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Posted by: dvandorn Feb 18 2006, 12:03 AM

Hi, all... as I may have mentioned earlier, I had a knee surgery scheduled for today. Just a relatively simple arthroscopy to remove and trim back a couple of very badly torn meniscii that were causing a *lot* of pain.

All went well, I'm back home and parked in front of my computer for the next three or four days.

I'm also under the influence of some pretty powerful pain meds -- oxycodone, to be specific -- and while I feel completely rational and all, and while I'm sure my posts will make as much sense as they ever did, I just wanted to give a very brief explanation in advance, just in case...

-the other Doug

Posted by: elakdawalla Feb 18 2006, 12:49 AM

Mmmm. Get well soon. --Emily

Posted by: RNeuhaus Feb 18 2006, 12:59 AM

Get well soon. The other thing is that you are lucky to have plenty of time for reading all things related to space exploration.

Rodolfo

Posted by: Bob Shaw Feb 18 2006, 01:10 AM

Would you like to hear some Right Medial Ligament stories? I got 'em!

Oxycodene... ...luxury, I tell you. In my day, we had to saw our own legs off with a frozen ferret, had to hold it 'tween our teeth (if we had any - luxury, wos teeth...). Pah! Young people, don't know how to make their own entertainment...

Bob Shaw

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 18 2006, 01:23 AM

Hey, there were times in the past few months when my favorite daydream was getting my hands on a chainsaw, and just lopping my leg off above the knee, it was hurting that badly.

When people would ask me if it really hurt all that bad, I'd tell them to go get me a tire iron, and to stand still for about five seconds, and I could demonstrate quite effectively just how bad it was hurting. Heck, this immediate post-surgical pain is no worse than the pain I've been dealing with, day in and day out, for the past six months or so. (At least, what I can feel of it through the pain meds.)

I'm just tremendously relieved that it should now start hurting LESS each day, until I have my full mobility back. That day is going to be a celebration, let me tell you.

-the other Doug

Posted by: elakdawalla Feb 18 2006, 01:41 AM

Best wishes that that's what will happen -- but don't be afraid to tell the doc if the pain sticks around, so they can try switching meds on you....I had jaw surgery a few years back, and it got better to a point, then stopped getting better for a few weeks. Let's just say that I wish I could market the Jaw Injury Diet for anyone who wants to shed some pounds, it was very effective for that. ("For the cost of a simple tire iron, you too can go from flabby...to fantastic!!"?? Every cloud has a silver lining though: eventually I had to have a consult with a nutritionist and actually received medical advice to go home and eat ice cream.) Finally I asked my doctor if there was anything different I could try, he switched medications, and it cleared (most of) the pain right up. (I'm still eating the ice cream. Got to listen to your doctor, right? )

--Emily

Posted by: Jeff7 Feb 18 2006, 01:48 AM

Sure, suuuure, that's your excuse every time you make a post that doesn't quite make sense.

"Uh, uh, I uh, had.....surgery! On....my wrist! Yeah that's it."

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 18 2006, 02:20 AM

Yep! That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

-the other Doug

Posted by: ElkGroveDan Feb 18 2006, 02:33 AM

Hey man, sounds like you got some good drugs and you aren't offering to share them with your friends here...

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 18 2006, 03:43 AM

Hey, no problem, Dan! Lessee, what button do I click to attach a pill to my post, here?

Or maybe I should just shove one into the ethernet port... drat, it doesn't fit!



-the other Doug

Posted by: ljk4-1 Feb 18 2006, 03:45 AM

This is why we need to start putting our brains in artificial bodies.

Of course, you'll have to come up with all new excuses....



http://www.primidi.com/2003/11/05.html

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=6&tid=150

Posted by: lyford Feb 18 2006, 03:47 AM

Yikes! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxycodone Just don't put on any Jefferson Airplane while convalescing....

I hope you are able to resume your break dancing career with only a minor interruption.

Posted by: ElkGroveDan Feb 18 2006, 06:12 AM

He's taking up the banjo during his recuperation.

Posted by: Jeff7 Feb 18 2006, 06:25 AM

All we get is Lipovitan.

Posted by: elakdawalla Feb 18 2006, 06:27 AM

You did? Where'd you score that?

--Emily

Posted by: djellison Feb 18 2006, 07:51 AM

I managed to cleanly knock out one of my front teeth when I was about 10. Amazingly, they were able to put it back in and hold it there with a little bit of steelwork for a few weeks while the gum decided to 'take it back' as it were - and thus I was a temporary member of the soup's and ice cream society for a while. I was at boarding school at the time and my class mates were VERY jealous, until I reminded them that 1) picking an argument with a floor isnt very comfortable and 2) having more metalwork in your mouth than the golden gate bridge can get a 'little' uncomfortable.

