Strange to read reputable professional medical periodicals and realize that the people who publish this stuff would consider my work to fall far outside their canon. It's funny, because there is a quite a lot of valuable pointers that I gather from their traditional processes that are very useful in the plying of my nefarious (ha ha) trade.
For instance, invasive surgical protocols have gone through huge leaps in the past thirty years. Former tried and true procedures considered de rigueur since the beginning of the 20th century now seem as archaic as blood letting to many of today's progressive practitioners. Now I know something about blood letting, for in the throes of various forms of need I have gone into traditional practice at times over the past two hundred years; so I really have a first hand perspective on the wide scope of advancement since then.
Mostly I went to observe and gather; for back in the 1800's you had to go to where the medicine was being practiced, it couldn't come to you over a wire. From our family's estate the most I could expect were treating accident victims or being called to preside over someone's final moment within the auspices of desperation. It didn't occur to most people to seek medical help until their condition had gone far past the point of being treatable with any reasonable hope of surcease of malady. It was one thing to read about procedures in mail delivered medical journals, but it was another matter to have your hands inside the torsol cavity of a living subject. It's even something else to have your hands in the torsol cavity of a conscious living subject, but that's a larger part of many other stories.
There are procedures done nowadays through small holes that previously had been accomplished with inch-measurable sutured openings. New instruments augmented by advances in computer science allow doctors the freedom to accomplish their goals using miniature cameras and tools modified to be operated at a short remote distance, guided by the image on a monitor sent from the mini-camera. To me, some of these methods don't look all that different from some of the video games I see the interns playing in their free time.
For instance, invasive surgical protocols have gone through huge leaps in the past thirty years. Former tried and true procedures considered de rigueur since the beginning of the 20th century now seem as archaic as blood letting to many of today's progressive practitioners. Now I know something about blood letting, for in the throes of various forms of need I have gone into traditional practice at times over the past two hundred years; so I really have a first hand perspective on the wide scope of advancement since then.
Mostly I went to observe and gather; for back in the 1800's you had to go to where the medicine was being practiced, it couldn't come to you over a wire. From our family's estate the most I could expect were treating accident victims or being called to preside over someone's final moment within the auspices of desperation. It didn't occur to most people to seek medical help until their condition had gone far past the point of being treatable with any reasonable hope of surcease of malady. It was one thing to read about procedures in mail delivered medical journals, but it was another matter to have your hands inside the torsol cavity of a living subject. It's even something else to have your hands in the torsol cavity of a conscious living subject, but that's a larger part of many other stories.
There are procedures done nowadays through small holes that previously had been accomplished with inch-measurable sutured openings. New instruments augmented by advances in computer science allow doctors the freedom to accomplish their goals using miniature cameras and tools modified to be operated at a short remote distance, guided by the image on a monitor sent from the mini-camera. To me, some of these methods don't look all that different from some of the video games I see the interns playing in their free time.
Especially useful are the really really small imaging devices using fiber optics and microscopic lenses. These seem a much more practical tool for getting a look inside than my laser resonance grid mapper. I developed this gizmo, the laser resonance grid mapper, which is kind of like an MRI (magnetic resonance imager) but uses two perpendicularly positioned low power wide swath laser beams for scanning.
The big trick with using this device is to put some kind of physical stopper on the power setting control. Igor's elegant solution was to just jam a wood chip in the slider to keep the dial from going above a certain megawattage. I guess I don't have to go into detail what happens when you don't double check things, but it was the kind of lesson that you don't want to read about in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kind of hard to put into print the eerie vibe one feels when hearing the hideous netherworldly shrieks of an index A4 chimera as it's head is being vaporized from the top down by an instrument that was intended by design to make a 3D map of skeletal and internal architecture. We thought the beast was only in another state of severe self induced panic from being tied down until Igor pointed out all the smoke. By the time the little light bulb in my head went off to check the power setting, the waveguide had moved the two intersecting beams to the point where 80% of the creature's head had been zapped away. It was sort of strange that it could continue to scream until I recalled the new redundant vocalizing sub-processor we grew behind the tonsils in this index A4 version. Of course, in the time it took me to recall this improvement, the lasers had already made short smoky work of it, as the sudden silence revealed. I was about to hit the emergency shutdown button when I suddenly discovered we had forgotten to put one on the control panel. As I reached to yank out the power cable, Igor stayed my hand and indicated we should just let the machine finish the scan. There's less to clean up; at this power level the lab's exhaust fans can take care of all of it except the bits of burnt rope and what remaining scorched pieces of the gurney there are. All we need to do is get the interns to haul that stuff away to throw in the old quarry.
