Flashes of Panic

Last night I went down to Springfield to get an ultrasound of my foot at Baystate Hospital. Aside from being asked at nearly every step of the process if I had “been registered” (answer: yes, on the phone a few days ago) it was pretty fascinating.

To start with, the ultrasound machine is easily the coolest piece of dedicated hardware I’ve seen since the TV trucks at Boston. The probes (there are several different ones) jack in to the front of the system with immense multi-pin plugs which must move staggering amounts of data. And the box appears to be running some kind of specialized video-editing stuff; the technician, in addition to a normal keyboard and trackball, also has a range of lit keys for swapping images, freezing one on half of the screen and then continuing to scan on the other half, etc. etc. A common technique was scanning part of my right foot (the one that hurts), freezing the image, then scanning the left foot and matching the image right-and-left on the screen. At one stage, she showed me flaring spots of color on the screen and said, “That’s blood flowing.”

I found this all pretty impressive while I was thinking of it as a high-powered workstation running specialized software, but eventually I figured out that it was, in fact, a machine—the entire system was specialized on this task. It probably didn’t even have an “operating system” as I understand it; it boots directly into this image-processing program, and that’s what it does. I did confirm that there was a network cable plugged in the back, but I haven’t established what good that did.

Anyway, after the technician took a look (and she knew where to look; she, too, has been sleeping with the sock for a while) I finished my book while waiting for the doctor to turn up and take his look. The ultimate verdict was inconclusive; the doctor actually said, “There’s not enough here to support a diagnosis of plantar fasciitis, even though that’s clearly what’s wrong.”

I suspect this is going to mean I will be headed somewhere, maybe back to Baystate, for an MRI. Apparently this is not an uncommon way of finding PF ruptures.

Perversely, I’m getting more stabbing pain than usual today.

Now playing: Shallow from Rock N Roll by Ryan Adams