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I had included this picture in a post on International Women’s Day. JMB had suggested that it would be more appropriate for Mother’s Day.

So here it is, ‘trotted out’ on a more appropriate occasion.

[Image Credit]

‘Mother and Child’ by Jamini Roy.

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I got this in a forwarded email today. Some of you may have seen it already.

The scary thing about this is how plausible it is, given the current trend towards having all personal information including medical records online.

Operator: "Thank you for calling Pizza Galaxy Kholi . May I have your…"

Customer: "Hello, can I order.."

Operator : "Can I have your multi purpose card number first, Sir?"

Customer: "It’s eh…, hold…….. ..on….. .889861356102049 998-45-54610"

Operator : "OK… you’re… Mr. Singh and you’re calling from 43rd Floor, Akask View Apt, Cantt Road, …….. Your home number is 4094-2366, your office 76452302 and your mobile is 0142662566.  Which number are you calling from now Sir?"

Customer: "Home! How did you get all my phone numbers?

Operator : "We are connected to the system Sir"

Customer: "May I order your Seafood Pizza…"

Operator : "That’s not a good idea Sir"

Customer: "How come?"

Operator : "According to your medical records, you have high blood pressure and even higher cholesterol level Sir"

Customer: "What?… What do you recommend then?"

Operator : "Try our Low Fat Hokkien Mee Pizza. You’ll like it"

Customer: "How do you know for sure?"

Operator : "You borrowed a book entitled "Popular Hokkien Dishes" from the National Library last week Sir"

Customer: "OK I give up… Give me three family size ones then, how much will that cost?"

Operator : "That should be enough for your family of 10, Sir. The total is Rs 2249.99"

Customer: "Can I pay by credit card?"

Operator : "I’m afraid you have to pay us cash, Sir. Your credit card is over the limit and you owe your bank Rs.10,720.55 since October last year. That’s not including the late payment charges on your housing loan, Sir."

Customer: "I guess I have to run to the neighbourhood ATM and withdraw some cash before your guy arrives"

Operator : "You can’t Sir. Based on the records, you’ve reached your daily limit on machine withdrawal today"

Customer: "Never mind just send the pizzas, I’ll have the cash ready. How long is it gonna take anyway?"

Operator : "About 45 minutes Sir, but if you can’t wait you can always come and collect it on your scooter.. ."

Customer: " What!"

Operator : "According to the details in system, you own a Lambretta 1969 Vintage Scooter,…registration number USE 8999…"

Customer: " ????"

Operator : "Is there anything else Sir?"

Customer: "Nothing… by the way… aren’t you giving me that 3 free bottles of cola as advertised?"

Operator : "We normally would Sir, but based on your records you’re also diabetic…. … "

Customer: #$$^%&$@$%^

Operator : "Better watch your language Sir. Remember on 11th Nov 1986 you were convicted for using abusive language on a policeman who stopped you for driving through a one way, in fact you were driving a 1973 Ambassador bearing registration number UTD 4267…….

Customer: [Faints]

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Blog friend Dr. Ramona Bates, plastic surgeon and author of the blog Suture for a Living is hosting this week’s edition of Grand Rounds, the medical blog carnival.

Go check out the week’s best in medical blogs and some great pictures and tidbits of information about Arkansas, like this one here:

Arkansas actually has a diamond mine open to the public - you get to keep what you find

Thanks for including my submission, Ramona.

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I know the title is not nice. It’s not even original.

When I saw this cartoon in yesterday’s newspaper,

[Image Credit]

I wanted to post it on my blog and write some scathing rebuttal of the moronic claim. But I found that Lakshmi has done a better job.

Madhu, one of the commenters on her blog linked to an even better cartoon in the Malayalam daily Mathrubhoomi. My Malayalam reading skills have become rusty, I can make out that it starts with ‘Mookku mutta thinnu mudikkuka…’ then I got lost. Any help in deciphering the rest will be appreciated.

Popularity: 91% [?]

I was tagged by Ramona Bates who was tagged by Midwife with a Knife for the six word memoir meme.

The instructions are to summarize my life in a six word memoir, with optional photo illustration and to tag six others.

Some of the previous players have done well:

Ramona - My life is full of stitches.

MWWAK - Catch a baby, watch the floor.

TBTAM - I want to do it all.

Dr.Wes - Show them kindness, integrity, and love.