Hope it all clears up toD - if not, I think there's a section in a project I was working on at work about knees

Doug

Posted by: mhoward Feb 18 2006, 08:27 AM

Good luck, other Doug.

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 18 2006, 10:52 AM

Thanks, everyone! It's gotten a little rough, now that the anaesthesia has completely worn off... but I'm in better shape than I would have expected.

You know, bringing this back to a space topic in some form or another, this is only the third time in my adult life I've ever been under general anaesthesia. The last time was a bad attack of appendicitis I had four years ago, which brought to mind, at the time, a serious question about long-duration manned flights to places far, far away...

You see, one thing my doctor told me, that I discovered a fair amount of supporting evidence for on the 'net, was that there seems to be a correlation between people who get their tonsils removed as children and those who have to have their appendices removed as adults. See, I was a little surprised that I would have held on to my appendix until age 46, only to get a severe case of appendicitis that would require an emergency appendectomy. When I brought it up with my surgeon in a post-operative checkup, he told me about this correlation -- and, indeed, I had my tonsils and adenoids removed when I was about 8 years old.

And that got me thinking -- on interplanetary manned flights, is there some value in the prophylactic removal of the appendices of all crew who still had theirs? Or would you just suggest this for those who still had their appendices, but not their tonsils?

I know that I was pretty well incapacitated in the wake of that emergency appendectomy, for a good three weeks. and wasn't back to normal for another two or three weeks beyond that. Even if you were able to outfit a complete surgery within, say, a Mars-bound spacecraft (which would be rather tricky in zero-G), you'd have an incapacitated crewperson on your hands for a while -- which could be a serious inconvenience, or even a dagerous situation, depending on the timing of the event.

So -- would it make sense to simply remove everyone's appendix before they take off on a three-year expedition to Mars? Or to an asteroid? Anywhere where you're months away from home at best?

-the other Doug

p.s. -- the appendectomy has a rather funny story to it. They had given me a shot of morphine when they figured out just what I was suffering from, so I was high as a kite, to put it mildly. They had taken a CAT scan of my abdomen to confirm the extent of the appendicitis (quite severe, just on the verge of bursting), and told me literally as I was wheeled out of the CAT scan room the extent of the problem and the urgency of getting me into an operating room as soon as possible. The surgeon then added, "By the way, I have to tell you, you have the largest appendix I have ever seen in my life. Granted, it's distended, but it it still larger than anyone else's I have ever seen."

So, they wheel me into the pre-op staging room (little more than an oversized closet), where my now-ex-wife stood there next to my bed, waiting for them to take me into the OR. In my morphine haze, I told her what the surgeon had told me, and then I added, "You know, I always wanted to have a really huge organ -- I just have to be more specific in what I wish for!" At which point, I heard a loud noise, turned my head, and saw a nurse at the foot of my bed, bent halfway over, laughing hysterically.

What can I say? Once a comedian, always a comedian... -toD

Posted by: Bob Shaw Feb 18 2006, 12:45 PM

oDoug:

On interplanetary crewed flights there'd be a real argument in favour of total tooth removal, appendix removal, and the excision of various external dangly bits of the human form - particularly in a crew which accepts that child-bearing will not be any sort of future option. It sounds callous, but given the choice of zero-g surgery or of surgery within the confines of a small lander...

...so you're halfway towards being on the crew roster!

SNIP!

Bob Shaw

Posted by: lyford Feb 18 2006, 06:45 PM

Well, with the advances of telerobotic surgery procedures, we can now perform intricate operations from afar...
So you could remove an appendix, or a tooth... or * ahem * .... other troublesome organs....

But why stop there? If http://www.nasa.gov/vision/space/preparingtravel/underwater_surgery.html, why not perform a complete astronautedectomy?

If we are devising amazing robotic technologies to assist humans to live in extremely hostile environments, why not just send the amazing robots instead? Why are we spending so much of our valuable space science budgets on efforts to basically keep meat fresh for the voyage to Mars and beyond?

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 18 2006, 06:49 PM

Aw, c'mon -- don't hijack my thread into a "there's no place for manned spaceflight" argument. I'm trying to keep my blood pressure down, here...



-the other Doug

Posted by: lyford Feb 18 2006, 06:52 PM

Sorry -
But you did bring it up... I was perfectly happy to keep off-topic!