The big trick with using this device is to put some kind of physical stopper on the power setting control. Igor's elegant solution was to just jam a wood chip in the slider to keep the dial from going above a certain megawattage. I guess I don't have to go into detail what happens when you don't double check things, but it was the kind of lesson that you don't want to read about in the New England Journal of Medicine. Kind of hard to put into print the eerie vibe one feels when hearing the hideous netherworldly shrieks of an index A4 chimera as it's head is being vaporized from the top down by an instrument that was intended by design to make a 3D map of skeletal and internal architecture. We thought the beast was only in another state of severe self induced panic from being tied down until Igor pointed out all the smoke. By the time the little light bulb in my head went off to check the power setting, the waveguide had moved the two intersecting beams to the point where 80% of the creature's head had been zapped away. It was sort of strange that it could continue to scream until I recalled the new redundant vocalizing sub-processor we grew behind the tonsils in this index A4 version. Of course, in the time it took me to recall this improvement, the lasers had already made short smoky work of it, as the sudden silence revealed. I was about to hit the emergency shutdown button when I suddenly discovered we had forgotten to put one on the control panel. As I reached to yank out the power cable, Igor stayed my hand and indicated we should just let the machine finish the scan. There's less to clean up; at this power level the lab's exhaust fans can take care of all of it except the bits of burnt rope and what remaining scorched pieces of the gurney there are. All we need to do is get the interns to haul that stuff away to throw in the old quarry.
We had tried using an MRI machine, but it shipped here with an unbelievably huge technical/operations manual that someone would probably have to read. Otherwise we could inadvertently risk several dangerous examples of magnetic attraction by discovering just how many loose metal objects there are in the lab when we fiddle with the controls.
That giant instruction manual reminded me of the value of inventing things yourself, you know how it is to be operated as you create it because you know what each assembly is intended to do. If some sly dog like Igor assists you in the construction, he can also learn it's operation if you describe out loud how the thing fits together and what it's ultimate function is to be.
So the MRI machine got ignored when we started building the laser grid scanner gizmo instead of reading the MRI operations manual. The MRI sat untouched for two seasons until we got an intern whose older brother was an MRI tech. Our intern had watched his brother operate it. I gave the intern carteblanche, but was a little surprised to find just three days later they had enlisted Igor's help and hauled the MRI machine out to the skeet range and were turning it into a kind of overly expensive skeet thrower. Except unlike a typical skeet thrower it had more technically in common with a very powerful rail gun. But it accomplishes the same thing, even though it has the ability to make airborne objects much larger than skeets, and at full power the capability to send them quite a bit farther due to the very impressive exit velocity potential.That giant instruction manual reminded me of the value of inventing things yourself, you know how it is to be operated as you create it because you know what each assembly is intended to do. If some sly dog like Igor assists you in the construction, he can also learn it's operation if you describe out loud how the thing fits together and what it's ultimate function is to be.
I know this for a fact, because about two weeks after the interns had been testing it using old metallic bone prostheses I got a secure diplomatic package via the UN on behalf of the international space consortium that operates the space station. Inside was a photograph, a terse letter and a bill. The photo had been taken inside the space station looking out through one of it's small observation port windows, one that faces the Earth. Firmly embedded in the glass was what looked like a metal ankle bone joint prosthesis. The bill was for 762 million dollars: hourly labor cost for three astronauts to replace the window, the cost of de- and re- pressurization airlock sealing the station module for window replacement; and the fabrication cost of the 'space glass' window, or whatever they make it out of. Plus the cost of an unscheduled Soyuz launch to take the new port glass up to the station. That 'pressurization airlock' cost of the damaged module seems a little pricey to me, probably NASA and the Russians conspired and snuck an extra hundred million on the bill, will split it between themselves.
Imagine what a snit everyone would be in if the interns had put a little more magnetic oomph on the metal ankle bone and ended up destroying the entire space station.
I wrote a check to the consortium.
