OT: "Procedure" tomorrow

As this Darwin Award nominee found out:

Where/how is Jim?

NT

Three days and no word. Hope everything went ok.

I wonder how a balloon is supposed to decimate stones? For kidney stones they use shocks of high intensity ultrasound.

Rick C ==========================================================

With kidney stones, one option is lithotripsy where they sit you in a stainless steel bathtub and blast with high intensity sound created by firing a submerged spark gap. Thousands of hits later the stone is usually in pieces small enough to pass. Problem is part of the kidneys are shadowed by the pelvic bones so if the stone is in the wrong place this doesn't work. Mine were shadowed so twice now they have gone in with an endoscope through the bladder and up to the kidney, put the end against the stone, and blasted away with a pulsed laser to break up the stone. Then they used a mesh basket (butterfly net?) on the end of the scope to catch the bigger pieces and pull them out, leaving any fine sand to be passed. I don't have any idea how just a balloon would break up a stone but maybe he meant the basket to catch the pieces? They also can use an ultrasonic probe to examine the walls in a colonoscopy, sigh :-).

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

The fool didn't have an amy of doctors and nurses standing around in case something went wrong with his iPhone.

Now *that's* the way to go! :-D Wonder how Jim got on?

Always struck me as a bit OTT and perhaps unnecessarily so. It only takes a fraction of the energy 'Old Sparky' dished out to kill someone. Atrial Fibrillation can be induced with just a few tens of milliamps. OK, I'll grant you it's far less spectacular than this:

But there you go. That's entertainment!

I'm a liberal and yet, in some circumstances I do support the death penalty.

But IMO the goal should be to show the condemned the mercy they did not show their victim(s) in life.

As civilized people it's the least we could do.

I'm sure he's fine. You knew he was gonna make you sweat, though...;-)

I believe it is more merciful to put someone deserving to death, than to lock them up for the rest of their life.

the problem of course is wrong convictions.

NT

My guess(tm) is that the balloon dilates the bile duct sufficiently to all the stone(s) to pass normally.

I had laser lithotripsy for kidney stones. Plenty of problems. Looking through an endoscope at the end of a catheter, the kidney is a large volume with many places for a stone to hide. Just finding the stone was a problem. Once located, they were shattered by the laser, and were suppose to make a graceful exit through the ureter. Nope. The edges of the broken kidney stones were rather jagged, causing the debris to get stuck in the ureter. The official term is "steinstrasse" or "stone street" which is what it resembles on an x-ray. It took 9 painful days to finally break loose the log jam. Most such procedures are not this ugly.

Some of the debris:

Gall stones are rather larger and often fill the gall bladder. For example:

Hopefully, Jim will not need to go through that ordeal.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Well, the qualifications for the kind of crimes that I feel are "death-penalty worthy" leave little room for doubt.

I don't think bin Laden would've needed to have been put in a police lineup, or would've rested his case on some uncertainty of DNA evidence.

That is to say the death penalty is best reserved for those few abominables who are actively proud of their "endeavors." Unfortunately, that type seems to turn up with some regularity.

Human nature will inevitably shift its use from cases beyond doubt to cases that are simply horse hockey. It's how the world works.

NT

"Jeff Liebermann" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

On Sat, 18 Mar 2017 09:22:18 -0400, "Carl Ijames" wrote:

My guess(tm) is that the balloon dilates the bile duct sufficiently to all the stone(s) to pass normally.

I had laser lithotripsy for kidney stones. Plenty of problems. Looking through an endoscope at the end of a catheter, the kidney is a large volume with many places for a stone to hide. Just finding the stone was a problem. Once located, they were shattered by the laser, and were suppose to make a graceful exit through the ureter. Nope. The edges of the broken kidney stones were rather jagged, causing the debris to get stuck in the ureter. The official term is "steinstrasse" or "stone street" which is what it resembles on an x-ray. It took 9 painful days to finally break loose the log jam. Most such procedures are not this ugly.

Some of the debris:

Gall stones are rather larger and often fill the gall bladder. For example:

Hopefully, Jim will not need to go through that ordeal.

-- Jeff Liebermann snipped-for-privacy@cruzio.com

150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558 ========================================================

I wondered about trying to "lead" them out with a balloon, but that just didn't sound promising and he did say "decimate". Maybe he will tell us more when he posts again?

After the laser, did your surgeon use a basket to fish out the big pieces? My stones were 9x10x11 mm and about 5x5x7 mm, neither of which were ever going to pass without surgery, and I never noticed anything passing afterwards so I assumed that whatever the surgeon didn't fish out with the basket was some pretty fine sand. Certainly nothing as large as what's in your picture. I had a CAT scan before each procedure to precisely locate the stone, and luckily neither moved in the few days between scan and removal. For me the worst part was the stent they put in the ureter (between kidney and bladder) so it doesn't collapse from inflammation. Think of a coffee stirrer about 10" long, pushed all the up to the kidney and with the excess length coiled up in the bladder so it can't some out. It stays in 7-10 days then they go up you-know-where, grab it, and pull it out, all with no anesthetic. The first time it felt like they went in with a hot poker. When he went in I clenched so bad I was only touching the table with my shoulders and my heels, my butt was about 6" up in the air. He kept telling me to relax and lay back down, but I convinced him that I was now rigid and not going to move and JUST PULL IT OUT NOW!!!!!! The second time they agreed to knock me out with a quick hit of anesthesia, which cost the insurance company and I more but made life so much better. I had maybe one or two days of discomfort after each stone from inflammation but every time I've had a tube in there I get an infection - one Foley catheter and two endoscopic lithotripsies, 3 for 3 now. I keep telling my urologist he needs to wash his hands before starting, but ... :-) First two infections required two courses of oral antibiotics each, and one emergency room visit when I waited a day too long to see if the second oral antibiotic was going to work. The last time I did a week of cipro before hand to prevent an infection, and it didn't matter. This time it was a resistant strain so I had the choice of staying in the hospital 10 days just to get IV antibiotics, or get a PICC line put in and give myself IV's at home. It was cool getting the PICC line put in. It goes into an artery in the bicep, across into the aorta, and down to just above the heart. The tip has something which they can track with a coil they rest on your chest, with the position displayed on a computer monitor like a video game. They can steer the tip to get it into the right place, then they pull the locator tip out of the tube leaving it ready for use. I was expecting the usual peristaltic pump but they had a much simpler, more reliable arrangement. Each dose was inside a tubular balloon about 1/2" diameter and 3" long, inside another balloon about 4" diameter inflated with some gas, air or nitrogen probably. Connect up the tubing, release the valve, and over 20-40 minutes the balloons deflate as the dose is delivered. Disconnect when done, cap the tube and tie it back down to the bicep for safety, and throw away the dead balloon. A home nurse came by a few times to train me, sterilize and check the PICC where it entered the skin, and to remove it at the end, but overall it was no problem.

Hopefully you and I will never have another kidney stone or move up to gallstones :-).

----- Regards, Carl Ijames

Hogwash. That's why so many on death row spend twenty years in appeals?

And you imagine they'd a) appreciate that gesture and b) learn from it?

Each case on its merits, dear boy; each case on its merits.

Indeed. So introduce a higher standard of proof in capital cases: 'beyond doubt' instead of 'beyond reasonable doubt.'

You can introduce all the requirements you like, it doesn't stop people being stupid.

NT