No? Very well.
My dear group, a belated greeting! Much as I'd love to share the results of my latest study ("Probable Swine Flu and the Elasticity of Punctuality") during the research phase of which I gamely came down with an absolutely disgusting case of something or other that the good people at Boynton--despite swabbing every square nanometer of my poor, beleaguered tonsils--were unable to conclusively diagnose, there's apparently something called "peer review" that's preventing me from actually turning this into a functioning excuse for missing a deadline. You may say to me: "this was a blog post assignment, not a ballroom dancing lesson; you can type and cough at the same time, idiot," and you'd technically be right, but let's not get bogged down in semantics, eh? I've got to type this out quickly so I can re-test my "Tom Never Waits Long Enough to Bite Into the Pop-Tart" hypothesis before going to bed.
Science and me, we go way back. You might even say science had a lot to do with my being born in the first place--and I don't just mean in the whole boring, "sperms and eggs are made of science" way, either; I mean that, right from the get-go, I was benefiting from thousands of years of medical research and advancement.
You see, I was born premature, and with a congenital heart defect called "Tetralogy of Fallot." I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that it's NOT that freaky thing Lance Armstrong's got where your heart basically makes oxygen out of dreams and kinetic energy. It's actually kind of like that, but in reverse; see, rather than a healthy, ruddy-cheeked bundle of giggles, I was kind of more of a half-sized, vein-blue pile of potential disaster.
Luckily, I was born in a state known for great medicine (MN), in the United States, at the tail end of a century that saw unprecedented advances in medical technology and research, which is basically like winning the Powerball jackpot for sick little babies. Within minutes of my birth, I was hooked up to countless wires and tubes and monitors and electrodes, and I spent my first few weeks in a special wing of a great big, clean Midwestern hospital the likes of which would be literally unexplainable to our great-great-grandparents before, at the tender age of two months, I was operated on by one of the world's leading pediatric cardiac surgeons. Because he lived nearby (and my parents were fortunate enough to have access to great insurance and sufficient resources to ensure the best possible care available. Do social sciences count for this?)! About two years later (once my ribcage had fully formed), the same surgeon went back in there (sawed me damn near in half!) and finished the job, and voila! Fully functional human!
I've often wondered how many millions of research dollars and decades of work by countless nameless geniuses it took just to develop the equipment of that little cart they whooshed me away on just after my "grand" (read: "feeble") entrance. And culturally speaking, what I got still qualifies as literally miraculous over most of our globe. Had I been born either a few thousand miles away or a few years earlier, I never would have lived to hack out that revolting little volley of coughs I just woke my neighbors with. Thanks, Science!
Now where the hell did I put those Pop-Tarts?
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Wow!
ReplyDeleteNow we have a question to answer: is full gestation normal? is being born prematurely a disorder? a disease? If ever you would like to watch the cold rationality of the actuarial vanish, if you would like to see a nurse with thirty years of experience cry, if you would like to see emotion enter into the decision making process of ostensibly empirical practitioners, come visit a neo-natal intensive care unit.
ReplyDeleteThis is a fascinating side track for us to go down! Never have you seen such a disconnect between what is "normal" (height, weight, blood pressure, temperature, pulse, respiration - all within normal ranges) be so stretched. Tom gives us an an excellent example of the place where finances/empiricism/science/emotion all come together to battle for primacy in an otherwise statistically based environment.
Cancer diagnoses, for example, are given to patients in a gentle, bed-sidey-manner to the patient - "we're not exactly sure, but we're going to do everything we can". But behind the scenes, someone is calculating that the five-year, seven-year, and ten-year survival rates (post-diagnosis) is "x" if treatment "y" is aggressively and immediately applied, or survival is "z" if nothing is done. This does NOT happen too often in a NICU.
Food for thought?
Tom, glad you're with us!