Friday, June 27, 2014

Trip to Pune

    I'm forced to recollect those days of exams, as I write this blog. Those were the days when each student would stop wasting even a single minute and keep studying (or "begin" studying for that matter).  While studying, my mind would drift start thinking of vacations that would soon ensue. So I noted the things that I would do in vacations. 
   So here was my first big plan of my vacation. The trip to Pune. All the memories are still flashing vividly in my mind as I contemplate the beauty of the mountains which I see passing by, during my journey back to mumbaaaaaai!
   The fun began from the CST station itself! Being an impromtu plan I had to travel by general compartment, without reservation. I met Ronak at CST in the morning at 6.30 am, three days after the summer solstice of 2014. As we reached the platform the train came. And with it began the mad tussle for the seats. The doors were locked from inside as the train approached. Ronak spotted an emergency window, pulled it up and we threw ourselves inside the compartment, with a feeling of victory we opened the door for others and secured our seats. There was no getting up from that moment on if we wanted our seats. So the journey was spent mainly by chatting, watching an episode of GoT and consuming the scenery of lonawala.
   Ajinkya came to pick us at the Pune Station. Had brunch at vaishali. Ate at ajinkya's place again! That was my first experience of a perfect marathi lunch. It was too good.  "What have you travelled, if you haven't even tasted that region's speciality".
   In the evening we played poker and pictionary at spruha's place. That board game was super fun. Aim of the game is to try to tell your partner the name that you get by picking a card. That brings out the insane creature in you. The dinner was outside. I saw the football match with them, though I am no fan of football! 
   Next day we went to a water park. Water park by itself was no fun, but our crazy and stupid things made it memorable. Dinner at Hard Rock Cafe of Pune. These were a few things where Pune is better than aamchi mumbai. :( . Time just flew by while playing it again. 
   Next morning was the last day. I'm happy we did something productive as well as fun on the last day.We visited Dinanath Mangeshkar Hospital. Saw CT-MRI, saw a live surgery, PCR machine, ICU and so many more things. 
   Here I'm, going home with a handful of enjoyment and a pinch of new knowledge. 







The Pune railway station 





CST station while leaving from mumbai 



PUNE, BRTS

During journey



Sunday, June 22, 2014

Future of surgery

      It's 12.39 am and I'm trying to sleep. That's when all weird thoughts start coming to our minds. And I couldn't stop my brain from thinking about the surgery of the future. I don't know how did this thought come to my "Cosmo-cortical" pathway, but that was enough to fire some corticospinal neurons to direct my hand to pick up my phone and begin writing. 
       If we can manage to miniaturise the robots and teach them how to...
      Hey wait, it just occurred to me how did I begin thinking of this-
I had this doubt about- why the peritoneal cavity in females is open. I finally got the answer in embryology. That reminded me of what a sir in my college had commented about embryology, "embryology is not real. There's nothing like embryology. All what we are studying is abstract". That lead me to pondering over the fact that our embryology is limited to- explaining why the defects occur and the underlying basis of that anomaly. (How fascinating it is that we don't need to think of the whole sentence to think of that whole sentence that my sir had told. In a jiffy, I am reminded of all the words that my sir had told. I mean, to recall an entire day of your life, you don't need to spend that much time recalling it, it will take the same amount of time as you take to recall one word! That's just by the way). Then I started thinking of-if we would use knowledge of embryology to help people. Then it came to surgery while an embryo is still growing. But how can a human approach it? So I thought of robots. Microbots, the size of bacteria may be handy at that time. 
   After making giant leaps in the sphere of technology, we may one day be able to produce robots that have the capability of normal robots. Storing power, computing, operating, commanding, seeing, hearing, connecting and doing its job. 
     So imagine, a women is on the operation table half a globe away from me and a friend of mine just invents a new way to fight a disease. He codes it and instantaneously sends it which I forward to the master computer over there. It is then shared to the million Microbots all piled up in an injection. They are made to connect to the computer via wifi and download the lastest technique to fight the disease. They all also can talk to each other. When first one goes in the body, he may send a message to all others like- "oh it's dark in here. Oops I just got pushed into the right coronary artery. I ll do my work over there. Take care and good luck". The other Microbot may reply, I m having some difficulty in the 8th zone of the right lung. I need backup immediately". Robots will be carrying packets of drugs that can be injected selectively into each cytoplasm. They may be able to enter the nucleus, obtain copy of the main DNA via PCR and replace the mutated DNA with the new one. 
They all will work as a team. 
   That I think will be the future of surgery. :)