Powerless

Nobody wants to be powerless.  The word itself conjures up visions of the downtrodden, the outcasts, the impoverished.  The first step of 12-step programs includes an admission that one is powerless over the addiction which has consumed them.  The inability to do normal, everyday things that we take for granted can be incredibly debilitating.  And there is nothing like having a state of powerlessness foisted upon one’s self to bring all this home.

This past Sunday night, I experienced powerlessness, up close and personally.  Late that night, the heavy snow that had been falling all evening finally took its toll on some local power lines, and my electricity went out.  I was powerless.

When I first get up in the morning, I walk the cat.  You read that right – I have a cat that does not always find his litter box, and so, like a dog, we walk him.  Take him downstairs to the facilities, at which point he is happy to oblige.  I usually don’t turn on the lights on the way (I was raised to turn things off when they weren’t necessary), and this time of year (November), it’s dark at 6 in the morning.  But I know the way, and don’t need to turn on the lights until I turn the last corner in the basement.  I usually turn on the light for Gus (the cat) so he can see what he’s doing, and last Monday morning when I tried to do that, nothing.  Nothing happened at all.  The light did not go on.  The thing that I do dozens of times a day, turn on a light switch, didn’t work.  I was powerless.

Well, Gus managed to find his way (thankful for small victories), and I got myself back upstairs and went for my smart phone.  After fumbling around to find the right place on the ComEd web site, I reported the outage at my house.  I knew that it would get fixed, but I hoped that more notifications might bring more attention and get it fixed sooner.  As the day progressed, checking back revealed that the prognosis was not good – the estimate for repair time was two days in the future.

So, we coped.  That first day, the temperature in the house steadily fell, from the normal not-so-toasty 65F down to the 50’s.  The cats (there are three others besides Gus) were hunkering down, cuddling with each other in ways that we don’t normally see.  I went to the library to work (I’m a teleworker), but it was a little crowded, and being on the phone there didn’t really score any points for me in the eyes of the other patrons.  At lunch time I took the opportunity to move to my laptop and myself to a spare classroom at my church, and finished out my day there.  I was to spend the next two working days there as a nomad, visiting the house from time to time to check on the cats, and to sleep.

What did work?  The stove worked.  We had to light it manually, but the gas stove worked well, and we heated up soup on it Monday evening, and had dinner by candle light.  Our flashlights worked, and our phones (as long as we could get them charged elsewhere). But otherwise, nothing worked, most notably the heat.  We burn gas for heat, but we need electricity to make that work.  Pumps, blowers and piezo-electric ignition systems all require the electricity to be on.  So it continued to get colder.  Down to the low 50’s by Monday night.

One more thing that worked was the hot water.  We could take a nice, hot shower!  However, turning off that water required more will than I thought I would need, and it reminded me of that time in late October I took the last shower of the year in the bathhouse at a state park on Lake Superior.  But I wasn’t camping – I was in my house.  Nonetheless I was happy to be able to shower.

Tuesday, as the house temps continued to drop, I came by the house a couple of times to turn on all the stove burners for a little while, and try to take the edge off.  We were not near freezing (inside) yet, but we were starting to worry about that eventuality.  And it was just too cold to be in the house and get anything done.  This, of course, worked for the cats since they never get anything done anyhow, but for the rest of us, life had to go on.  My wife Caryl, who had hunkered down with the cats on Monday, adding layers as necessary, had to go to work on Tuesday, and they had power there so it was business as usual.  Bjarne, our 25-year-old German exchange student, spent the day at the local community college where he goes (they also had power).  However, as the day progressed, we realized that we would need to be getting out the cold weather camping gear to make it through another night at the house.  And since I’m the only one with any cold weather camping gear, we decided to go to a hotel.

Day three started a little better, with a hot breakfast at the hotel, after a reasonably good night’s sleep, and I spent the morning working at church (I was still occupying their classroom and mooching their power and WiFi).  As the announced restoral time for our power approached, (noon), I was surprised as how much anticipation I had.  A couple of times an hour I would go back to the web site and check it to see if the estimate had changed.  The neighborhood Facebook group was abuzz with reports of ComEd truck sightings and encounters with electric crew members nearby.   Around lunchtime, I hopped in my (non-electric...) car and went back home, to check on things.  I fired up the stove again, and got the temp from 45 up into the low 50s, at least in the kitchen.  The cats didn’t budge – they were still conserving energy and heat as though for the haul.  I was hoping they did not know something I didn’t know.

Finally about an hour later than the predicted, as I was standing in the kitchen wondering if I should turn off the stove and get back to work, the power came back.

What a relief.

I am still surprised at how much emotion there was in my reaction to this happening.  It was truly a burden that was lifted instantaneously.  I felt good.  I felt happy.  I felt empowered.

