The letter has been on the table since Tuesday, and you have read it four times, and it says the same thing every time.
Nothing to eat after nine. Water until midnight. Arrive fifteen minutes early and bring the letter with you.
It is ten past nine now. The kitchen is exactly as it always is, and every part of it has just been taken away from you.
The bread in its bin. The butter left out from lunch. The kettle cooling on its base, which is the ordinary end of every ordinary evening in this house, and tonight is not allowed.
Minutes and Hours
The scan will take somewhere between six minutes and half an hour. You will be told which when you get there.
You will lie down on a padded table. A machine will do a thing that does not hurt. Someone in a doorway will say you can get dressed now.
That is the whole event. It is one of the shortest appointments in medicine and one of the least dramatic.
And standing in front of it is a night of fourteen hours with nothing in them, no instructions for any of it, and a kitchen you are not allowed to use.
That imbalance is the real problem. Not the scan. The long unmarked evening in front of the short unremarkable morning.
What This Working Does, and What It Does Not
This is symbolic practice, and it deserves to be described plainly before anything else on this page.
It does not treat illness. It is not a substitute for medical care, and it is not a second opinion on anything.
It does nothing to the images, nothing to the machine, and nothing to what the report will eventually say.
Whatever is in your body tonight will be in your body tomorrow. The scan is only the thing that looks, and no rite ever written has changed what a lens finds.
What this does is smaller and completely real. It gives the evening a shape that is not waiting.
It puts you in your own kitchen at an hour you chose, doing a short sequence of deliberate things with your hands, instead of lying on the sofa reading the same three paragraphs about the same procedure.
An evening spent preparing rather than an evening spent anticipating. That is the entire offer, and on the nights it works it is worth a great deal.
What to Have Ready
- The letter, or the appointment message written out on paper.
- A bag you can carry in one hand.
- The clothes you mean to wear, and a chair to lay them on.
- One candle in a holder that will not tip, white or pale blue. A lamp turned low does the same work.
- A pen, and a piece of paper small enough to fold twice.
- A glass of water, if water is still allowed at the hour you do this.
- A stone or small object you keep for steadiness, if you keep such things.
Nothing here is a remedy. Nothing is brewed, swallowed or rubbed into skin, and the only thing that goes into you tonight is what your instructions permit.
The Working: The Evening Before
Do this at the hour the fasting begins, or as near to it as your household allows. The point is that the hour is marked rather than simply passed.
- Light the candle. Say the date of the appointment aloud, and the time, and nothing else.
- Read the letter out loud, once, all the way through, including the boring parts about parking.
- Pack the bag, slowly, one item at a time, naming each thing as it goes in.
- Lay the clothes on the chair in the order you will put them on.
- Write your route on the folded paper, with the time you will leave the house.
- Write one word on the other side of that paper, and read it twice.
- Lie down where you are and practice the held breath three times.
- Stand, drink the water if you are allowed it, say the closing line, and put the candle out.
Eight steps, perhaps twenty minutes. The rest of the sections on this page are only these eight steps, explained.
The Bag, Packed Slowly
Most people throw a bag together in ninety seconds on the way out of the door. Tonight you do it at half the speed, on purpose.
The letter. Your identification. The list of any medicines you take, written out, because you will be asked and you will not remember.
A book, which you will not read. A phone charger. A bottle of water for afterward, and something to eat for afterward, chosen now while you are calm.
Naming each item as it goes in is the oldest trick there is for making a nervous mind do one thing at a time.
Then zip the bag and put it by the door, where you will fall over it in the morning. That is the intended effect.
The Clothes on the Chair
Choose loose things. Soft waistband, no belt, a top that comes off over your head without a struggle.
You may be asked to change into a gown, or you may not. Either way you will be undressing and dressing in a small room with a curtain and a clock ticking somewhere.
Lay them out in order, socks on top, because cold floors are a small misery you can prevent from here.
This is the least mystical instruction on the page and one of the most reliable. Nobody has ever felt more in command of a morning while hunting for a clean shirt.
What Metal Is Not Allowed
Depending on the scan, metal may be a genuine problem, and the staff will be strict about it in a way that can feel abrupt.
Rings. Watch. Earrings and any other piercing. Hairpins. An underwired bra. A zip, sometimes. Glasses and hearing aids, at the last moment.
Take them off tonight, at the table, and put them in a dish that stays at home. Anything you leave behind is one less thing to hand over to a stranger while you are already unsettled.
If you have anything metal inside you — a pacemaker, a plate, a clip, an implant, fragments from old work — tell them. They will have asked already on a form. Tell them again in person anyway.
Nobody has ever been thought foolish for saying it twice.
The Room You Will Be Put Into
It is worth knowing the shape of the thing rather than meeting it cold at eight in the morning.
The table is narrow and firm. It slides. Depending on the scan, some part of you goes inside a ring or a tube, and for some people that is nothing at all and for others it is the whole difficulty.
If it is your difficulty, say so when you arrive. Not as an apology — as information they need.
