years their papers came through; however the problems in Hannah’s story never have simple resolutions.

Two days before leaving, their exit visa was revoked and two days later her father was arrested as a suspected German spy. Her father remained in police custody for fourteen months. The Chinese police eventually realized that he couldn’t be a spy, but punished him with deportation, which worked for the family. They boarded a boat in Shangai heading to Hong Kong. When they hit international waters, the captain entered the cabin where her father was still being detained. Hannah tears up even today as she speaks the captain’s words, “Mr. Heinemann, you’re now a free man.”

The journey to their final destination was long, but filled with exhilarating moments. She recalls her father being reunited with his Aryan step-mother who was his only living relative remaining in Germany. She excitedly describes to me how she saw Pope Pius XII in Vatican City on a cloudy Easter morning and how when he blessed the crowd, the sun shown down for a brief and miraculous moment. She fondly remembers her father searching through a book store behind the Spanish Steps in Rome and finding a first edition of Jacques Cartier’s Voyages in Canada, which they later sold and the family lived off the profits for three months.

Hannah arrived in Canada on June 2, 1953 after travelling by boat for six days across the Atlantic. Her mind is sharp and she explains that it was 1:30 in the afternoon when the ship’s passengers were let out at Pier 21 in Halifax and immediately herded into cages in a concrete shed. The family was processed after ten hours and boarded a sealed train heading west. For three days they travelled, being offered a few sandwiches a day. Her brother, Stephen Heinemann, then six, was the only one who could get comfortable. When the train stopped, Hannah’s mother told them they were getting off. She didn’t know where they were, but after three days without sleep and seeing nothing but Canadian bush passing by her window, Paula had enough.

The family found a small apartment and Heinz managed to talk a local bookstore owner, Mr. Lovely, into letting him run Mansfield Book Mart after only a month of working in the small basement shop that Hannah describes as being as “large as my front room.” It was at this store that Hannah got her first real taste of selling books. “My father didn’t volunteer much information,” she recalls, “but if you were curious and you asked him, he would very carefully and patiently instruct you and answer your inquiries. So I learned a lot. I picked up a good deal of knowledge there.”

Montreal was a literary and cultural centre at the time and Hannah met poets and authors including Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Alfred Purdy. It was Mr. Purdy’s roommate Douglas Kaye that Hannah met and married. The two moved to Vancouver in September 1957 and she immediately started looking for an adequate location to open her own bookstore. She found a narrow, but long, shop and Douglas built a wall dividing the space into a store and primitive home where they lived a “bohemian” lifestyle without a kitchen for two years. Running H. Kaye’s Books made Hannah the youngest independent bookseller in the country at the time.

It was in Vancouver that Hannah had her two children; Paula, named after her mother, and Michael. She and Douglas divorced in 1963. She then met Velmer Headley who was studying at the University of British Columbia, while she worked in the library. The two soon wed and, as destiny would have it, moved to St. Catharine’s, Ontario. Their story in this city is where my first interview with Hannah began.

It takes a moment to absorb Hannah’s life’s narrative. I’ve asked few questions as she’s delved into her past offering anecdotes and tidbits about her fascinating life. Even after hashing out her entire story, Hannah doesn’t make the direct connection that her life parallels the stories of the heroines she enjoys reading about. But I can say without doubt, that Hannah is the most curious and intrepid adventurer that I’ve met.