You may recall last year an off-the-wall post scratched out at Dunkin Donuts that a wrote on the way to an MRI lab. I had been suffering from depression and headaches, sometimes so serious that I couldn’t think straight.

Rarely, in these cases, the symptoms indicate a brain tumor or some other neurological problem. So at the expense of my health-insurance company—and possibly also to protect himself from a malpractice claim—he ordered an MRI scan on my head. I implied that I promised to post pictures, which I never did… not that they’re that interesting. They found nothing there. Uh, nothing that wasn’t supposed to be there. (As you can see from the photo above, my perfectly healthy brain.)

I still say the depression had a pretty obvious cause. And the headaches, I’m convinced were caused by stress, poor sleep, and caffeine abuse. (UPDATE: And bad diet, lack of exercise, and dehydration. Duh.)

My friend wasn’t so lucky.

I’m sitting here in Dunkin’ Donuts, Wednesday morning, with nothing that I feel like writing about, eating a delicious breakfast sandwich that will probably set my cholesterol and blood pressure back six months, mentally preparing for my MRI, which will take place in about a half an hour. “Mentally preparing,” that’s the medical term for “working up anxiety that they actually might find something wrong with me, or that something might go wrong, like I’ll accidentally bring a steel nail file into the MRI room and the superconducting magnet will stab me to death with it, which I’m sure you agree would be not very pleasant.”

Why am I getting an MRI? The same reason I got a new BP prescription. (By “BP,” I mean “blood pressure,” and even though it does have to do with oil, not that kind of oil.) I’m getting an MRI, because over the past several months, I’ve been suffering from headaches, debilitating at times— migraines, we think, probably.

My father also suffered from migraines when he was about my age, and my brother and I were about the same age as my kids are now. Interestingly, as soon as we grew up and moved out of the house, my father’s migraines disappeared. So my headaches may be partially hereditary. The answer, in any case, seems clear: all I have to is wait until the kids grow up and move out, and then I can have nice things again.