From: Amara Graps (amara@amara.com)
Date: Sun Apr 29 2001 - 05:12:29 MDT
From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de, Sat, 28 Apr 2001
>I dunno, I never thought cryonics as funny. Sick and creepy maybe,
>but never funny. It helps talking to the people who're doing it
>and watching a video of the procedure. It's still not pretty (unless
>you're the type who's horsing around during practical anatomy lessons
>as medical student) but it will help adjust your attitude.
I have a couple of contributions to this note.
1) Eight years ago Keith Henson posted a message to the extropians
list describing the medical procedure that precedes the part
where cryoprotectives are prefused in the patient. The beginning of
his message is the following:
>I wrote up how you go about putting in heart bypass plumbing--which is
>necessary before perfusing patients with cryoprotectives. Thought the
>"wet work" phase of cryonics might interest a few of you. The
>squeamish should skip the rest now.
I think that Keith provided a very valuable service by describing
it. Nothing substitutes practical information and knowledge,
especially about a topic which is often considered "abstract"
("uploading", etc.). I remembered Keith's post really well because I
gave him an ASCII "Squishiest Extropians Post" award, and I believe
that my stomach was queasy enough after his post that I skipped
lunch that day.
Instead of posting the "plumbing" description here, I have placed
the description at my web site (not permanently however):
http://www.amara.com/plumbing.txt
2) If you're a person like me who spends a huge amount of time in
an abstract world (me, working with astronomy data), the world of
other people's lives is sometimes shoved to the background. I
think that one of the best ways to experience "hard people issues"
and to become grounded in reality is to spend time in a hospital
(any kind of hospital). I don't think that a person can experience
reality any closer than that.
My own experience in a hospital was actually in a pathology lab.
When I was starting a small programming project several years ago to
write a Web interface to a breast cancer tumor SQL database for a
local hospital, the pathologist in charge of the project spent
several hours leading me through all of the steps that the doctors
perform when they diagnose tumor cells from breast cancer patients.
I know now how malignant tumor cells under the microscope appear
from women who will die in several months. For me, life and death
became much more real when I saw that graphical evidence. If
you _really_ want to know the state of cancer research,
*please* spend time in a pathlogist's lab. You will discover that
the cancer researchers are fighting a hard battle.
Amara
********************************************************************
Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the
future of the human race." -- H. G. Wells
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