It is better and it is my heart

Since New Year's eve I have been fighting with a bad cold that has progressed to bronchitis, which we have been treating with various drugs. Sunday morning I had a typically disturbed kind of sleep, waking up at 4 A.M. possibly because of the steroids I had been prescribed. I did make it back to sleep and woke at around my usual time a couple of hours later. There was one odd thing I noticed at the time, though, and that was the way my heart seemed to be racing, regardless of my trying to induce a relaxed mental state. I got up, had breakfast, took my medicines, and was just getting dressed to go out to the gym when I noticed a feeling of pressure around my chest. Going up a flight of stairs made me feel winded, and the rapid heartbeat was still unchanged from before. Time to ask my wife to drive me to the nearest emergency room.
It had been a couple of years since my last trip to the E.R. and the hospital we went to that time is not even in business any more now. We went to the very new facility at Englewood Hospital a couple of miles away and was soon set up with medications to treat the condition. After a few hours, I was set up in a room in the Cardiac Step-Down ward waiting for my heart to "flip" back over to a normal rhythm, or, failing that, schedule a cryoablation to reset it. I didn't know that a person's heart could fibrillate for twelve hours and still be alive, but now I do.
I spent the night and was released today after they had a chance to image the malfunctioning part with ultrasound, apparently not sustaining any permanent damage. I'm on a couple new prescriptions and advised to avoid going on a "bender" which can set this sort of thing off. Wilco. Also, pleased to be here.

Artrial fibrillation. from just leenarts on Vimeo.

Colorblindness, colorblindness, colorblindness!

The most popular page on this blog, by far, is one which people are attracted to because of the image of the random dot colorblindness test by Shinobu Ishihara. The two volume publication containing those illustrations, which was printed originally in the 1950s, is rather difficult to find at the major retailers (you know who they are), but those who are truly interested can buy used copies on the Web.

If only brand new will do, there is this place too.

Hope this helps you all.

N-plegics

I was thinking about a particular line from a poem of mine:

quintuple amputee can't you heal us?

and started to wonder about the closely related term quintaplegic. Do people use this term? And when they use it, is it always in a ribald way? So, instead of doing some real research, I tallied up page counts at Google, checking all the Latin and Greek possibilities I could think of.

Name	Number of hits
0.5
hemiplegic	41000
semiplegic	7
demiplegic	3
1
uniplegic	75
monoplegic	2
2
biplegic	29
diplegic	39200
3
triplegic	1020
4
quadraplegic	85300
quadriplegic	980000
quadruplegic	2050
tetraplegic	116000
5
quintaplegic	31
quintiplegic	1
quintuplegic	3
pentaplegic	411
6
hexaplegic	32
hexiplegic	1
7
heptaplegic	13
septaplegic	9
8
octoplegic	36
9
nonaplegic	1
10
decaplegic	2
11
undecaplegic	0
12
duodecaplegic	1

So it turns out that quintaplegic isn't even the most popular term in its category, which typically refers to individuals who do not have control over their neck muscles. The higher numbers usually refer to non-human creatures. I didn't find any hits for prefixes greater than 12. By comparison, a search on paraplegic yields 1210000 hits.