Showing posts with label medicine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label medicine. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

I Present to You...Tinnitus

Yeah I know that 'ringing in your ears' doesn't sound that interesting but this article on it in the New Yorker is kind of fascinating. There's brain scans, people!

Plus, I'm always facinated by stories of people who were totally normal and then bam!! Medical mystery and they're miserable. Like this guy:

"Last May, David Nowak, a sixty-four-year-old retired machine repairman, had an ear infection that his doctor treated with antibiotics. Shortly thereafter, he heard a loud horn in the street, and has been plagued by tinnitus ever since. ... Now, he said, “My life has come to a halt. I can’t do anything. I can’t concentrate.” One Sunday, he told me, he went out and stood by a metal flagpole during a storm, hoping that lightning would strike, and that he had gone to the cemetery and “begged my mother to take me. I wish I would pass away.”"

Aw! Sorry David.

And did you know, "...that hearing loss accompanying tinnitus is now the No. 1 cause of disability among veterans of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Body Parts! Gross!

3 years ago I read this article in the NYTimes about early research into face transplants while I was high, and it totally freaked me out. Actually the Times had a bunch of scary articles around that time, like this one about human/animal amalgams used for medical purposes.
Way to freak me out Times. Yikes!

Um, anyway so I got totally icked out, but then before you know it face transplants are a go! And it's only really freaky because the 1st person they chose to get a donor face ended up being this suicidal French woman whose dog ate half her face off after she tried to overdose on painkillers.
I guess the face eating woke her up. As it would.

News today from East Coast correspondent Jeff, the Krauts bring us the 1st double arm transplant. How weird would that be to have no arms for 6 years (stupid farm machinery) and then to wake up with 2 arms that weren't even yours but that you could use.

Obvi it would be awesome to be able to like go to the bathroom by yourself again, but what a trip! I just hope they didn't use criminal mastermind arms because maybe you can control one arm but you're no match for 2 evil arms. What, are you going to foot wrestle them??