Work Blues and Partly Digested Food

I haven’t gotten to spend as much time as I like with O this week, giving me a bit of the work blues. It’s my week to be responsible for my nemesis – capsule endoscopy.

It’s a nifty procedure. Just swallow a camera the size and shape of a big vitamin, wear a recorder, and 8 hours later download photos of the esophagus, stomach, small intestine, and colon. Very useful for examining the small intestine that can’t be reached with other kinds of endoscopy, but a huge pain to interpret. Each study has 8 hours of recording time, generating 57,600 images which must all be looked at. Unfortunately, there’s no helpful computer program to make the reading easier (by marking the abnormalities for me). And the software has the not-so-useful characteristic of occasionally corrupting the findings, resulting in getting to re-read the entire study. This happened to me today for the first time, but I won’t repeat the string of swear words and grumbling that erupted when I realized I would now be reading the study again. The capsule images are turned into a video, so it’s like watching a trip through the GI tract, but not as funny as when it happens on the Simpsons or Futurama, and not as cool as when it gets shown on a science show. There’s always a few people who don’t follow the prep instructions, so I get to look at their partly digested food. There’s also a bit of a seasick factor when watching the images as the capsule really bounces around in the stomach. Oh well, I finished my 8 studies for the week and now don’t have to read them again for a few months. Hmm, writing about Owen is more fun…