Steve and Judy's Travels!

  Wet to dry bandaging.  It sounds so benign.   It isn’t.   Remember when I remarked that this whole thing with my leg wasn’t very painful?  Well, the nature of the game has changed.  We’re in the process of re-growing skin where, for awhile, there was none.  We want to grow new skin from the bottom up and the sides in.  We can’t let it just scab over.  We need to keep it open.   Wet to dry bandaging involves packing wet gauze into the wound, and wrapping it in place with breathable bandaging.  As the gauze dries out, and the wound simultaneously heals, a scab forms.  The gauze packed into the wound becomes part of that scab.  Then the gauze is ripped out, ripping off any scab, down to the new fresh skin, and new gauze packed in its place.  Wet to dry bandaging just doesn’t describe the sensation.  Packing and dressing sounds a little more ominous, but still; entirely inadequate.  Maybe we should call it ripping and stripping.  That comes a little closer to reality.   Have you seen the chest waxing scene in the movie Forty Year Old Virgin?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4UgkNnbNVc.  That’s me, twice a day, every day (as I get better).    

  So the rain gauge conclusion is that it doesn’t matter if the rain is coming straight down or at an angle.  Up to a point, the rain gauge will measure the correct amount of rain.  If you go back to my earlier visualization, that we’re sampling a tube of air and raindrops above the top of the rain gauge, maybe instead of imagining tilting that tube and slicing it off diagonally, we should just imagine the drops coming down at an angle inside a tube that is vertical.  Then, for every drop of rain that blows away and escapes the rain gauge, another drop of rain will be blown in and be captured by the rain gauge.   Of course, if there is a strong wind, and the rain is blowing sideways over the top of the rain gauge, you could get plenty wet, without any rain ending up in the gauge. Unlike a rain gauge, we collect rain from any direction.   Then again, I particularly enjoy the thought that a good wind vortex might actually pull some water from the gauge, resulting in negative rain!  

  Morning light.

  I’ve been thinking about rain gauge accuracy.   In calm weather, the rain gauge will sample a column of air and water directly above it; a column of air and water exactly the diameter of the rain gauge.  That’s our baseline accuracy.   But what happens when the rain is not coming straight down?  What happens to the accuracy when there is wind with the rain?  If you imagine a column the same diameter as the top of the rain gauge, and slice it off perpendicularly, you’ll have a surface area on the end of the column exactly equal to the surface area of the top of the rain gauge.  If you cut that column of air off diagonally though, indicating the rain striking the top of the rain gauge at an angle, you’ll increase the surface area of the face; the part that intersects the top of the rain gauge.  For the same amount of rain, you’ll collect more rain than if the rain were coming straight down!   But then, if it rains too hard sideways you won’t get any rain in the rain gauge at all, it will just blow straight across the top.  Probably, after a certain point, you get decreasing amounts of water in the gauge as more blows across, so my column of water analogy doesn’t hold up.  The surface area on the face of a column of water would continue to increase, the more acutely you cut across it, to almost infinity, before it suddenly went to zero when the angle went to zero.   Guess I’d better think about something else ….., like maybe how to make perfectly clear ice-cubes in a home refrigerator.    

  Damn, this thing is creepy.  The doctor did more cutting and cleaning out today, but there is also some healing going on.  It is simultaneously getting better and not getting better.  Today’s work should clear the path for improved improvement.  We want all of it to improve, not just parts of it.   Turns out I didn’t even get the baddest bacteria.  This didn’t culture out as MRSA staph; I grew a Vibrio species.  It’s not an easy thing to have, but there is a good chance of curing this one.   I’ve got the easy assignment for this whole thing.  I can barely even see where the problem is on the side of my lower leg.  All I have to do is what people tell me to do.  I don’t envy Judy her job.  She has turned into Home Nurse, changing packing and redressing the wound every day.  Of course she is doing a super job.   Physically, this is not that tough to tolerate.  I don’t have to take prescription pain medicine.  Today the doctor even cleared me for more vigorous exercise than easy walking.  I’m back on the Trikke.