My Wife's Foot, Part I

I could see on my phone that the call was from my neighbor Noel. Ordinarily I would pick up, but I was already on a voice call and instant-message chat at the office.

Either he called again or I called Noel; he reported that my wife has broken her foot. At first he said an ambulance had taken her, then that the ambulance was on its way. I asked to speak with her, he said one moment, and I could hear my wife moaning and he reported that she could not speak. I told him I would leave immediately and asked if he could put the phone to hear ear. He did and I said "Hi sweetie, I'm leaving now and I'll see you soon". My mother-in-law, visiting from Florida, was out. Nine-year-old Charlie was at school. Twelve-year-old Abby was home, having stayed away from school on account of feeling poorly.

I did leave the office immediately. I felt a little sad that I would be missing my former supervisor's going-away party. Traffic was light as I was traveling at 1pm. About halfway home Noel called again to say that the ambulance was taking Julia to Rose Hospital, so I headed there. I drove a little faster than normal, but still safely, and still slower than the maniacs.

I parked at the hospital and ran inside and inquired at the front desk. They had no record of Julia and suggested I check with the emergency room. I inquired there; they also had no record, but the staffer said that loved ones arrived ahead of the patient 90% of the time. Another staffer behind the desk, listening over her shoulder, asked "last name White?" Julia was there, and the first staffer led me back to her three-walled-one-curtained room.

Julia looked sad and distressed. A young male doctor was pushing on various parts of her foot and asking about pain. A young female nurse was typing at a computer. Julia answered "yes" to three spots and "no" or "not sure" to the remainder. She said she felt faint and nauseous. They offered anti-nausea medication, which she declined.

Julia told me a little of what happened. She was standing on one of the tall chairs near the kitchen island when she fell. She had an intuition that the injury was very severe. She called out to Abby and had her find a neighbor. Julia felt faint and saw white, like a nuclear explosion.

The hospital staff wheeled an X-ray machine into the room and asked me to leave because of the radiation. Made sense, I thought, although I wondered later that none of them nor Julia wore lead vests. The machine was directed at her feet, so perhaps that was the reason. They took three pictures and wheeled the machine out. It was made by GE (General Electric?) and was self-propelled; possibly it was shielded by lead and too heavy to comfortably push.

Julia and I separately asked how long until results were back. Maybe we were aware that the images would be crucial to the diagnosis. The answer: "soon" or "not too long". And, it wasn't. The doctor returned to say that, although he was not qualified to render a definitive opinion, the second metatarsal was broken. An on-call podiatrist, Dr. Jaakkola, would look at them, too, although when could not be guaranteed. His opinion came within a few minutes and he confirmed the diagnosis. Even better, his office was in the Wolf Building, very close to the hospital, and he was available.

The original nurse assisted a new nurse with the application of a splint. Doing so was painful for Julia and she was angered that the second nurse did not explain what she would be doing before doing it. The splint consisted of a pad made of cotton and some other material. They wetted the pad, fit it around Julia's foot, ankle, and lower leg, and waited "three-to-five" minutes for it to harden, but I would say it was closer to six. They issued her a brand-new set of crutches, adjusted them to Julia's size, and sent us on our way. Except for the splint incident the care was first-rate and I told them so.

We walked to the waiting room, I left Julia there, ran back to the car, and drove to the emergency room parking lot. An attendant came over and quietly, but insistently, took my keys and gave me a receipt. It took a few moments for me to realize that, although the nurse had told us we could park in that lot, it made sense that the hospital would not want cars parked indefinitely, blocking space for ambulances. I walked in to the waiting room, helped Julia out, and the attendant offered and did pull the car closer for her comfort. I considered whether I should tip him and did not, not out of cheapness so much as perhaps he felt his role as a profession above receiving tips.

