Medical
Jonco medical update
Inquiring minds have inquired as to how I’m feeling. Much better! On Friday I had my sixth and final physical therapy session. I’m allowed 20 per year on my insurance, and I’ve progressed about as much as can be expected, so it’s pointless to continue going.
But I’m much better. I went from being miserable for 6 or 8 weeks to just mildly agitated. Definitely tolerable. I haven’t had any pain medication in over a week now. It still bothers me a little, but nothing like it was a couple of weeks ago. I go back to the specialist May 11th.
When I first started experiencing these pains I researched it and read that many times it will go away on it’s own in about a month. My pain subsided, but it took almost 2 months. I’m not sure if the PT really helped or not, but I learned some good posture habits. Now, will I use what I’ve learned? – that’s the question. I just hope I don’t regress into the pain again.
I would like to thank all those who offered advice and well wishes. I do appreciate that very much.
Dog eats Homer Simpson
Doh! When Homer said, “Eat me”, he didn’t mean literally. But a dog named Dixie, wolfed down a Homer Simpson toy. Dixie had to have life saving surgery to remove the plastic figurine.
Dixie, a Dalmation cross, was taken to the vets after becoming ill – and an X-ray showed the little plastic figure.
Her owner Victoria Keir, from Aberdeen, Scotland, said the dog had scoffed down a chocolate egg which had the Simpson toy inside a plastic capsule.
Vets from the charity PDSA said that without having surgery Dixie wouldn’t have survived.
The Worm Within
The illustrated story of a man who found another creature living within his body.
Why are MRI’s so noisy?
I spent 23 minutes inside an MRI machine today.
“Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr — WHAMMMM!! Ka-CHUNG Ka-CHUNG Ka-CHUNG Ka-CHUNG Ka-CHUNG Ka-CHUNG Ka-CHUNG Ka-CHUNG….” at a decibel level that you will be quite sure is equal to the noise of an old Concorde — or possibly a new space-shuttle — taking off from your backyard.
That’s how WikiAnswers.com describes the noise from an MRI machine.
OK, what makes them so darn noisy?
To understand this in reasonable detail, it’s probably best to start off with a bit about how MRI, or magnetic resonance imaging typically works.
Each hydrogen atom in your body is composed of a proton with an electron orbiting it. The proton itself is like a little magnet, with a North and South pole, and in this way resembles the earth, which also has North and South magnetic poles. You can think of a little arrow along the north-south direction as being associated with each such proton. On average, these all point in random directions.
Turning on a big external magnet, makes the arrows line up, as each proton turns so that its South pole tends to point to the North pole of the big magnet and vice versa. (Recall that opposite poles attract and like poles repel.)
Now there will be a certain energy needed to flip these little magnets around, and that energy is determined by the strength of the external magnet. If you apply suitable radio waves of the right (so-called resonant) frequency, you can supply that energy to make the flip. The proton will eventually flip back and release a radio wave and this lets you determine where it is.
So far this just tells you that you can find out that there’s hydrogen in your body. If you suitably change the strength of the magnet over the body and over time, you can change where the hydrogen atoms are “resonant” or not, and basically measure how much hydrogen is present at any given location. As you change the strength of the magnet, you change where you’re looking and a computer can reconstruct a map of where hydrogen (typically in water) is in your body. Different tissues respond slightly differently, which means you can take interesting pictures, even of things that are all basically transparent to X-rays.
The fact that the strength of the magnet has to be changed over time and position means that all sorts of things move at least a bit in response to it, and that motion makes sound – that clanging noise.
