Paging George Berkeley

I'm visually oriented. No big surprise there; humans generally are. What I mean specifically is I'm at home, resting after surgery, and I find it really annoying when I need to use the ice pack because it covers my eyes. I'm awake and alert and thinking about the writing I'm working on and even if I'm listening to a podcast about writing (the Writing Excuses podcast, which I discovered through participant Howard Taylor, the writer and artist of webcomic Schlock Mercenary) I am bored and impatient.

Odd. It is about words, but more, about the concepts those words are intended to capture, but I want and need to see the words on paper. The podcasts are barely enough to divert my attention from cold eyes (literally; the ice pack, again).

Yeah, surgery. I don't remember it. They hooked me up, I sat around for about four hours until they had me walk over to the operating theater holding my bag of Ringer's in one hand, I lay down on the operating table and blinked the sleep out of my eyes in a quiet room with blood dripping out of my nose.

Retrograde surgical amnesia. Surgery might have been painful. I might have panicked going under. I might have complained about the fit of the mask. I will never know; those experiences were edited from me like the gaps in the Watergate tapes. Total lost a little over an hour. As far as I know I had contiguous memory from waking up in recovery but my only checksum is that the timing works.

That is; I had a blood pressure cuff on and I counted three inflation events in the time before my anesthesiologist came over to check up on me. They felt nominally the same elapsed time between each, and I know the machine is typically set to a fifteen minute interval, and the anesthesiologist confirmed it had been about an hour since I was wheeled in. So I may have lost a few bits here and there but I still experienced them as contiguous elapsed time (I have a pretty decent awareness of elapsed time when sleeping, generally able to guess within 25% of how long I've been under).

Yeah, it was kind of a Femi Estimation day. I had stuck my book (aka, iPhone with Kindle) at the bottom of my property bag and I got rather bored sitting there in gown with wires and tubes dripping off me waiting for the doctor to arrive. Started studying the parts of the IV, all the various glands and valves up to the bag of Ringer's Lactate (clearly marked, plus the cabinet it came out of was within my line of sight).

Wasn't until I thought about the problem of keeping air getting into the line that I realized the length of the tube had to be carrying saline and, from the looks of the valves, at sufficient pressure to keep my own blood where it belonged. Then I looked at the drip chamber where the level wasn't increasing and it became obvious there was a positive pressure in the system. Aka it had been dripping into me all this time.

So I estimated the droplet size and rate (2-3 mm in diameter, falling at one per second) and that came out to 500 ml/hour. Figuring the bag had been on for two hours at that point and presumably had started from one liter, that was within a factor of two. Tried to calculate column height versus blood pressure as a cross-check was a no-go, though. But there was another nice cross-check; I needed to piss, human bladder holds about .8 liters, typical urination from a less-full bladder is 1-2 cups and a cup is either 250 or 350 ml (I couldn't remember, but then I was only going for about a factor of 2 accuracy). Hadn't had any water since leaving home that morning so that was basically the Ringer's going through.

On the way back from the bathroom I let the bag in my hand go below my heart level and I got red tint in the line about ten cm up from my arm. Nice cross-check; the positive pressure was indeed column height. Over the next hour I made a mental mark on the bag and was able to verify a flow of around 100 ml over 20 minutes.

Yeah. This is how physics geeks pass the time. You should see me contemplating the competing regimes of convection, conduction and radiation over a cooling cup of coffee.

The operation? Nasal Polpectomy and turbinate reduction. I'm in the second day of recovery and mild inflammation is setting in but I'm basically able to breathe freely through my nose for the first time in at least a year. Too early to tell yet but I have a strong feeling this is going to return a lot of my strength.