Wet Read: What I miss (a little)

“I don’t need a KUB to see that you are FOS”

—Spotted on a ribbon at RSNA 2016

I saw that you all took my advice at RSNA this year. NOT! There was as many ribbons as always. Personal record, I saw a very distinguished individual with 12 ribbons on their name tag, and with their head pulled forward, stooped and bent by the additional gravitational pull of the load. I had no sympathy. They should have listened to me earlier. Off to the current topic.

We were shopping a little the other day and I was treated to a display of vinyl LP records. Seriously. In the new world we inhabit, whatever was old is new again. I hear that the vinyl LP (of course, the vinyl has to be real special. I think it is mined on Jupiter or something, and it has some special property that makes the music real, real good) is making a comeback. Hipsters want them, presumably. Or real audiophiles. You remember audiophiles? Those people who swore that their music was best when played on a $200,000 system (that used tubes left over from Roentgen’s experiments), even though they were a little hard of hearing and you had to yell at them? I remember. So, anyway, looking through all those LPs made me remember the feeling I used to get rolling through the album bins at my favorite record store. Does anyone else remember that feeling? You could see the artwork on the covers, feel the heft of the album, imagine what it would sound like when you got it home? I spent many hours sifting through albums, at a great shop that played killer music all the time.

Which leads me to the radiology connection. Film. I sometimes miss going through film jackets to find “the study.” You’d have the film room (another relic) pull the jacket, you’d sift through it, and hope that you could spot the study from the correct day. “Aaaah! Got it!” You’d be so happy to find it, to put it up on the viewbox, and celebrate that no one had stolen the film (surgeons were always taking the post-op mishap films) or had already copied them (the radiologists), leaving you that crappy copy exam.

But, I remembered those film cuts. Not a paper cut, although occasionally you got one on the jacket. Those are for cowards. A film cut could bleed you out. Sever your finger. Get you disability. And then, PACS didn’t seem quite so unfriendly.

Keep doing that good work. Mahalo.