For several minutes I drove looking for the Wolf Building, only to return to the parking lot to ask for directions. The same attendant said to turn right at the end of the street, instead of left as I had assumed. The Wolf building provided valet parking, and only valet parking. We hobbled into the elevator, up to the fourth floor, and then a considerable distance to Dr. Jaakkola's office (ironic, given most of a podiatrist's patients must have at least some difficulty walking, but understandable given not all the doctors on the floor can have the one closest to the elevator). I completed the initial patient forms for Julia; I am still curious as to why most doctors use paper forms given how technologically advanced their work has become. For "emergency contact" I put myself, and was reminded of Steven Wright's joke: "When they asked for emergency contact information I wrote 'doctor'. How is my mom going to help?" The form asked, "Marital Status". I wrote "married", though I considered "happily married". The form asked, "how long has this condition existed". I wrote "3 hours".

I led Julia down the hallway to the examination room. The doctor stopped me and said "don't I know you from somewhere?" I tried but could not remember him. "Do you live in Stapleton," he asked. I said I did and we agreed that perhaps he had seen me around the neighborhood. He unwrapped the bandage around Julia's foot and examined it and the X-ray. He pointed to the spot where the break occurred and said he was further concerned by the inward slant of the bone leading to the bid toe. That might be an indication of a Lisfranc fracture. I had heard the term but did not know what it meant and told him so. The doctor suggested an MRI to get more information. Julia asked about a CAT scan and he said that would not be helpful. He also suggested another X-ray, this time with all of Julia's weight on the broken foot, if she could tolerate the pain. We asked if that X-ray could wait until a negative MRI result, and he said yes.

Julia and I returned to his waiting room while his staff sought an MRI appointment for us. We were hopeful we could get in today, or at least tomorrow (Friday). Still, we knew that if surgery were recommended that it would need to wait until the swelling subsided. The urgency was more in wanting to know, rather than needing to act.

I commented to Julia that the doctor did not seem 100% confident, and that we should take that as a good sign. I was recalling what I read from the invisible gorilla, that assuredness was, if anything, negatively correlated with accuracy.

Book review: 3 MPH

Subtitled "The Adventures of One Woman's Walk Around the World".
Authored by Polly Letofsky in 2010 (ISBN 978-0-9841543-2-6).

She did not walk on the water. The Guinesss Book people and others who decide the rules regarding amazing feats (elbow-licking is not eligible for a world record) decided that to claim one has walked around the world one must:
* Walk at least 14,000 miles,
* on at least four continents,
* have someone verify each day's walk,
* and start and finish in the same place.
Flying between continents is acceptable; further, Letofsky decided that it would be okay to accept rides to lodging at the end of a day, so long as she could also catch a ride back to that same spot in the morning to resume her walking.

Letofsky's story is both sweet and compelling. She designed her walk to raise awareness about breast cancer after an odd encounter with a doctor who told her that, because she had no family history of that disease, she herself need not worry about it. She told her friends about her good luck, and they set her straight.

Thus started her walk from Vail to Vail, via the desert southwest, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand ... Greece ... Germany ... Britain ... New York and her home state of Minnesota. Twenty-two countries in all.

She had a number of companions and helpers. Her first helper stole her money and the copyright to her walk's name. A second helper, a bisexual woman, left because Polly spurned her sexual advances. Her biggest helpers were the Lion's Club members who accompanied her to New Zealand, Australia, Thailand and Britain. They would call the next club down the road; a member would pick her up, drop her off, house and feed her, and arrange for press coverage so she could increase her collection of donations. While walking up to 26 miles per day was expectedly tiring, also draining were the daily press conferences and answering "how many pairs of shoes have you gone through" from every stranger.

She enjoyed the Indian food but she complained about "Indian Hearing Deficit": she found that Indians did not want to relay bad news, and a trip of her magnitude would have bad moments, and she found their unwillingness to admit to mistakes frustrating. She was amused by the constant questions of her marital status (single, no children). Questioners could not believe a 36-year-old woman was not interested in marriage and children. Letofsky said: "if someone doesn't know they're [sic] being offensive, do you have the right to be offended? [The questions are] offensive in my culture, not theirs."

