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Stuck in the hospital, sans NG tube.

This is a pretty personal post that I’m writing more as a PSA than anything else.

If you follow any of the Facebook or Twitter feeds, two weeks ago I was stuck in the hospital. I have Crohn’s disease, and I had a flare up. What’s Crohn’s? That’s the first thing I thought when I was diagnosed almost four years ago.

It’s an autoimmune disease that affects the small intestine. If you think of your intestines like pipes, Crohn’s inflames a part of the small intestine, narrowing the opening and making it harder for food to pass through. Eventually it gets so inflamed that the passage is totally blocked, leaving only one place for the food to go – up.

Before I was diagnosed I was getting extreme stabbing pains in my stomach. It felt like the Alien trying to bust out of my chest with a samurai sword. I went to some doctors, but since I was in college they just assumed I was eating poorly and it was a result of that.

And this is why I share my experience, because I still feel like there’s some taboo on people talking about medical conditions, when instead if we shared the knowledge and experience we can gain more from it.

Had I known what Crohn’s disease was, I could have gotten treatment the first time I started vomiting and getting pain, and not letting it sit to the point that I was stuck in the hospital for a week. I was actually relieved to be in the hospital and getting properly diagnosed, because it meant the pain would finally stop.

Similar to Crohn’s is Colitis, which affects the colon.

This is the third time I’ve had a flare up and had to be hospitalized. I also have little doubt that it was coincidental that I literally finished Bots High a week earlier, had a sigh of relief, and then got sick.

Future Engineers, We Need Your Help

Alright, so for those budding future biomedical engineers, there is a way you can help.

First off, the treatment for a blocked intestine is one of the most unpleasant experiences I’ve ever had to go through.

NG Tubes Suck!

So blockage doesn’t happen over night, it builds up over a week or so until the intestine is completely shut. So there’s all this build up of fluid that needs to be relieved. The treatment? A NG tube (nasogastric intubation). It’s a tube they stick up your nose, down your throat and into your stomach. It gets hooked up to a pump and starts sucking the fluid out. For days.

It’s one of the worst things ever. Please, someone come up with a better solution. If they can stick a camera down your throat for an endoscopy, why can’t they just knock you out, stick a high powered vacuum down there and just get all the fluid out in one go? Why the long, torturous process?

For days you’re stuck in bed with no motivation (or ability) to do anything but watch Bravo marathons and Jersey Shore.

Next on your list, though probably more importantly, is a cure. Crohn’s is treatable, not curable. Even more information about the disease would be helpful – no one even knows how you get it.

Luckily I’ve been able to keep it under control just with medication, but with this latest flare up that might change, and the future options gradually get more extreme.

Some Hospital Fun

So there was one highlight to this hospital stay – a test I hadn’t had before that was pretty cool. I’ve had endoscopies, colonoscopies, camera capsule endoscopy, CT scans, nuclear CT scans and lots of blood work. Every inch of my intestine has been photographed, which I find pretty ironic and funny.

Let's take a look inside...

But this time I got a GI Tract X-Ray through fluoroscopy. Lying on this Frankenstein-like movable x-ray table, I would drink a liquid contrast while under a live x-ray, watching the contrast go down my entire digestive tract to eventually see where the blockage is. The x-ray head and table would rotate in all sorts of directions to get the best angle. I felt like a piece of metal on a CNC mill.

Coming to you live...your intestines!

With all this radiation pretty soon you’ll be able to see me glowing from space.

All I have to say is having an iPad this time around made everything much better.

Thanks to everyone for all your well wishes online. If you have any questions just leave a comment or email me. For one of the best resources on Crohn’s and Colitis, check out the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America.

Twitter celebrated its 4th birthday this past Sunday (March 21). Look at the first Tweet here.

Summer of 2008 I was able to interview Biz Stone, one of the co-founders of Twitter. I’m sure today he wouldn’t have time to sit down with some college kids in the Twitter HQ, so I was lucky I got him when I did (the interview was actually pushed back because he had to go on Fox to talk about Obama announcing Biden as his running mate on Twitter).

I think what he says is really interesting, not just about Twitter but how we communicate as a society.

Check it out and please share and rate it if you like it:

Check out this video on saving NASA’s Constellation program and Ares rocket (the program that was going to replace the Space Shuttle and take us back to the moon, and then Mars). In his proposed budget Obama wants to raise NASA funding by about 2%, but cut the Constellation program (and basically manned space flight), leaving that area open for private companies to take over.

