Bowling By Blowing
When you stop writing posts, and then try to start again, it feels like trying to start off a drag race with your tires melted to the tarmac.
Can you tell I've been watching a lot of Top Gear (British car show) lately? messypeaches is the one who got me into watching it, and much as I don't need another thing to Tivo, I'm glad of it. Top Gear is brain candy. The hosts are hilarious, it's segmented so you don't really have to think hard, and I've learned a lot about cars (which I didn't think I cared about before, and still don't care about, really. Much. Really... I want an orange metal flake Tesla Roadster.)
So where am I going with this post? Nowhere. Nowhere at all. My friend Anet tells me Mercury is in retrograde. Perhaps that's what's behind the upheaval I've been having lately. I seem to know a lot of people going through crisis of one sort or another right now, and I'm trying to be a good friend, a wise counselor, a steady and sane touch pole, and not lose my own equilibrium in the process. I wish I was as calm and mature as I'm capable of pretending to be.
Since I don't want to do an infodump on what I've been doing lately, instead I will talk about the video game my doctor's office got. That's right, video game. Evidently the state of the art in asthma management is nitric oxide measurement. When my doctor said to me, "I want to do a nitric oxide test on you today" I was momentarily looking forward to it, until he explained that it's nitrous oxide that the dentist uses to get you high. Nitric oxide is just a gas created by inflammatory cell metabolism. So measuring nitric oxide in your exhalation can give you an idea about how much inflammation is in your lungs. Inflammation = bad, in case you didn't assume that. Cool, huh?
So anyway, you breathe into this tube and exhale slowly and steadily, and it measures how much nitric oxide there is in one exhalation, in parts per billion. The thing is, you have to exhale slowly and steadily. So the machine has a user interface to tell you you are doing it right. It has two modes. There's the normal, boring medical device mode, where you have to keep the arrow in the green zone. But the machine has a full color LCD, and here's where the other mode comes in. Bowling mode. Beautifully rendered in 3-D, with your choice of ball (I chose swirly blue, but red with flames and watery green were also options.) You have to keep the ball in the center of the lovely polished wood lane, and if you do it all the way to the end, you get a strike. Yay!
Normal is 0 to 10 ppb of NO. I had 32, which is not great, so that means I'm switching inhaled steroid dose a bit. Anyway, though, it was cool. And the tech was invented here in Menlo Park. Anyway. Maybe tomorrow I'll write a substantive post.
Can you tell I've been watching a lot of Top Gear (British car show) lately? messypeaches is the one who got me into watching it, and much as I don't need another thing to Tivo, I'm glad of it. Top Gear is brain candy. The hosts are hilarious, it's segmented so you don't really have to think hard, and I've learned a lot about cars (which I didn't think I cared about before, and still don't care about, really. Much. Really... I want an orange metal flake Tesla Roadster.)
So where am I going with this post? Nowhere. Nowhere at all. My friend Anet tells me Mercury is in retrograde. Perhaps that's what's behind the upheaval I've been having lately. I seem to know a lot of people going through crisis of one sort or another right now, and I'm trying to be a good friend, a wise counselor, a steady and sane touch pole, and not lose my own equilibrium in the process. I wish I was as calm and mature as I'm capable of pretending to be.
Since I don't want to do an infodump on what I've been doing lately, instead I will talk about the video game my doctor's office got. That's right, video game. Evidently the state of the art in asthma management is nitric oxide measurement. When my doctor said to me, "I want to do a nitric oxide test on you today" I was momentarily looking forward to it, until he explained that it's nitrous oxide that the dentist uses to get you high. Nitric oxide is just a gas created by inflammatory cell metabolism. So measuring nitric oxide in your exhalation can give you an idea about how much inflammation is in your lungs. Inflammation = bad, in case you didn't assume that. Cool, huh?
So anyway, you breathe into this tube and exhale slowly and steadily, and it measures how much nitric oxide there is in one exhalation, in parts per billion. The thing is, you have to exhale slowly and steadily. So the machine has a user interface to tell you you are doing it right. It has two modes. There's the normal, boring medical device mode, where you have to keep the arrow in the green zone. But the machine has a full color LCD, and here's where the other mode comes in. Bowling mode. Beautifully rendered in 3-D, with your choice of ball (I chose swirly blue, but red with flames and watery green were also options.) You have to keep the ball in the center of the lovely polished wood lane, and if you do it all the way to the end, you get a strike. Yay!
Normal is 0 to 10 ppb of NO. I had 32, which is not great, so that means I'm switching inhaled steroid dose a bit. Anyway, though, it was cool. And the tech was invented here in Menlo Park. Anyway. Maybe tomorrow I'll write a substantive post.