Happy Hospitalist - I’m Sorry Honey. It’s My Fault.

Here’s mine:

Aiming for accuracy in grayscale images.

I don’t think I have any images of me in action as a radiologist (I do realise that there are some who would say that being a radiologist and the concept of action are mutually exclusive or oxymoronic), so I borrowed an image from here to post in this meme.

I had declared a few months ago that I won’t do memes. I took this on because it was simultaneously thought-provoking and easy-looking.

I pass this along to…

Lakshmi (following the established tagging tradition of this blog).

Moof - hoping that this will get her out of her serious pursuit of academic excellence and into some light hearted blogging.

JMB.

Lekhni.

Rads.

Samurai Radiologist. (I recently discovered his delightful blog, Not Totally Rad - Shedding Invisible Light on Medical Imaging. Go explore).

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This happened when I was an intern.

I was on night duty in my General Medicine rotation and was in the casualty near midnight because nothing much was happening in the wards. An emaciated old man was brought in by a bunch of rustic folk. He was wrapped in a threadbare shawl and there was a horrible smell of rotting flesh emanating from him.

One of the men in the group told the Casualty Medical Officer (CMO) that the old man had a bad wound in his left forearm for more than a month. He had sustained an injury in the farm a month ago and was being ‘treated’ by a traditional bone setter. The CMO (a perspicacious doctor who knew this was probably going to end up in an amputation of some sort) sent word to the surgeon-on-call.

Meanwhile, the surgical resident and intern who were there in the casualty got the old man to an examination couch. The stink of rotting flesh worsened as they removed the shawl. The old man was naked from the waist up. His left upper limb was swathed in a bandage from the palm to almost the shoulder level. I use the term bandage very loosely. The thing wrapped around his arm had no resemblance to a conventional bandage.

Traditional bone setters in our part of the world use strips of cotton cloth soaked in a concoction (I am tempted to call it a witch’s brew, but traditional bone-setting is an exclusive male preserve) of herbal oils and splints made of select kinds of wood to set and bind broken bones. This particular specimen of ‘bandage’ was oily, black, grubby and encrusted with stinking stuff the nature of which we could only guess at (if we were so inclined, of course). It would not have been a great surprise if cow dung was part of it.

The surgical resident and intern donned masks and gloves (more for their protection, I guess) and proceeded to unwind the ‘bandage.’ The intern, a classmate, was supporting the limb by holding on to the hand and elbow. The resident was gingerly unwinding the ‘bandage’ starting high in the arm. A few minutes later, when the resident had reached near the elbow, the intern lost his balance and took a sudden jerky step backwards away from the patient.

To his and the onlookers’ horror, the patient’s forearm came away with him, detached at the elbow, leaving the discoloured condyles of the humerus exposed.

*This was the story that I alluded to in this comment at Bongi’s blog. Though this is a tame story compared to some of his, I guess it would raise at least a small blip in his weird-sh!tometer.

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Note: This is a series of images of CT scan in the diagnosis, staging and therapeutic follow-up of colorectal cancers, which I prepared for a talk that I had to give to general practitioners. By ‘prepared’ I mean I had selected representative images and annotated them to show the abnormality to laymen. So this series is not going to be exhaustively informative or educative. I would suggest places like this and this for more information on colorectal cancers for health professionals and patients who stumble in here from search engines.

Hepatic Flexure

Oblique coronal MPR image showing a large exophytic mass at the Hepatic Flexure of colon with mild circumferential wall thickening in the Ascending Colon. The ileo-caecal junction is normal. Multiple metastases are seen in the Liver (black arrows).

Sagittal MPR image of the same mass. Both images show iodinated oral contrast in the small bowel, contrast enema in the large bowel and intravenous contrast enhancement of the abdominal organs and blood vessels.

For further information on colorectal cancers:

US National Cancer Institute’s Colon and Rectal Cancer Home Page and this online booklet for patients.

Mayo Clinic’s Colon Cancer Page.

Tags: colorectal cancer, Computed Tomography

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The latest episode of SurgeXperiences, the surgical blog carnival is up in limerick form at:

Surgeonsblog, by Sid Schwab, a retired General Surgeon int the Pacific Northwest in the US and author of the book "Cutting Remarks: Insights and Recollections of a Surgeon."

Go. Read. Enjoy. Think.

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