You can ask how long. You can ask for a cloth over your eyes. You can ask whether you may keep your eyes shut the entire time, and the answer is almost always yes.
You will be given a button or a bulb to hold. It stops everything. It exists because people need it, and using it is not failure.
The Noise
Some scanners are nearly silent. Some are astonishingly loud — a knocking, a buzzing, a sound like someone hammering on a radiator two rooms away.
It is not a sign of anything going wrong. It is the machine working, and it comes in bursts with quiet between them.
You will be offered earplugs or headphones. Take them, and ask whether they can play something, because in many places they can.
Dread shrinks noticeably when the thing it is aimed at has been described out loud the night before.
One Word to Take Inside
You cannot take the bag in. You cannot take your phone, or your keys, or the stone from the windowsill.
You can take one word, and it costs nothing, and no one can confiscate it.
Choose it now, while you are calm, because a word chosen at seven in the morning in a corridor is never as good.
Keep it plain and concrete. Still. Six minutes. The kettle is waiting. The name of a river you know, or of somebody who is in the waiting room, or of a dog.
Write it on the folded paper. Read it twice. Then put the paper in your coat pocket, where it will stay in the locker while you are inside, which is exactly where a held thing usually ends up.
If you would rather carry an object than a word, a stone kept for comfort does the same job with the same honest limits, and it waits in the locker just as happily.
The Breath You Will Be Asked to Hold
For many scans a voice will come through a speaker and say: breathe in, and hold. Then, some seconds later, and breathe.
People find this the strangest part, because it is the only part where you are asked to do something and you have never rehearsed it.
So rehearse it tonight. Lie on the floor or the bed, flat on your back, arms at your sides.
Breathe in through your nose, not enormously, and hold. Count slowly to fifteen. Then let it go without gasping.
Do it three times, no more. If you feel lightheaded, stop — this is a rehearsal, not a test, and there is no score.
Lying flat and still on your own floor is also a small grounding practice in its own right, and the older grounding meditation is built on much the same idea.
If the Fasting Is the Worst of It
For a good number of people the hunger is the real hardship, and it arrives around eleven, and it is mostly boredom in a costume.
Follow your instructions exactly. Not approximately, not with one small exception at half past ten.
If you are genuinely unsure what you are allowed — medicines, water, a diabetic routine, anything at all — telephone the number on the letter. That number exists for precisely this, and the person answering it has heard the question a hundred times.
Then go to bed earlier than usual. An hour asleep is an hour of the fast spent unconscious, which is the only trick anybody has ever found for it.
The Closing Line, and Then Bed
Stand in the kitchen with the bag by the door and the clothes on the chair and the candle still lit.
Say something like this, or your own words, which are always better:
Everything I can do tonight is done. Tomorrow I lie still and the machine looks. The rest is not mine to carry.
Then put the candle out. Do not leave it burning as a vigil — the working ends when you end it, and an unfinished rite sits in a house all night like an unwashed pan.
The Morning: Early, and Sitting Down
Leave at the time written on the paper, not five minutes after it. The route was decided last night by someone calmer than you are now.
Arrive early enough to sit down. Ten minutes in a chair with your coat still on is worth more than any amount of preparation done at speed.
Waiting rooms are dull and that dullness is a kindness. Let it be dull. Read the poster about hand washing twice, and then a third time.
When they call your name, take the word with you.
Afterward: The Flatness of Having Only Lain Still
You will come out and feel almost nothing, and it will confuse you.
You spent a night building up to it and the thing itself asked nothing of you. No effort, no bravery, no moment. You lay on a table and a machine hummed.
That flatness catches people out. A body braced for an event and handed an errand does not put the bracing down neatly.
So eat the thing you packed. Drink the water. Sit somewhere for a quarter of an hour before you go anywhere or tell anybody anything.
Then let the day be ordinary. Run the errands, answer the messages, go to work if you must. Ordinary is the correct shape for that afternoon.
Then the Waiting, Which Is a Different Thing
The scan is over. The report is not, and the two are separate difficulties that deserve separate handling.
Tonight’s working was for a fixed thing at a known hour. What follows is open-ended, and open-ended waiting corrodes differently.
Give it a shape and a limit. Decide now when you will chase it, and by what means, and leave the rest of the week alone.
That is its own practice, and it is set out properly in the working for the stretch between the ask and the answer, which was written for other kinds of news but holds perfectly well for this one.
The Kettle, Finally Allowed
You come back into the kitchen and it is just a kitchen again.
The bread in its bin. The butter, which should have gone in the fridge and did not. The bag on the floor where you fell over it at seven.
Fill the kettle. Stand there while it comes up, the way you have stood there ten thousand times, and let the ordinary noise of it fill the room.
That is the end of the working. Not the answer, which is not yours yet, and not the result, which belongs to the machine and the people who read it.
Only this: a night that had a shape, a morning you were ready for, and a cup of tea in a kitchen where nothing is forbidden anymore.