Billy McNeely of Canada's Northwest Territories was scratching his back when he noticed a pointy protrusion. Turned out to be the tip of a 7.5cm knife blade that was stuck in his back. For three years. Back in 2010, McNeely was stabbed in a brawl following an arm wrestling match. Since then, his back set off prison metal detectors and he's had pain, but he claims that physicians told him it was nerve damage caused by the injury. From BBC News:
But this week, McNeely, 32, was scratching his back as usual when his fingernail caught on something. His girlfriend took a look.
"I told Billy: 'There's a knife sticking out of your back.' I was scared. I was ready to pull it out with tweezers," Stephanie Sayine told CBC News.
McNeely is considering whether to file a lawsuit against the local health department.
Jess Hill has published the second part of a three-part series on what it’s like to have a brain tumor diagnosed, then surgically removed. Read: Magical Realism: From Seizure to Surgery. The earlier installment is here. — Xeni
•
This is Rex, a $1 million "bionic man" built in the UK by roboticists Richard Walker and Matthew Godden. Rex was the star of a new Channel 4 documentary titled "How to Build A Bionic Man." Rex is outfitted with a variety of synthetic systems and appendages, from prosthetic limbs to a cochlear implant, artificial pancreas to retinal implant. He's now on display at the London Science Museum but will visit America in October to promote the Smithsonian Channel's US premier of the documentary, retitled "Cyborg/Frankenstein."
Bossa Studios created the surgery game "Surgeon Simulator 2013" in a weekend. It's somewhere between Operation, advanced medical training simulations, and splatterpunk films. From the description on Steam Greenlight:
You are Nigel Burke... an ordinary guy, with no outstanding skills.
Somehow forced to perform an array of vastly complicated procedures,
using any tools available. Your goal will be to complete every
operation in the quickest time possible, with minimal blood loss!
One of the focal points of the storm emergency in New York City last night was New York University's Langone Medical Center: the hospital's main and backup power generators all failed, and hospital staff had to evacuate patients as power resources faded. All but 50 patients have been evacuated, and the remaining 50 are due to be transferred this morning. Those patients included 20 prematurely-born newborn babies who were in intensive care. This morning, CBS News has a first-person account from Dr. Jonathan LaPook, a CBS News medical correspondent (also a board-certified physician in internal medicine and gastroenterology).
Many patients were too sick to walk down the narrow staircase to the lobby. They were painstakingly carried on plastic sleds - one by one - by teams of four to five people from as high up as the 17th floor. I went to several of the floors with Dr. Mark Pochapin, the director of the Division of Gastroenterology at NYU. He was one of a team of people making sure that communication flowed and that everybody was accounted for. The intensive care unit was already evacuated when I arrived. Lit only by my flashlight, filled with crumpled blankets and other evidence of a hasty retreat, it appeared eerie to me - like a scene in a movie where a cup of still-warm-coffee tells the detective that somebody had been a room only minutes before. But this was undeniably real life and the clock was ticking as the team of workers raced to evacuate the patients.
[Video Link] "On July 5th, 2012, my 11-month-old son, Noah, was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor," writes Mike Masse in the introduction to this YouTube video, a beautiful performance of the Beatles' "Let it Be."
No parent should have to bare their grief to the world, no matter how beautifully, to beg for money to cover the life-saving medical treatment their baby needs. As you see the beauty, be mindful of the injustice in our health care system this represents.
Cancer is one tragedy. The way our country treats people with cancer, even when they're little babies, is another.
Using the narrative of a police force hunting down pain, users are inducted as a rookie officer working on the case. Patients fill out a daily survey – which asks questions relating to whether they felt pain that day, how intense it was and its location – and can progress through the ranks of the force when they keep their records updated. The concept was created by Toronto-based media agency Cundari, who got stars from Rookie Blue and Flashpoint – two primetime cop shows in Canada – to appear in videos that are unlocked when patients do well and progress the narrative. By gamifying the process, the app gives patients an incentive to keep a daily journal of their pain. The app is still in the testing phase but SickKids hopes to release it later this year.
The excerpt tells the story of 53-year-old Edna Riggs, of Atlanta, Georgia. Fear of cancer, medical debt, and losing her job caused her to not seek treatment for her breast cancer until it reached a very advanced state.
(Graphic content, may be upsetting; via @rogersmatthew)
And then there were books which claimed to be made from the human flesh but were, in fact, not. One example comes from the Wellcome Collection in London [left]. It is a curious little notebook which professes to be ‘made of Tanned skin of the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence’. Presumably, this refers to Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of Wampanoag who was the first person killed by the British during the Boston Massacre. Immediately following his death, Attucks was held up as an American martyr. As a consequence of its alleged origins, this notebook has become a symbol of the American Revolution.
More. And if you enjoy tweets about 17th-century surgery, you'll want to follow Lindsey Fitzharris, the medical historian behind the "Chirurgeon’s Apprentice" website. (via Vaughan Bell)
Via my friend and fellow cancer-warrior Francesco Fondi of Wired (Italy), news that Fujifilm in Japan is launching what it calls "Real 3D Mammography," a medical imaging system that enables technicians to view mammographic images in a kind of 3D. The idea is to see and interpret the detail of internal anatomical breast structures more clearly than is currently possible with a 2D image.
The new system costs about $181K, and is designed to work with "Amulet f," Fujifilm's digital X-ray equipment for breast cancer screening (sold separately). I hereby volunteer to be a test hamster for this thing some day, even though I realize the radiation payload is a little higher with this than with current mammography. But wow, I'd love to see this level of detail about what is going on inside my body right now, as I go through chemotherapy.
Because the three-dimensional structures of breast tissues can be checked all at the same time, it is possible to determine if a tumor mass is in contact with a mammary gland as well as to measure the depth of microcalcification, Fujifilm said.
When a picture of a breast is taken with the Amulet f, it takes two images from different angles. Then, by displaying the two images on a special LCD monitor and using polarized glasses, it becomes possible to see a 3D image.
The special monitor is manufactured by combining two LCD monitors and a part called "half mirror." (...)When the Amulet f is used to take pictures, a patient is exposed to X-ray radiation twice. But, with Fujifilm's own methods of taking and processing images, the total amount of X-ray increases by only 30-50%, compared with a normal mammography, the company said.
Here's a terrific article by Gilles Frydman at e-patients.net advocating for opposition to H.R. 3699, aka The Research Works Act (RWA). The bill before Congress would seriously impede "the ability of patients and caregivers, researchers, physicians and healthcare professionals to access and use critical health-related information in a timely manner." (@timoreilly via @epatientdave)— Xeni
•
"Videos must show how you will use information technology to achieve your resolution and how you plan to maintain it," according to the contest website. The sort of topics one might address (one per video) include obtaining your health records from your doctors and learning how to read and understand their contents, finding online support communities for a specific illness, or direct health improvement actions like using an electronic pedometer to track physical activity, or an iPhone app to count calories or monitor sleep cycles.
Billy McNeely of Canada's Northwest Territories was scratching his back when he noticed a pointy protrusion. Turned out to be the tip of a 7.5cm knife blade that was stuck in his back. For three years. Back in 2010, McNeely was stabbed in a brawl following an arm wrestling match. Since then, his back set off prison metal detectors and he's had pain, but he claims that physicians told him it was nerve damage caused by the injury. From BBC News:
This is Rex, a $1 million "bionic man" built in the UK by roboticists Richard Walker and Matthew Godden. Rex was the star of a new Channel 4 documentary titled "
