It's a model of Her new knee. The technical aspects of getting this sucker in place are fascinating.
In ye olde days the doc would whack out the old, rotten joint, fit the new one, all using the Mark I Eyeball.
They used templates. Which works real good. If you match a template.
Enter CNC. This thing measures the patient six ways from Sunday, cuts everything precisely to fit. Talking about this the doc started to dive into technical-talk not out of place in manufacturing: sample sizes, quality control, medians, outliers eliminated.
This made me trust the guy abolutely. This isn't some early 20th century hackery, but a high-tech assembly process, with computers doing the hard, finicky painstaking work.
You don't even need to be sedated: all they need is a spinal block so you don't wiggle around and screw up the robot.
It all sounded so damned cool.
And it is! Great days we're living in, where an otherwise young chick with degenerative arthritis faces not decades of crippling pain but .. surgery, pain [1] and mobility a few months later.
Which is great because Herself is getting real tired rolling round Wal-Mart in a wheel chair to do the shopping.
I confess I was a little disappointed when the doc said the shiny stuff goes on the inside. My feeling is if you're gonna have cyborg bits installed they should look like cyborg bits, ya know?
[1] And, let's not kid ourselves, it's not a little bit of pain but a whole bunch of it. Once you work through that you're good.