As we went through this experience, we saw the goodness of our neighbors and even total strangers, the empathy, the advice and the boots-on-the-ground help (a neighbor dropped by with a box of donut holes and a box of coffee one morning, for example).  And we realized, from the start, and during every conversation where we told folks about our dilemma, that our problems here were all first-world problems.  There was never any doubt that the power would come back.  There was never any risk that we would not have a warm place to sleep (cats notwithstanding).  We could have picked up the phone and called any one of 20 people that we knew, who would have happily and graciously offered us whatever they had, to help, including accommodations, meals, transportation – whatever.  We were not at risk of anything worse than possibly losing some hamburger patties in the freezer.

What I thought about a lot, also, was the plight of so many in our world that are living in “energy poverty”.  Those that burn dung to cook their food, whose families suffer from illnesses brought on by the resulting indoor pollution, and which often result in early deaths for them.  Those that don’t have any of the modern (powered) conveniences that we take for granted.  Automatic climate-controlled shelter.  Food on demand, prepared in sanitary and therefore safe ways, for a price that we can afford.  A warm bed to sleep in when its cold, and air conditioned environments when it’s unbearably hot.  And I thought about Hans Rosling’s magic washing machine.

Indeed, ours were first-world problems.  Over a billion people don’t have electricity at all at their homes.  And billions more live with electricity that we would never put up with.  Intermittent, unreliable, insufficient and (more and more importantly) dirty electricity is all they have.  Those people live, and work through, many challenges each day, that I never have had to face.  Their governments are and will be working to get reliable electricity to them.  They won’t be satisfied with a solar-powered water pump at the village well, or LED lights that the children can study under, or cell phones that are charged with solar panels.  And they shouldn’t be.  They will do what they can to provide reliable electricity to their citizens.  If they don’t have a clean way to do that, they will use something dirty.  Like coal.

Or, if we work at it, we can come up with nuclear reactors that can provide for them, without poisoning the environment, and exacerbating climate change.  But if we don’t make it a point to develop those technologies for them, they will do what is easiest, and what they can afford.  They’ll burn stuff.

It’s my hope that we will have that technology for them, and sooner rather than later.  It’s also my hope that we will use it to clean up our own energy generation.  Here in Illinois, we have over half of our electricity provided by just six nuclear plants, each of which takes up little space, and produces tiny amounts of by-product (no, it’s not waste).  This material is safely and securely stored, a veritable warehouse representing huge amounts of clean energy, waiting for the next generation nuclear reactors to be ready to consume it.  But our dirty not-so-secret is that basically the other half of our electricity is generated by burning coal.  Our grid is a pretty amazing machine (biggest thing ever built, I'm told), and I'm thankful for it.  But we have a lot of work to do.

Thanks for reading.  I think I’ll go take Gus for a walk now.

I'm Radioactive!

Actual sign in the hospital.  I am annoyed a bit by being referred to as "material"

Not long ago, I was radioactive.  I know, many reading this will want to point out that we’re all radioactive.  Stuff in our bones.  In our blood.  It radiates.  But that’s not what I’m talking about.

I was really radioactive.

Let’s back up a bit.  As I write this, I’m 61, and have a family history of clogged arteries, heart attacks, angioplasty, stents and bypass surgeries.  After reviewing this information and my own health situation with my doctor, she recommended that I get a “stress test”.  So I signed up for a “Nuclear Exercise Stress Test”, in the radiology department of my excellent local hospital.

A Nuclear Exercise Stress Test is a procedure that provides a comprehensive view of how your heart is working, in particular how it is working under stress.  It involves an obtaining an electrocardiogram (EKG), obtained under stress (a treadmill that is gradually inclined as the test progresses) to check the heart’s ability to manage high-work situations, and it involves a Gamma Camera.  That’s where the radioactivity comes in.

Gamma cameras are one of those “scanners” that you hear about, which use nuclear imaging technology to build and piece together many two-dimensional images to create a 3D image of your heart.  This is incredibly useful for determining if the heart is diseased or damaged in any way, or if it is suffering from not enough blood, or... just about any issue that it might have.

In order for the gamma camera to take these pictures, it needs there to be gamma rays coming from the body being imaged.  So, to give the camera something to work with, they made me radioactive.  Really radioactive.

The specific radioactive isotope that was used is a material called technetium 99m.  This is used because it emits gamma rays (remember, the camera needs that), and because it has a very short half-life (6 hours or so).  This means that it lasts long enough to provide gamma rays for the gamma camera to see, but not long enough to deliver anything close to a harmful dose of radiation to the patient.

Because technetium-99m is so short lived, none that was here when the world began is left – even the relatively long-lived isotopes of this element, with half-lives as log as 2.6 million years have decayed completely in the billions of years that our planet has been around.  And of course, anything with a 6-hour half-life is really long gone.  So, to get technetium-99m, we need to create it.

Wait.  Create it?

