Like Removing A Nail

So you always hear about the techniques used when people are being tortured…one of them being have their nails ripped off.

Ouch!

So this week when I had a ingrown toenail removed, I said jokingly to the podiatrist:

“Do you do waterboarding also?”

Ok, funny, not-funny.  Still got a chuckle!

But in removing the nail, the technique is really so amazing.

They inject the toe with a local anesthetic, but hey even the injections into a sensitive toe could be pretty uncomfortable. 

So before the injection, they spray you toe with a freezing spray, so you don’t even feel the injections.

When he actually removed the nail and chemically destroyed the nailbed so it wouldn’t come back, I didn’t feel a thing.

I mean, I literally didn’t feel a thing!

It was a wonderful feeling–whatever he did, however much it would’ve hurt–it didn’t.

I thought to myself in a wave of anesthetic and freeze-numbed delight, this is absolutely wonderful.

No pain, not even a pinch. 

I could sense everything going on around me, take it in, think about it, even mull it over again and again, and just smile. 

In a way, I thought how wonderful life would be to have the ability to think in the head and feel from the heart, but have no pain or suffering in the body. 

Yes, there are plenty of damning and painful thoughts, memories, and heartaches, but for the body to be numb (even momentarily) to all the bad stuff that actually felt pretty good.

How would it feel if the mind and heart also felt no pain and only bliss–I smiled even more. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Medicine Back When

   
I thought you may find these photos interesting of how medicine used to be–not all that long ago.

 

I took these at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. 

 

1) The Circo Electric Bed rotates a patient 210 degrees to help them go from a prone to a vertical position; push the button and you go almost loop de loop. 

 

2) A Hospital Ward–no private or semi-private rooms yet; say hello to a dozen or so neighboring patients sharing a room, moaning and groaning, each their own. 

 

3) An X-ray–say cheese as this machine peers inside your body, hopefully not emitting too much radiation to the patient.

 

4) An operation–looks serious, almost like an alien abduction, hope they had plenty of anesthesia so it didn’t hurt. 

 

Okay, medicine has come a long way…but we’re not there yet, not by a medical tricorder longshot. 😉 

 

(Source Photos: Andy Blumenthal)