Claustrophobia

I don’t remember having claustrophobia. I never liked elevators though but it had more to do with motion sickness, rather elevation-change-sickness, that made me uncomfortable. I place it in same category of my air sickness symptoms. I am not comfortable moving up or down an elevation. However, I am not afraid of heights. I am not scared of roller coasters either. I think it’s simply the unknown force moving me up or down an elevation that makes me sick (not scared but sick).

Anyway, that isn’t point of the post, is it? I was talking about claustrophobia. So I never had any incident of claustrophobia in my life. However, few months back I had my MRI done. I spent around 30 min in the machine for that. And ever since then I get slightly anxious if I see anything enclosed in small space as someone being buried alive or such. I don’t like to think about me being in any situation like that anymore. As it turns out there have been a study that indicate that people actually become (okay 30% of them) claustrophobic after an MRI exams. You know they should have this as a warning for this exam.

Anyway, my recent discovery of this new fear make me wonder why aren’t we all born as a claustrophobic, after all a fetus has to spend 9 months of its life in an enclosed space? How can spending 30-40 min make me claustrophobic then? Was I braver when I was a fetus? Or maybe I was simply dumber to realize the fear. Either way I don’t fancy being a fetus or, for that matter, being Anarkali at the moment. The idea sends chills down my spine now..