Pneumonochrome

I think I’m going to try to start a weekly post where I briefly discuss some medical treatment that I think is neat, interesting, cool, amazing, or otherwise worth mentioning. This week, I’m going to talk about ECMO, or ExtraCorporeal Membrane Oxygenation. You’re welcome to click on through to Wikipedia to read about it there, or you can just read my short summary below.

ECMO is used in some cases where a person’s lungs aren’t working well enough for them to get enough Oxygen. It works as follows:

1. Blood is removed from a large vein in the patient’s body.
2. That blood crosses a special membrane that causes carbon dioxide to be released and oxygen to be absorbed.
3. The blood is returned to the patient’s body either through a large artery or a large vein.

This way, the patient gets the oxygen he needs, even though his lungs aren’t working well. It’s already used with newborn babies when their lungs aren’t working well, whether because of infection, underdevelopment, or trauma. You can check out the Wikipedia article if you’re curious about when the blood is returned via an artery and when it is returned via a vein.

One of the things I think is cool about it, though, is that it’s under investigation for the management of Hanta Virus Respiratory Syndrome. When a person in the US gets the Hanta Virus* it almost always causes lung problems. The person’s lungs fill up with junk, leaving no room for air to go in and out (this is a really simplified way of talking about ARDS) The standard treatment is mechanical ventilation, but that can cause injury to the lungs and isn’t as effective as it could be because the lungs are full of stuff, rather than just not moving like they should.

That’s why I think it’s so cool that they’re looking into ECMO for treatment of it. There’s no guarantee it’ll be the best approach, or any better than the current approach, but it’s a cool way of approaching the problem, I think.

*I said, “When a person in the US gets the Hanta Virus” because the strains that are more common in Europe and Asia cause a very different set of symptoms.

When people find out I’m in medical school, they almost always ask me, “What kind of doctor do you want to be?” I don’t mind being asked this question at all, as long as people don’t mind my rather bland answer: “I don’t know. Maybe Internal Medicine?”

That being said, Internal Medicine seems anything but bland, to me.  It also is one of the broadest “specialties” in all of medicine.  Internists may sub-specialize into Gastroenterology, Infection Disease, Cardiology, Geriatrics, Adolescent Medicine, Allergy and Immunology, Rheumatology, Endocrinology, Hematology, Nephrology, Oncology, Pulmonology or Sports Medicine.

Today, our Pathology lecture was done by the state’s Chief Medical Examiner, and he talked about forensic medicine.  It was really funny to me that I found it so interesting, because it shares something with other specialties that I don’t fine interesting at all:  The Medical Examiner, like the Diagnostic Radiologist or the Anesthesiologist, isn’t providing interventions aimed at improving a person’s health.  The latter two assist other doctors in doing so, but the former only deals with dead patients.

It amused me to revisit this aspect of medicine (I’d been introduced to it while in my EMT training) and remember that it actually seems kind of interesting to me.  Based on the direction my attitudes toward medicine have been taking recently, I wouldn’t have expected that to be the case.

I think the thing it shares with the medicine that does interest me is problem solving.  Both while treating patients and while attempting to tell the story of how they died a physician has to take the information he can glean from a study of the patient and piece that information together to tell a coherent, plausible, and logical story.  I enjoy trying to do that, and I guess that’s really what makes Medical Examining and other fields of medicine so fascinating:  they would constantly engage me.

10. Perhaps the most obvious reason an editor is essnetial to the writing process is spelling. Correct spelling can make or brake your message. Few things are more distracting to large portions of the literate populous than abundant spelling errors.

9. An editor can help ensure that your sentences are consistent. It can be very confusing when your own on-the-go editing produces a sentence that seems to have been stapled together like the Frankenstein monster can cause your readers to reread portions of your sentences in complete befuddlemetn.

8. Editors help to make sure you stay focused in your writing. Focus is important, especially in topical writing. Topical writing is any writing that is done to discuss one specific topic and communicate information about it to many people. Much of the writing on teh internet could be considered attempts at topical writing. Some of my favorite blogs are topical blogs, whether they are about the daily experiences of people working under appreciated jobs or the latest political trends, each post on the blog generally should have a specific topic. I read one the other day about Hillary Clinton’s health care plan that was a prime example of good focus in writing. The post wasn’t long, really, but was packed with good information about and analysis of Senator Clinton’s proposed changes to the health care system in the United States. It was clear from the author’s writing that he didn’t care for Senator Clinton at all, but his treatment of her health care plan was very even. He resisted the urge to discuss other aspects of her platform in that post, which would have diminished the focus of the article and obfuscated the points he intended to make, and it made all the difference in the world to the readability of hte post.

