All Clear

Okey, doke. Lesion out and the margins are clear. The dermatopathology fellow was kind enough to give me a tour of my biopsy. It turns out that one *can* use an iPhone for photomicroscopy as long as one's expectations aren't too high.


Here is a chunk of my normal skin at medium power. I took this by just holding my iPhone 3GS up to the microscope's eyepiece. By no means diagnostic, but good enough for blogging purposes.

Once they stitch me up, I'll head over to my office and work on ARRS and AUR abstracts like a crazed ferret for the rest of the afternoon.

The Smell of Long Pig in the Morning

Turns out I'm live-blogging my outpatient surgery today via my iPhone.


I'm having a minor skin lesion removed today in our university's rather slick dermatology outpatient surgery center. The drill here is:

1. Remove the lesion
2. Take a 45 minute break while a dermatopathologist processes and analyzes the tissue.
3. Repeat until the margins of the lesion are clear.

I'm grateful for this built-in break. I came to my appointment NPO (ate nothing after midnight) and I'm hungry.

To make matters worse, the electrocautery unit they use to stop the minor bleeding creates a smell that is disturbingly similar to barbequed pork.

I used my first break to run to the espresso stand next door for a bite. There I spotted a "bacon, sausage, egg and cheese, French toast bagel sandwich" for sale. No shit. However, like a car wreck you can't turn away from, I just couldn't stop looking at it. OK, OK, I bought the damned thing.

However, the unwillingly tasty scent of sizzling long pig was still fresh in my nostrils. Fresh enough, that when the espresso lady asked: "Can I heat that up for you?", I had to say,

"Uhhhh… No!"

Mysterious iProd in the Works...

This just in from Ars Technica:

An updated USBConfiguration.plist in the most recent version of iPhone OS 3.1 beta offers compelling evidence that Apple has continued development on an unknown device, referred to as "iProd," that was first discovered in March.

The mind boggles.

Of course, my mental image of an "iProd" may be a bit skewed, having grown up in the ranch country of West Texas. Out there, a prod is a sort of cow taser, used by some to herd stubborn animals. We preferred positive incentives -- a shake of a feed bucket is all it took to make our cattle come running. The only cattle prod I've seen in several decades is the one hanging over the waiting line in Rudy's, my favorite Austin barbeque spot.

Of course, I would never actually use an iProd at work. As with cattle, so with radiology residents -- I prefer positive incentives, such as chocolate.

However, one would look swell hanging up in our reading room over the PACS stations. Until I find out the identity of Apple's latest mystery device, I'll keep an eye peeled for something similar on the iTunes Store. As the Apple ads say, "there's an app for everything..."