PS - hope everything is going well

Posted by: tty Feb 18 2006, 06:54 PM

Almost anything seems to be usable as a narcotic once a junkie gets hold of it. On the other hand almost nothing is a narcotic unless a junkie gets hold of it.
Believe it or not, Heroin was used on a large scale for medical purposes in Sweden and Denmark in the 40's and 50's. It was used as cough drops (it is an excellent cough remedy). Nobody seems to have noticed any particular problems with it.

tty

Posted by: RNeuhaus Feb 19 2006, 01:22 AM

Recently there were many remote surgical operations. The patient in the other side with robots arms and camera and the doctors in the other sides with a big panel with powerfull zoom and a pair arms with access to all surgical instruments with the help of technicians which are in the surgical room.

I think that this would be the probably extra-planet medical attention to the astronauts.

By the way, I hope you will start to progress in everyday and will start to feel even confident that you are going to be able to walk good again.

Rodolfo

Posted by: CosmicRocker Feb 19 2006, 07:53 AM

Hey O'Doug. Sorry to belatedly learn of your misfortune, but quite happy to learn of your imminent recovery. I liked the Doug^2 moniker someone tagged you with some time ago, but that's OT.

I'll try to refrain from sad stories of my own. Suffice it to say (as many have said before me) that, getting old sucks. Now that you have set yourself up with a pretty much bulletproof alibi, I haven't noticed you taking advantage of it around here. What are you waiting for? Have some fun.

Get well, soon.

Posted by: edstrick Feb 19 2006, 08:58 AM

Bumper Sticker: GETTING OLD AIN'T FOR SISSIES.

Rueful observation: "You know you're old when you no longer have a family doctor, you have a "medical staff"."

Posted by: tty Feb 19 2006, 06:29 PM

Might get a little bit slow a couple of light minutes away.....

tty

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 19 2006, 06:41 PM

There is also the whole question of performing surgery in a microgravity environment. How difficult would that be? Would microgravity make the clearing of incisions and wounds of blood and tissue significantly harder?

Would we have to develop some kind of centrifuge just to offer a G-field within which to perform sensitive medical/surgical procedures?

Seems to me that this is an area in which we could be using the ISS for really valuable research. Although, using the ISS to develop microgravity surgical techniques would have its own issues to deal with, not the least of which would be the transportation of live animals to ISS to be used as experimental guinea pigs. Live animal research is a touchy subject here in the U.S., performing it on the ISS would just raise the profile of the issue much higher than it is right now.

But, see, this is where I see ISS as a useful platform for certain types of research. It provides a habitable microgravity environment in which we can develop and test procedures that will eventually be needed by interplanetary explorers. Why not start developing that data and those capabilities *now*, and use the ISS for something approaching a useful purpose???

You could also design and test a centrifugal artificial-gravity module within ISS operations, and I don't see anyone even mentioning the concept. Seems to me it would be cheaper and easier to check out how well such things work at the ISS than it would be to just design one and fly it, untested, as part of the first major manned interplanetary expedition.

-the other Doug

Posted by: tty Feb 19 2006, 07:29 PM

Not to mention that we have no idea how much gravity is really needed to eliminate the medical problems of microgravity. This is impossible to test on Earth but could be tested on animals in quite a small artificial-gravity module.

tty

Posted by: jamescanvin Feb 19 2006, 09:44 PM

Yeah, it's a real shame the http://www.spaceref.com/iss/elements/cam.html isn't going to fly. There could have been some really interesting experements done with that (for once)

James

Posted by: Bob Shaw Feb 19 2006, 09:46 PM

I can't remember the details, but I believe there is a forthcoming US aeromedical mission which should address these issues, with a small mammal payload and a centrifuge aboard a recoverable spacecraft.

Bob Shaw

Posted by: Myran Feb 19 2006, 11:10 PM

dvandorn: Get well soon!
And I bet you still will be a lot more cohorent than what I ever have been here, and these guys have endured my presence without kicking me out so no worries mate.

Posted by: edstrick Feb 20 2006, 05:57 AM

We don't want him TOO coherent.. he might LASE!

Posted by: Jeff7 Feb 20 2006, 07:03 AM

Ack! *cough* The, the pain! The pain won't stop!

Posted by: Myran Feb 20 2006, 02:30 PM

In case he do start to lase, that would get a new meaning to the phrase: 'Beam me up' wouldt it?

Posted by: dvandorn Feb 21 2006, 08:04 AM

Hey, guys, c'mon -- I may have been charitably described as "bright," on occasion, but...!



Actually, the knee is coming along OK. I'm more having to manage the effects of the pain meds, which is a bit of a juggling act. Especially since I go back to work in the morning. But, overall, things are proceeding apace...

-the other Doug