The story so far: Having eventually managed to arrange an MRI for three days’ time, I discovered that, by mistake, the clerk had booked the wrong MRI – brain instead of prostate. Despite my best efforts, the institute’s bot refused to correct the error or connect me to a human being.

Spoiler alert. This story has not one, but two, happy endings, despite appearances on the way.

On Tuesday morning, the day before the scheduled MRI, I decided to try just once more to get past the bot, and phoned at a time that I thought it most likely there might be a human being around. ready to field more challenging enquiries. Having gone through the usual routine with the bot and hit the usual impasse, I asked it to connect me to a human agent. “Certainly,” was the reply. “Just a moment.”

Fortunately, the moment turned out to be long enough for me to recover from my total shock at having achieved the equivalent of reaching the next level of Minecraft (whatever that means). I don’t know if you have ever wondered how long it takes to play the enchanting opening movement of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. In case you have, I can tell you that it runs – at least in the passable version used as background waiting music by the institute – to about 5 minutes and 18 seconds. This means that, in 18 minutes, you can listen to it all the way through a bit less than three and a half times. I know this because it was after exactly 18 minutes of waiting that my phone call was cut off.

However, having got so tantalisingly close to speaking to an actual human being, and given that the version of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik chosen was more than bearable, if suffering a little from irregular tempi, I was certainly not going to give up now. I immediately called again, raced through the same script with the bot, was put on hold with Mozart again, and, a mere one and a quarter renditions of the first movement later, a woman’s voice interrupted, asking how she could help.

Pausing only to assure her that she could have no idea the extent to which the sound of her voice had brightened my day, I explained my dilemma. Completely unphased by my account (I wonder how regular an occurrence this is), she explained that she would just have to check the system online, and asked me to hold. The music this time was considerably lighter, and, I felt, interminable, although in fact it was less than two minutes that I was left clutching my phone, barely time for my knuckles to turn white, before my guardian angel was back on the line, telling me that the correction had already been made online, and I was indeed registered for a prostate MRI.

I can only assume that my email had been read and acted on, and that the person who acted on it had thought how much more fun it would be not to email me a reply updating me, but rather to leave me stewing.

I thanked the clerk profusely, and asked her to send me the correct protocol for how I needed to prepare for the MRI. This she did immediately, and, the following afternoon, I arrived at the institute with all my papers and my innards in order. The receptionist studied my papers, called up my details on her computer, and said:
“Why are you here?”
“For a prostate MRI.”
“But you’ve just done a prostate MRI, at our other building.”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Yes, you have.”.
“No, I haven’t. If you look at the date, you will see that it was last year, not this year.”
“Oh, yes.”

By this stage, I was starting to miss the bot.

However, the best was yet to come.
“This is an authorisation for a prostate MRI.”
“Yes.”
“We don’t do prostate MRIs here. I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake.”
“If a mistake has been made, then it isn’t me who’s made it. Your office contacted me and booked me in here today for a prostate MRI.”
“Wait over there. I’ll go and see whether they can carry out a prostate MRI exceptionally.”

So I waited over there, while the clerk went out, came back a few minutes later, checked some things on her computer, then started making phone calls to schedule future appointments.

About twenty minutes later, by which time it was only 15 minutes before my scheduled MRI time, I went up to the desk again and asked the clerk whether she had an answer for me. She looked at me as if she was having difficulty remembering exactly which stone I had crawled out from under.

“You’re having a prostate MRI, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” (This somehow didn’t feel like the right time for a more smart-aleck response.)
“Why are you waiting here? Go and wair in the waiting area through that door.”

I offer it as further evidence of my maturity that I silently turned and went and waited.

The MRI, once I was eventually called, went smoothly. The noise seemed marginally less strident and stressful than usual, the lighting slightly more subtle, and background piano music was provided that was just far enough on the saccharine-free side of Richard Clayderman to be soothing rather than aggravating.

There was, however, time for one more hiccough, for which I will take some responsibility. I had been required to put all of my metallic miscellania – ring, watch, piercings – in a locker, with a very hi-tech locking mechanism, for which I was given a smart card. After my 45 minutes inside the MRI tube, I walked into the labyrinth of inner rooms, found the locker room and attempted to open my locker. I remembered that mine was the middle locker, and was reassured to note that the coloured dot on the locker matched the green dot on my smart card. However, the locker door failed to respond. I eventually found a doctor, who tried and failed to open the locker. I could see that the lockers had an override socket, and asked the doctor whether he had a key for the socket. He explained that the technician with the key had just gone off-duty. He managed to call him back and the locker was opened, to reveal…somebody else’s metal items.

At this point, the doctor who had admitted me and issued me with a locker came in and pointed out that my locker room was on the other side of the corridor. When I eventually stood in front of my own locker, I was interested, but not, to be honest, surprised, to note that my green-dot card actually opened the blue-dot locker.

By the time all this was sorted out, my MRI disk had already been burnt, and so I was free to go, having been informed that I should receive the analysis of the MRI in a week: happy ending number 1.

In the event, the analysis arrived the following day. I sent it to my urologist, and Bernice and I then delivered the disk by hand to his secretary in Shaarei Zedek hospital. This was on Thursday afternoon, and he was in surgery at the time. On Monday morning, he phoned me to say that he and his colleagues had reviewed the analysis and the disk, and could see no suspicious developments since my last MRI, and nothing to warrant taking any further action. My prostate is still, for the moment, just one of the nooks and crannies of my body that some specialist or other is checking in on every so often: happy ending number 2.

Since I took this call while we were driving up to Zichron, we were in an excellent state to enjoy a wonderful afternoon with the family there.

May we all continue to hear only good news, and I promise not to give you another organ recital next week.

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