New writing: Medical imaging, how does it work.

read the piece that has five comments on nytimes dot com, all of which are actually kind of nice

Tomáš Vendiš via Wikimedia Commons

For the New York Times Magazine’s Screenland column, I wrote about how weird CT scans are. They’re very weird! They do not look like pictures of a human body!

From my CT scan, I expected a brush with mortality — the opportunity to see the forbidden land of my own guts, to contemplate their eventual decomposition. By that point I had already had an organ removed (my gallbladder), and I suppose I expected to register its absence somehow. What I saw instead was just shades of gray and blobs of darkness. Nothing was recognizable as an organ. At one point, I remember, the doctor directed me to pay attention to something that, in his own words, did not look like anything at all. That, he wanted me to know, was my pancreas. He was right: It did not look like anything at all.

In the piece I quote the passage where Hans Castorp sees his hand under the fluoroscope in The Magic Mountain and sees “his own grave,” which has stuck with me for well over a decade at th…