Yes, create it.  And to do this we need to fission (split) some atoms.  Bigger atoms than technetium.  And that usually requires a nuclear reactor these days.  What we actually create in the nuclear reactors, though is a precursor isotope of the element molybdenum, molybdenum-99 (AKA moly-99 for those of you who, like me, have trouble pronouncing “molybdenum”).  Moly-99 is (sometimes) what you get, about 6% of the time, when you split a uranium 235 atom.  Splitting atoms requires neutrons, and right now we use nuclear reactors to get those.  The Moly-99 created in these reactors (there are only a about a dozen of them in the world) makes its way through the supply chain to a distributor to the local hospital that will use it.  At that point, the technetium-99m can be stripped out chemically, and mixed with a pharmacological agent selected such that it will carry the technetium-99m to the organ(s) in the body that the technicians wish to observe with the gamma camera.

This is a “just in time” supply chain, of necessity.  The Moly-99 will decay away in a relatively short time and soon it will no longer be possible to extract any more technetium-99m from it.  At that point the vessel in which it was transported is returned to the facility that created it, where it is processed and ultimately “recharged” for the next customer.

Back to me.  On the day of my procedure, I checked in, and was handed off to a radiology technician.  He walked me through a waiting room in the radiology department, to a seat in a chair that was partially shielded from the rest of the waiting room by walls.  He had some stuff on the counter there, including a small, shielded container that has the technetium-infused solution that they would put into me.  This is when I got out my Geiger counter.

Wait.  A Geiger counter?

Yep, I brought my Geiger counter.  I had actually mentioned it to the technician on our way over.  His response was similar...

My counter, which I had turned on (the audio “clicking” was enabled) was reporting low-level, background radiation (there is always radiation around, from rocks, people, space etc.).  Just a couple of clicks per second, pretty tame, and normal.

The tech got out the solution and loaded it into his syringe, preparing to inject me.  At this point, my counter was a couple of feet away (in my other hand), but had livened up a lot once he opened the shielded container containing the technetium-99m.  He then told me, matter-of-factly, that “if that thing doesn’t go crazy now then it’s broke”.  Indeed, when I brought it over near the point in my right arm where he was injecting the solution, the clicks turned into a constant buzz.  Holy cow.  I was radioactive.

Here's the setup, used to inject a bit o' The Hot Stuff into me.  Twice.

Speaking of cows, it is my understanding that the container holding the Moly-99, when it is being prepared to extract the technetium-99m, is referred to as a “cow”, and extracting the technetium-99m is called “milking the cow”.  So, there you go.

I was then given a seat in the waiting room and we waited for the solution to make its way to the place we needed to image (my heart).  After about 35 minutes, the took me into the next room, where the gamma camera was waiting for me.

This is the gamma camera. I didn't catch the brand or model. You're slid in to be by those two boxes on the left and top, and then they rotate around you, a tiny bit at a time, for about 90 degrees.

The gamma camera is one of those imaging machines that goes around you, while you lie down.  In this case I had to lay still for about 15 minutes, while it snapped hundreds (I am imagining) of 2D images and feeding them to a back-end computer that would assemble them into a rotatable, detailed 3D image that would show the doctors what they needed to see.  This may have been the most difficult part for me – laying still for 15 minutes.  The camera machine consists of a platform to lay on, and a couple of big boxes that you slide under which contain the gamma detectors.  These boxes continuously are repositioned slightly during the procedure, to “take pictures” at all the necessary angles.  Fortunately, I was not “fully enclosed” in the machine as is required with some other types of medical scanning, so there was no risk of claustrophobia.

The stress and EKG part was next.  They took me over to another room with a treadmill and a heart monitor, shaved some chest hair (not much to do there) and stuck a bunch of electrodes onto me.  They put me to work with a specific heart rate target, and logged a bunch of data.  I was breathing pretty hard at the highest point but they did not have to cart me off to the OR like happened to my father.  I remember thinking that if I were riding my bike and I was working this hard, I’d slow down and get there later, for sure.

The EKG readout screen.  I'm sure this is all important.

Once done with the EKG I was taken back to radiology and they gave me another blast of technetium-99m and put me through the gamma camera routine again.  This provide them with more data, presumably to get insight into how my heart and the arteries feeding it were performing under stress.

That was it.  However, I had no end of fun over the next couple of days showing anyone around me how radioactive I was, using my handy Geiger counter and radioactive body.

Here's me, after I got home, in my "Melty" tee shirt, showing up with over 60 micro Sieverts per hour.

As predicted, I was back to normal levels within a couple of days.  With a six hour half-life, the amount of material left after 24 hours is significantly lower, but still easily detectable.  After 48 hours it was still a bit high, but not by much. In three days I was back to normal, and my unusually-high radioactivity had come to an end.

48 hours later, almost back to background levels

Around my house, the "going rate" for my Geiger count seems to hover around about 0.5 micro Sieverts, so even after a couple of days of decay, I was still 10 times hotter than stuff around me.  I'm happy to report that I no longer set off my Geiger counter, but it was sure fun while it lasted.

Oh, and the results?  The EKG picked up a little blip at my highest heart rate while on the treadmill (which my doctor said not to worry about), but all the imaging showed that everything's clear, and operating well.  Happy ending!