The things we do for medicine

Subject: The things we do for medicine 

The things we do for medical attention. Lie still don't move, the platform we are laying on slides us into the machine and we hear, deep in the bowels the mechanisms stirring to probe our most inner secrets.

Just one of those gadgets the medicos use to interrogate our inner workings the Radiography  scanning machine sits pristine in its surgically clean environment, like a Buddha waiting for alms, hushed in an almost cathedral like environment, it waits for the next patient.  We are encouraged to lay stretched out in our flimsy hospital gowns which for some reason must be worn, back to front with the ties behind at the back. I wonder if some frustrated patient haven't gone home with them still on under their clothes in desperation, unable to undo the strings.
It's that final ignominy  when we lose all semblance of privacy or human pride and we become a thing to be stared at and probed by a machine which as it grunts and groans, getting to the grist of who we are, just flesh and bone, much like each other, no discrimination here. What a sorry picture, reduced to a layout diagram, this tube leading there that one somewhere else. That other self, the emotions, hopes and fears replaced only by a physical imprint, like the shadow of a vaporised human after Hiroshima.
'Are you ok sir', comes the disembodied voice close to our head. Yes you mumble, not daring to move a muscle even though the tickle on your nose is crying to be scratched.
Rumble grumble bang and buzz the machine goes through its schedule of checks measuring your deviance from the norm, plotting the shape of things to come.
In what seems an age the voice congratulates you, like the cabin steward at the end of a flight, well done you can come out now. Sliding from the scanning tunnel into the fluorescent light you begin to regain your sense of identity as you hastily shuffle back into your clothes, they the one and only  reminder of another life away from medical care.