Europe was the most challenging part of the trip, perhaps because she did not expect it to be so. She had no Lion's clubs to lean on. People were not as friendly. Prices were high. Maps were hard to obtain, and more necessary than in places like India and Thailand where only a single road might connect two points.

In addition to raising over $200,000 she raised awareness of the disease in places, especially the Third World, where awareness is low. Her's is a remarkable story and a very entertaining read.

Oh: she used 29 pairs of shoes.

Book review: The Disappearing Spoon

Authored by Sam Kean in 2010 (ISBN 978-0-316-05164-4).

I like chemistry more than I remember from school. My high school chemistry teacher spent the first six weeks of school instructing us in the phonetic-mnemonic memory system. He could use the system to memorize the order of a deck of cards. The purpose of the instruction was to prepare us for memorizing the periodic table.

Looking back, that was a waste of time. The system is useful; maybe he could have used one class to introduce it and encourage all of us to practice on our own time. But memorizing the periodic table seems useless to me. Even in that 1983-pre-internet age, printouts of the periodic table were not hard to come by. Maybe professional chemists, over years of constant use, commit some or all of the table to memory. Maybe. A failure to memorize that table would not close the door on a chemistry profession for any us who would have chosen to go in that direction.

I also took the standard Chemistry course that all engineering students were required to take. My recollection: difficult.

I enjoyed reading this book because chemistry is neat. There are 103 naturally occurring elements, each with their own story. (There are an additional 14 or 15 human-created elements, depending on your standard-of-proof.) The titular example is as follows. Most metals are solid at room temperature, the only exceptions being mercury and bromine. Most other metals become liquids only high temperatures; for example, the melting point of iron is 2800 degrees Fahrenheit. A notable exception is gallium, with a melting point of 85 degrees Fahrenheit. Gallium is white/silver in color and not terribly expensive at about $1 per gram. If one were to fashion a lump of gallium in the shape of a spoon and put such a utensil in an empty tea cup, no one would notice. However, upon pouring the tea into the cup, the spoon would melt and disappear into the cup.

The discovery of the periodic table is one of the triumphs of modern science, organizing seemingly random materials into order. With the table we can predict, and explain, that carbon, silicon, germanium, tin and lead will behave chemically in similar ways. This is so because chemistry is the study of how one atom's electrons interact with another atom's electrons. Electrons "circle" the nucleus of an atom, which consists of protons and neutrons. The electrons circle in different orbits, each representing different energy levels, and the electrons in the highest orbit are the ones free enough to join up with the highest orbiting electrons of another atom. The elements carbon, silicon, germanium, tin and lead all have four electrons circling in their highest orbits. The structure of the table to the modern scientist is intuitive, but to the scientists of the 19th and early 20th centuries the structure had yet to be agreed upon. The work of Russian Nobel prize-winner Dmitri Mendeleev and others provided theoretical explanations for the work of experimental chemists. Further, gaps in the table showed experimental chemists where to look for new elements (the prize: for a while, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry named new elements after the discoverer).

Most of us have read on some packages of salt: "this salt does [not] provide iodide, a necessary nutrient". In addition to preventing many types of birth defects, iodine is necessary for proper thyroid function. (Iodide is an ion of the element iodine; it is what you get when you mix iodine with some other chemical, such as potassium.) Improper thyroid function can lead to (among other things) goiter and mental retardation. Starting with Switzerland in 1922, many countries required the addition to iodide to table salt as a cheap and effective way of insuring a sufficient intake. The British, while in control if India, in their infinite wisdom, taxed the production of salt. This tax was one of the policies Gandhi protested against, so that after the years of independence, as Western scientists pushed India to iodized its salt, it resisted the colonial intrusion. To this day, iodine deficiency is a public health issue in India.

