Decrepit Old Fool

Check out this fascinating TED talk by surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr, on Surgery’s past, present and future.  You’ll see 10,000 years of surgical history, from stone-aged trepanation to amazing robots, and even ways of seeing through flesh during surgery, without using radiation.  Seeing, even, the boundaries of otherwise invisible tumors in real time.

I’m not just geeking out over the cool technology; obviously everything about surgery catches my attention these days.  One takeaway for me is that the new techniques are great if you need precision excision but wouldn’t have been useful at all for what happened to me.  For certain classes of calamity, there may never be any substitute for the twelve-inch incision.  And mine is less than charming right now as the nerves get reacquainted and start sending in their garbled reports to the head office.