7. Editors can help you to avoid one of the unpardonable sins of writing: excessive use of cliché. Everyone under the sun, these days, seems to plug cliché into their writing like it’s going out of style.

5. Editors, while good at helping you correct errors in your writing, can also identify areas where your writing is incomplete, helping you to be a more thorough and reputable writer.

4. Editros can also help to make sure you write using a grammar that is appropriate for your audience and purpose. Just as a technical manual should avoid words like “duh” and “fussbudget”, writing for young children should not be comprised of words like “esoteric”, “skullduggery”, or “actionable”.

3. What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before. For the rest of us, editors help to ensure we aren’t plagiarizing anyone else.

2. Editors can help spot punctuation errors that can be every bit as disracting as spelling errors can; and can help you find better sentence constructions in general.

1. Editors provide a much-needed second point-of-view. It will never make as much sense to anyone else as it does to you, and editors can help make sure you haven’t left out necessary antecedents.

Walking to catch the campus shuttle home  today, I passed a sign that said, in part,  “No Tipping.” Someone had stuck a small  magnetic-poetry-style word between the two  words printed there, The word was “cow.”  It made me chuckle to see “No cow tipping”  written up on the wall as I exited The  hospital. Cow tipping is particularly funny  to me because I spent a few years working  on a farm when I was younger.  I regularly woke up over 300 cows at 2:00 in the morning, but one thing I never did was tip one over.  You know why? Cows don’t sleep standing up.  Surprise!

Now, I’m not foolish enough to think that everyone who’s ever mentioned cow tipping really believes it can be done.  In fact, I’m sure that most people who have ever brought the subject up at least suspect that it sits right up there with jumping just before your run-away elevator hits the ground to prevent being hurt.  However: every once in a while someone will, in my presence, claim to have actually tipped cows.  Usually I’m in a pretty good mood, and I’ll just grin and call BS quietly in my head.  Every once-in-a-while, though, I just can’t resist the urge to tell people exactly how I know they’re full of crap.  Whether I say something or not, I get to laugh just a little to myself every time I catch someone making up a lie like that, especially because it’s such an absurd thing to lie about.

What are some of the myths you see perpetuated that you know, from your own personal experience, are myths?  I should mention that I consider this blog to be my space, and anyone whose comment makes it up here is seen here as a guest in my space.  I say that because I have no inhibitions at all regarding the editing and deleting of comments.  If you comment in response to the question I just asked, please keep in mind that one of the fastest ways to guarantee I’ll moderate your comment is to make a comment that calls a person’s spiritual beliefs, or faith, a myth, so please don’t do it.

Oh, and by the way, the majority of this post was hand-written on my tablet PC.  I’ve finally got the handwriting recognition trained up pretty well, and it’s nice to be able to just use the stylus to jot down thoughts from time to time.

Today is one of those days, so far, where I keep finding myself looking for “meaning.”  I look for something in my life worth journaling, something worth contemplating, something that makes this day different from every other, and that makes my experiences today different from other experiences.

I keep looking because I’m not finding it.  I’m not unhappy, I don’t think, but it is interesting to notice that things seem to feel a bit… empty, today.  It’s also interesting to note that that “empty” feeling isn’t necessarily a down feeling.  It’s kind of empty of itself, actually.  It seems to be me taking notice of a complete lack of other feelings.  In a way, it kind of feels restful.  I’m not unhappy, but I’m not noticeably happy, either.  I’m having a hard time pinning an adjective, or a few of them, to my experiences today.

The problem with days like this, I suppose, is that as I think back on other days when I’ve felt this way, I tend to get upset or irritated much more easily, because I’ve got this big, empty, emotional stage, and the door is open for the first group of emotions that walks by to come in and start acting something out.  Often, probably due the difficult nature of many of my daily activities, those emotions end up being frustration, irritability, or anger.

But I’m not any of those things right now, I’m just… here.  I wish I could describe it better, because it’s an interesting phenomenon, I think, but I just can’t seem to find the words to describe it well.  So maybe I’ll just call it the empties