A few days ago I wrote about a decade-old medical experience with parallels to modern tech. Today I have a recent story from home with parallels to medicine.
We have an indor fountain in our fancy new home, [Note: The story of how we ended up in a house some two levels of fancifullness above our needs and wants deserves a separate post, maybe a whole series of posts. ] a thin slab of rock over which water runs in a smooth sheeth.
Problem one: when the water tank is full the fountain is nearly silent. In the dry Colorado air, it is full for a day or two at most, after which it becomes an increasingly annoying drip-drip-dripapalooza.
Problem two: you can’t fill a fountain with plain tap water, unless you want to clog the pipes with sediment. No, you need it to be deionized, at least aquarium-grade, preferably distilled.
Problem three: the only place that will refill a 3 gallon bottle of deinozed water near us is Whole Foods, which during my time in the US went from the third great Wonder of Capitalism (Costco being number one, TJ’s number two) to a soul-sucking dump. I was not about to make twice-weekly trips to Whole Foods a family ritual.
So, we got ourselves a home deionizer that hooked up to our laundy room’s faucet and produced 3 gallons of fountain-ready water — along with around 4 gallons of waist water; it is not a terribly efficient system — in about 45 minutes and at fractions of a penny per gallon. Waste tube goes into the sink, output tube goes into the 3 gallon bottle. What could go wrong?
Well you could leave it unattended for too long is what could go wrong, and it did, I did, within a few weeks of my installing it. One moment you are turning on the laundry room faucet before dinner thinking the length of an evening family meal is just enough for the bottle to fill up, the next you are sitting at your computer finishing up slides for next day’s lecture when you are startled by your wife’s loud, anxious, not really panicked but certainly urgent question from two stories down of why there was water drip-drip-dripping from the recessed light fixture onto the glass cooktop.
Not 10 seconds had passed from the downstairs yelp to my running to the laundry room and turning off the faucet. There wasn’t that much water on the floor, and none at all under the washer and dryer which were mercifully elevated with the tiles underneath clearly visible. However much water went over, and from the timing of everything it could have been up to 4 gallons, must have quickly found its way down under the floor, which was also the kitchen ceiling. But whatever damage there was, it had already happened. There was nothing to do but survey it, right?
Wrong. The process of surveying included climbing onto the kitchen island, as the recessed lights were right above it an inaccesible by ladder. On the island was also a stove. With a glass cooktop. Which I was very careful not to put pressure on getting onto the island, because of course the glass was fragile and not meant to be stomped on. But for one of the two lights, which ended up not being a conduit for the drips, I had to — oh so very gently — lay my knee onto the stove so that I could have a better grasp of the trim. Relieved that there was no water underneath, I quickly turned to the other one, behind me, bending my knee ever so slightly in the process, hearing a gentle click down below.
So that is the story of how our attempt to boycott MacKenzie Scott’s husband led to an $850 cooktop repair bill but — mercifully — no substantial water damage. Squint hard enough and you will also see a story of medical misadventures, chasing one fix with another for a problem of your own making until you make a critical mistake.
Like the time someone had a thyroid ultrasound to screen for cancer — please, don’t ever do this — and found a few thyroid nodules, benign under a microscope, but also a plump lymph node in the neck. That one was also biopsied, the result being some scar tissue and a piece of muscle so it may not have been as plump as the sonographer had thought, which should have provided reassurance but instead only prompted some to ask how we could tell that the person — let’s not call them a patient as there was never anything wrong with them — didn’t truly have lymphoma? I would argue that their probability of having it would be the same as anyone else’s, the suspicious lymph node being a nothingburger, but in the great game of Cover Your Ass someone else decided to scan the patients whole body, leading to a bonanza of incidental findings of the kind you would suspect to see in a 60-year-old smoker, with so many radiographic ghosts in which to stick a needle, maybe miss, maybe cause bleeding or infection.
But hey, at least we did something.