A Hunch (1/2)

A Hunch

(The First Part)

Toko has been annoyed with migraines for almost a year, every single day. They started right after she graduated the collage and started working for the bank in Tokyo. She doesn’t like it and she is never interested in her job at all. The pay is great, and maybe that’s why she took this job. Days are nothing but torture. Working for a bank is too boring. After 5 p.m., she meets friends, sip a glass of wine, and goes home. Toko has a fiancé she’s supposed to marry in three months. It’s the marriage her parents set for her. She is not happy about this at all, but she is also not desperate to oppose it. She grew up this way. Everything about her life seems lukewarm. Now she finds herself turning thirty, and she questions what she has accomplished: nothing but saving plenty of money—saving for nothing planned ahead, only getting married and have a baby or two.

Toko takes aspirins daily with breakfast. A very exemplary patient. Medications did work for her a while. She was just annoyed, but when she started vomiting occasionally in the morning, she was worried. One night, she could not resist it anymore and searched headache, early morning, vomit on Google. The results were not fun to read at all. On the screen along bold letters “headache” in each result, she saw the words “brain tumor.” This terrified her. She imagined a black, gruesome clod of tissue tingling in her head. She became suspicious about everything she encountered. When she lost her appetite, she felt the tumor clinging to her satiety center. When she dropped her pen at the office, she felt it tingling on the back of her head.

It could be anywhere and the place didn’t matter at all, actually. The point was, she has the possibility of having (and moreover, developing!) a tumor in her brain, and the possibility itself is close enough that the tumor might be well as real. It’s just like the rock dams a stream and suppresses the babble. She has become silent.

Going to see a doctor took courage though she knew she would need him sooner or later. As she explained her symptoms to the doctor, she felt as if she were mocking the patients’ story she’s taken from Google. The doctor was a middle aged man, the sort of a guy you can imagine in a white coat—glasses, the meaningful face, mustache, and the expensive pen in the pocket with a BiC pen side by side. He suggested that she have the MRI test soon. “It’ll be over in fifteen minutes or so. And you won’t be irradiated.” He smiled at her with a great confidence, though it did not make her feel better or relaxed. “Does it hurt?” Toko asked him innocently. The doctor’s response was simple but quite irritating; “Of course not!” Toko had no idea why he said of course. The doctor added, “Oh, are you afraid of the closed place? Is that your problem? If so, we can give you a sleeping pill so you can sleep while you are under the test.”

Toko said no. She was almost going to say yes, but she could not imagine sleeping with her head in the MRI machine. What if there was an earthquake while she was there sleeping and the door frame skewed and no one could open the door for her?

Toko was told to come back next day. She received the brochure about the MRI test. Back to her apartment, she made a cup of black tea and started reading it carefully. She made herself nervous this way. Sipping black tea, she learned she shouldn’t wear eye shadow on the following day, because it would be burnt lightly under the strong magnetism. This somehow made her think of David Bowie’s forehead in 1970’s. Would she be cool if she painted her forehead with glittering powder like him? and let her forehead burnt? What a spacey thought.

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--to be continued--

Ayako M. All Rights Reserved