Dear everyone,
The weather last weekend (Mother’s Day), and this weekend
has been rainy, even though it has warmed up.
Too bad, since I had anticipated distributing my share of Mom’s remains
around 1261. We will have a warm, dry
weekend eventually! Jeff and Joan managed
to do it several weeks ago, and I guess Vanessa, Evelyn and Theo are now next
on deck.
Last night Cindy and watched the movie Vice with Christian Bale
(who did a great job) as Dick Cheney, and Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld. Although some of the movie is played for
laughs, much of what happens is too horrible to consider (although we must). It was the type of movie where you wanted to
avert your eyes, but you had to keep watching.
The movie makes quite clear its belief that Cheney and Co. (Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, etc.) were responsible for the (continuing) disaster of Iraq. If you haven’t seen it, and you have a taste
for political horror, I recommend it.
Afterwards I asked Cindy a philosophical question - - which
is the way to live? To be a true
believer and follow the tenets of some (absolute) ideology - - or to chase
after personal attainment and aggrandizement? Even though most of the small
details in the movie about Cheney’s life are wholly made up (given his penchant
for secrecy), I was left with a feeling about him as a complex person twisting
between these two poles of thought (and some sneaking admiration for him as a
complete SOB).
Later this evening we are going to go up North to take Roger,
and Jim, Amy and Michael Tuchler to Bob
Chinn’s Crab House, selected because it is a close drive for them, and also
because I know oysters will be available.
Roger hosted many of us last weekend at Northmoor, where I split a
softshell crab entrée and a roasted duck entrée with Owen. Yum.
Roger indicated in his letter that our dinner would only
happen if I wasn’t called to the hospital on an emergency - - I’m not on call
that often, but I did consult on a brain tumor case by telephone a couple of
weeks ago, where the pathologist on call sent me pictures of the frozen section
via his telephone. The quality was not
super high, but adequate enough for me to make the correct diagnosis (it also
helped that I knew something about the patient history and radiology, so I had
a limited selection of possible diseases).
Telepathology, as it is called, has been around for at least
15 years and is increasingly used in this type of situation, where a specialist
pathologist is contacted to assist with an emergency frozen section diagnosis,
especially in remote, understaffed health facilities (like Vail Hospital,
Andy). Unfortunately, the digitizing of
all pathology slides has been slow in coming, since it is an added cost on top
of making the slides (unlike radiology, where no one uses photographic film
anymore – the images are digitized from the outset). Also, pathology images of
adequate resolution are huge compared to X-rays - - kilobytes compared to
megabytes, so there are issues of data flow and storage, also. I will be long
retired before the digital pathology laboratory becomes the quotidian
reality. Perhaps not so for molecular diagnosis,
this gets cheaper, faster, and better with each passing week. I bought a textbook on this technology a few
weeks ago, and I am almost done with it.
I won’t pretend to be a molecular pathologist now, but at least I can
understand some of the lingo.
Love, H.
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