On Mar 27, 4:22*pm, Monk wrote:

Hey Bob! *Glad to see you're still at it.
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Dear Monk,

You'll have to define 'it'

Peering into my own body? Not by incision nor X-ray but
electronically using Magnetic Resonance Imaging. That's a big IT .
If you can stand the pain or the noise, you can get a 'Full Body Scan'
for your IT.

I couldn't stand the pain of the painless procedure.

Indeed, the procedure itself IS perfectly painless -- everyone sez
so. It was the position -- flat on my back -- which proved
intolerable.

As for the procedure... when your body is inserted into a powerful...
a POWERFUL magnetic field, the molecules within the cells that are
randomly aligned re-align themselves with drill-team precision. Now
hit them with a jolt of electromagnetic energy, such as your favorite
Top Forty radio station, and they will try to align themselves with
that.

As a ham radio operator I was interested in the procedure but that
interest quickly wained when I saw the powerful magnet was roughly
akin to a sewer pipe of claustrophobic dimensions. But the back pain
was too much. I managed to get through the exam -- about 15 minutes
-- but I would need massive amounts of pain-killers to last any
longer.

What happens when they hit your aligned molecules with RF is that each
molecule tries to realign to an angle that is -- apparently --
proportional to the RF. And it is that emitted signal the machine
records. My back was good for 58 megabytes which, when viewed with
the appropriate software, has Kodachrome detail of tissue as well as
bone. Tumors are revealed, as well as the honeycomb of what was once
good, healthy bone.

Does anyone even remember Kodachrome in these digital days? I recall
a then-famous money manager urging everyone to buy Kodak...

Looking at the image of my spine reveals the rather disturbing fact
that my #5 Lumbar Vertebrae is gone, save for a sickle-shaped shard of
bone industriously digging into the meat & muscle, producing
spectacular light-shows of pain. The bone doctor isn't too happy with
my spine, which he sees as a playground. I'm not too happy with it
myself, since everything is connected to it.

In effect, the missing vertebrae has been replaced with Pain.

They've already tried gluing it back together. They, meaning
physicians, don't like to mention their failures but the glue-job was
one of their less-than-perfect efforts. What they're talking now is a
Graft Job. Given their success with the J.B.Weld I'm wary of giving
them the go-ahead. After all, they have an endless supply of
patients, some of whom I assume they see on time, whereas I have only
one spine to play with, which I always deliver ON -TIME rather than 45
minutes late.

I mean, think about it. If the guy isn't competent to read a clock do
you really want him rummaging around in your spine?

So my '..it..' for today is Thinking, as in Thinking About It.

-Bob