SIMON RAYMONDE
In 2003, while producing the Duke Spirit’s debut mini-album Roll, Spirit, Roll, I noticed my ear was getting blocked, as if I was coming down with a cold. A week or two later, it was still bothering me, but I didn’t feel at all ill. I went to the doctors to get my ears syringed, hoping that might do the trick. Nothing doing. the doctor sent me for a hearing test. I began to wonder… 20 years of loud monitors on stage, listening to music on Walkmans and iPods – was this having an ethect? I failed the test miserably in the problem ear, my right. Within a few minutes, I was sent for an MRI scan that day, and gured pretty soon that something was up. “What do you think it is?” I asked the audiologist. “Wouldn’t like to speculate, but always best to get these things checked thoroughly,” he replied. “An MRI scan will quickly tell us if there’s anything to be concerned about, but hopefully, it’ll all be fine.”
Later that athernoon, I lay inside a capsule that looked like something NASA had made, with this strange catcher’s mask over my head as they fed me slowly into the tunnel. they injected me with a contrast dye to make the arteries in my brain appear more clearly on the scan and told me not to move my head at all until it was all over. I was given these horrid ugly green plastic headphones and handed a ‘panic button’, which I was told I could press any time if I started to feel anxious or claustrophobic. Funnily enough, the minute they gave me the panic button, I started to feel anxious and claustrophobic, and as soon as the radiologist spoke into the headphones: “Okay, first scan is about to start, don’t move your head, this one will last about nine minutes,” my nose felt so tickly I wasn’t sure how I could last 540 seconds without touching it.
The experience of being inside an MRI scanner is akin to putting your head inside a tiny washing machine filled with large metal balls crashing chaotically around inside the tumbler. Or listening to Test Dept. Eventually, the ordeal was over. Or so I thought.