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Thursday Night
Nov. 7th, 2002 10:12 pmWe have high winds tonight on the Peninsula. The meteorologists say the jet stream is moving above us at 200 Knots, and winds have been clocked as high as 72mph at the Golden Gate. Trees were dropping branches along El Camino, and a lot of traffic lights are out.
I stopped by a friends house after work to help her set up her computer. Her roommate is a female MD from Georgia that specializes in pain management. She is visiting Stanford Hospital, and made us watch her power point presentation that she will give at Stanford Hospital on Saturday. Much of it involved techniques of injecting various substances into the spine to kill nerves, and or block pain transmission. I thought it was fascinating, and learned a lot about an arcane medical specialty. Stomach and pancreatic cancer can cause agonizing pain, that even massive doses of opiates cannot mask. Doctors are learning how to give relief and quality of life back to people that were previously doomed to agony. Sometimes they will even destroy a small part of the brain that is the pain receptor, but that can have unseen consequences. One patient was a flasher, and he had learned to control his impulse to expose himself. After they killed a small portion of his brain, to give him relief from debilitating pain, he could no longer control the impulse to expose himself.
I stopped by a friends house after work to help her set up her computer. Her roommate is a female MD from Georgia that specializes in pain management. She is visiting Stanford Hospital, and made us watch her power point presentation that she will give at Stanford Hospital on Saturday. Much of it involved techniques of injecting various substances into the spine to kill nerves, and or block pain transmission. I thought it was fascinating, and learned a lot about an arcane medical specialty. Stomach and pancreatic cancer can cause agonizing pain, that even massive doses of opiates cannot mask. Doctors are learning how to give relief and quality of life back to people that were previously doomed to agony. Sometimes they will even destroy a small part of the brain that is the pain receptor, but that can have unseen consequences. One patient was a flasher, and he had learned to control his impulse to expose himself. After they killed a small portion of his brain, to give him relief from debilitating pain, he could no longer control the impulse to expose himself.