Marie Curie was one of the few people, and the only woman, to receive two Nobel prizes. She shared the first, in physics, with her husband; they discovered that uranium's physics (radioactivity) was different than its chemistry (how its electrons interact with the electrons of other elements). Thus, to study the radioactive properties of uranium, it was not necessary to separate it from whatever it was found in, such as pitchblende. Scientists need only study the radioactivity of ninety-some elements, not millions of chemical combinations. She earned her second prize in chemistry for her discovery of radium and polonium. You have probably heard her name before, even though you can name but a few other Nobel prize winners. This is probably due to her travels throughout the world, including the United States, where she introduced crowds to her glowing radium samples. She enjoyed barely-secret trysts with many men, including colleagues. She died in 1934 at age 67 from radiation poisoning, one year before her daughter, Irène, won her own Nobel prize in chemistry. Irène herself died from radiation poisoning at age 59.

Despite her fame and her accomplishments, Madam Curie seems to have little interest among biographers. I just now searched the Denver Public Library for additional titles. All of the first ten listings, and seventeen of the first twenty listings, came from the juvenile/youth section. Only three of the first twenty listings were books targeted to an adult audience.

Lithium, element 3, is a salt. It appears directly above Na, element 11 and the symbol for sodium, a more well-known salt. Doctors use it as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses, including manic-depressive (bipolar) disease. Robert Lowell, a Pulitzer prize-winning poet of the 1960s and 70s suffered from bipolar disease. He won his prize in 1974, seven years after starting his lithium use, though many critics prefer his work from the 1960s. The depressive phase of bipolar disorder arises when the brain becomes depleted after a manic phase. The manic phase arises because proteins in the brain that normally rise and fall with sunlight, do not fall. Sufferers have proteins that remain embedded in the brain; no signal for fatigue is detected, and the brain is happy to continue for days ... until depletion. Lithium helps the brain shed the proteins in the evening, when they should normally fall off.

I should note that, while Kean seems comfortable with the foregoing description of lithium's effects on bipolar users, others are not as sure. In fairness, Kean describes lithium's effects as "complicated."

I was in high school when I first read books about quantum mechanics and particle physics and about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. I remember part of the explanation including the phrase "Observer-created reality". These books would describe the Schroedinger Cat thought experiment, where a cat was placed in a box along with a toxic-dose poisonous substance encased in a glass. A material with a half-life of a minute is placed in the box also; if this material decays it will trigger a geiger counter which is rigged to shatter the glass. Schroedinger asserted that after the half-life the cat was both dead and alive; the act of opening the box causes one or the other to occur. In my mind, this is a metaphysical, rather than a physics, assertion. The experiment parallels the particle-wave duality of light and applies to subatomic particles in ways not observable with human-sized objects. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that one's certainty regarding the position of an object is inversely related to one's uncertainty regarding that object's velocity.

Think of a car. We can see it as it crosses point A, and as it crosses point B. With a stopwatch and a ruler we can calculate its speed to whatever precision our watch and ruler afford. "See" means that photons of light bounce off the car and into our eyes. Photons have no appreciable mass in comparison to the weight of the car. A photon striking a subatomic particle however, is more like one billiard ball striking another. Perhaps they are not exactly sized, as in coin-operated billiards, but close enough such that the strike will substantially interfere with our ability to measure position or velocity or both.

Kean explained, to my astonishment, that the foregoing is somewhat inaccurate. The Heisenberg uncertainly principle is actually formula:

4 * Π * Δx * Δv >= Planck's constant

Delta-X is our uncertainty in position; delta-V our uncertainty regarding velocity. Planck's constant is very small, but not zero. The Bose-Einstein condensate, so-called because Einstein's work predicted it and Bose said so, is a form of matter that arises when one cools matter substantially. By substantially, we mean 1 billionth of a degree Kelvin. At such low temperature, atoms move hardly at all, and when the uncertainty regarding velocity is so small, the atoms become more confident about where they are positioned. In a University of Colorado experiment, scientists Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman reduced a few thousand rubidium atoms to this tiny temperature and observed them behave as a single, large "ghostly" atom. Their efforts netted them a portion of the 2001 physics Nobel prize.