This has been a pretty low note compared to Obama’s announcement to push for science and engineering education. Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg thinks it’s the right thing to do, arguing that “the only technology for which the manned space flight program is well suited is the technology of keeping people alive in space. And the only demand for that technology is in the manned space flight program itself.” And I’m sure robots everywhere are cheering when he says for the cost of one manned mission to Mars you could send 100 robots.

Of course if we ever want to have a future that doesn’t permanently restrict humans to remaining on Earth (which I hope is not the case) then we’ll need all that technology and knowledge that comes out of manned space travel.

I think a far more intangible benefit of manned space travel is marketing. Marketing for interest in science. Marketing for exploration. Marketing to future generations and inspiring people to explore science and technology and continue the journey into the final frontier.

There’s an inspiring article written by Calvin Turzillo (the guy who made the video above) marking the 40th anniversary of man walking on the moon. You should definitely read it.

With the Space Shuttle retirement just over a year away, now is the time to dream big, take chances, and really let our imaginations guide us. Now is the time that we as a generation need a vision. We need a vision like that of generations past, to once again return to the moon. However, we cannot stop there. We must continuing pushing that frontier, pushing forward, onward to new worlds. We must explore and learn, create and innovate, conquer tough challenges, and once again see our world as one whole instead of many pieces.

I thought of a solution that would definitely motivate private companies to invest in manned flights to Mars. Just tell them there’s oil on it.

In talking to people about my project, and in talking to Nola, the director of BattleBotsIQ, a fair number of responses we get when we describe kids building BattleBots is something along the lines of “it’s violent.”

Now I could go off on a whole other post comparing BattleBots injuries to football, boxing, or even cheerleading (all sanctioned sports), but that’s not the point of this post.

When 9/11 happened, Nola described how some kids said, “My BattleBot is tough enough to go into the collapsed buildings and could’ve helped rescue people.” Today that’s the exact case with Haiti – so many collapsed buildings could use rugged robots to go in, find survivors, and help free people.

Will, one of Fluffy’s creators, summed BattleBots up pretty well compared to other robot competitions. He says it’s the only competition that fully tests your robot. If everything isn’t perfectly built 100%, your opponent, physics, or the BattleBox will destroy you.

Who’s going to be building the future rugged robots that are going to help out in future disasters? The students who are building BattleBots today.

I also wanted to touch on how amazed I am at the wonderful use of technology in providing aid. Of course there’s Twitter and the Red Cross text messaging viral campaign, which alone has raised over $10 million.

I also just saw a post released by the White House that they’ve created a Person Finder app, where you can either look for someone or list information about someone. It’s embeddable, which you’ll find below.

[Well apparently it's embeddable anywhere except WordPress blogs...]

Finally, I just wanted to shed some light on some areas and organizations that I doubt will ever get exposure. This past March I went to Haiti for the first time and loved the experience. I stayed in Leogane, a city about 30 miles west of Port-au-Prince.

We stayed in a sort of Bed & Breakfast, run by Yoleine, a Haitian native who goes back and forth between New York. She also runs a school across the street from the Bed & Breakfast.

This is the City Hall in Leogane.

This is one of the classrooms.

And here’s one of the students in an outside building, eating lunch the school would provide.

From what I’ve heard, everyone is alright. However, Yoleine’s Bed and Breakfast collapsed, along with the smaller school building where I took the photo above. Fortunately the main school has remained.

Yoleine has some property a little outside of the city, which she’s turned into a tent city to house the now homeless.

I’ve tried searching everywhere and I couldn’t find one news update on Leogane. While of course Port-au-Prince severely needs help and probably has the most number injured, the news organizations are acting like the earthquake took place there, when in fact Leogane is closer to the epicenter and needs help just as much.

So if you’re looking for a cause that mainstream news media and foundations haven’t reached yet, please give to Yoleine’s NEGES Foundation. I know the website looks like it was built in the 90s, but I assure you it’s legit and they desperately need money, supplies, and all sorts of aid.

One thing that Nola, the head of the BattleBots high school program, tells all the kids is engineering is about solving problems.

Here’s one that may not necessarily be a problem, mostly because we’ve all become so used to it, but it can definitely use improvement, and that’s how we interact with computers.

The mouse has been the dominant tool for decades, but as the video below shows, it limits the many possibilities of our hands to only two coordinates. You don’t see Data clicking around with a mouse in Star Trek, right? It also explains that while touch screen works great with smart phones, it won’t translate into desktop computers.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

This reminds me a lot of Minority Report. I still think keyboard shortcuts are the fastest and easiest way to get things done, but of course that has its limits.

The person who takes our interactions with computers to the next level might just be building a robot right now.