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In the beginning, my brain seemed my friend. It got me into Ethical Culture, a selective private school in Manhattan, then Ethical Culture's high school, Fieldston. As a kid, I did well. Teachers praised me for inquisitiveness, seriousness, smarts.
The first numerically scored test I took was in seventh-grade history. I got a 98 out of a possible 100. My father, the kibbitzer, asked, "Who got the other two points?"
After graduating from Fieldston, I went to college at Harvard, as my father had done (he got his law degree there). I was amused when he teased me for having a "Harvard smart-ass attitude."
On August 10, 1999 I had a brain scan in the MRI Unit at the Oregon Health Sciences University Hospital, in Portland. "Have you ever had an MRI [Magnetic Resonance Imaging] scan before?" the male receptionist asked me. "Oh, yes," I said. "Many." There had been five or six during the last ten years. They had all been in New Haven or New York, where I had lived. All had been MRI scans of the brain, and all because I have multiple sclerosis; the first scan had been part of how I got diagnosed with MS in the first place.
Now the technician, or "technologist," as these professionals are called, told me she was ready; she wanted to know what the purpose of this particular MRI series was. "I mean, your doctor prescribed it, right?" she asked. I nodded. "So what's the reason?"
"It's primarily to check these pictures against the last scan that was done, nearly two years ago," I told her.
"Ah-to follow up? See how the medication's working?"
"Pretty much," I said, though that was not the whole story.
"All right," she said. Then she asked me to fill out a questionnaire that listed all the metal objects that could interfere with the machine. She said it was clear that I did not have a pacemaker, for example. "Please review the list and check off anything metal you may have in your body. And you'll have to take those hairpins out of your hair."
When I removed the hairpins, she smiled and asked me to follow her. We walked through the heavy door to the room where the...