Behind the Scenes Minis: Medical Scans and Nobel Prizes

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Wilson. We talked about Mriyes all week, Yeah, which I I This was a hard episode to write because I'm I found myself at moments feeling like I was in a Cranberry bog of science, unable to wade my way out. Yeah, so hopefully I didn't. I didn't make any scientists sad. It's hard. It's hard stuff.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: There are a few things that I wanted to talk about, Okay. So one of the things that was just charming was we talked about how louder Bird did not major in engineering and his father wanted him to, and how he wanted to go into science. And there's a great quote that he wrote about it, saying, quote, my father had recommended it because, as he had observed, he didn't know what scientists did for a living, but engineers could always get a job. I love how he was just being practical. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure his kid had a way to support himself.

00:01:18
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:01:18
Speaker 1: But then he turned out to be a Nobel Prize winner, so that worked out. I had to chuckle a little bit about ray Toamadian's discussion that he wanted to lower the cost of MRIs because the numbers he quoted, I think it was something like for a hospital at that time, it was like one hundred thousand dollars just to get a machine, and for a patient, the billing was like one thousand dollars for an MRI. Now this was in the eighties or that was later. That was a little bit later than that. But I had to chuckle because, as I mentioned, I had had one recently and I did not.

00:01:52
Speaker 2: Pay for it.

00:01:53
Speaker 1: Insurance covered it, right, but like it was many thousands of dollars, more than one thousand dollars.

00:02:00
Speaker 2: I don't I don't remember how much mine was because I mean this was more than a decade ago at this point.

00:02:05
Speaker 1: Uh.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: And it like it was at a point where our employer was Discovery Communications, and like their insurance was generally really good. Yeah. I know, everybody's experience with insurance is different depending on their needs, but like that they covered that MRI that I needed on my knee at one hundred percent, so I paid no dollars for that MRI, and I was so relieved at that fact that the actual cost of it never right. Yeah, yes, yeah, but like that so I had, uh, I had stepped in a hole and broke in my knee, and I had an X ray of it, and they needed to do an MRI to confirm whether there was any compression in the fracture, which I was very nervous about because I did not know I had fractured my leg. And I walked on that break like a like a mile. It was fun and that does like, at least, as I remember, my head was not all the way in the thing, so I did not have the claustrophobia that a lot of people experience in there. But the noise and the unpredictability of the noise was enough that like my body was involuntarily tensing up and you're supposed to hold still, and the like I kept like the technician kept having to be like, I need you to breathe, and I would have to like consciously try to keep myself from doing that. It was challenging. I did not find it as uncomfortable in experience as a lot of people do, partially because my head was not in the machine. But I did, like I have to really focus on not involuntarily tensing up my entire body. Yeah, it's hard. I was in the whole thing. As I said at the topic, I had to evict my gallbladder. We were trying to figure out what was going on because I thought I had food poisoning at first, and that was not what it was right, And then I had done a telemedicine I tell this story just for transparency so you understand and there's nothing to worry about. I had done a telemedicine appointment in the middle of the night because it wasn't getting any better.

00:04:27
Speaker 1: And I also wasn't nauseated. I wasn't throwing up or any of the things you would associate with food poisoning. But I had that just my torso felt very sick and it was somewhere in my digestive track. And I did that, and I talked through what I was experiencing with the doctor, and the concern was that, like, I think there might be something going on here, and also, hey, you know sometimes in women of your age, things like heart attacks can present as strange indigestion.

00:04:57
Speaker 2: So maybe go to the er.

00:04:59
Speaker 1: Let's get this checked. So I did, and they ekg'd me super fast. I wasn't even done filling out paperwork and they were. They had the little mobile one on me, and that was fine. My heart was great. And then they started to figure out what the problem was, which is that my gallbladder was sad baby and didn't want to didn't want to do his job anymore. Yeah, so I had to be fully in the MRI and I was so panicked because I am claustrophobic. I felt really really bad. I'm going to try to tell this story without any gory details, but my my MRI tech. This was all going on on a weekend and so like full staff was not there and there wasn't an orderly to come and get me and take me down to the MRI. So the MRI tech just came up and said, I'm gonna drive you down, like get in the get in the wheelchair.

00:05:45
Speaker 2: And he didn't.

00:05:45
Speaker 1: He was an angel human and he was super patient with me because I explained that I was claustrophobic. He let me keep my wedding ring on because he's like, it's silver, It's gonna be fine. Although I panicked halfway through and hit the panic button because I could feel it. He tooke my wedding ring off very carefully and was so nice and like, because I have I don't take my wedding ring off ever. It's just like a deal Brian and I made when we got married twenty seven years ago that like this is on us for good. It's why I will never upgrade my wedding ring. I can't go back in time and put a different ring on my hand. This is my wedding ring for life. And so he was super nice and very caring and kind about that, and then I did the thing. I made it through.

00:06:24
Speaker 2: It sucked. He would occasionally just pop on to the audio thing and be like, you're doing great, We're almost there, like he was amazing. And then I got out and he I was getting back into the chair and he said, you look a little wobble. Here are you dizzy?

00:06:37
Speaker 1: And I just said I'm about to barf. And bless that man who was not a nurse and took care of me while I was a mess, mess mess, But it was fine. Again that was from my gallbladder, not from the MRI that was making me nauseating. But it was just one of those Listen, nurses and people work in hospitals with patients hands.

00:06:57
Speaker 2: On all the time angels. Yeah, oh nice. So that was my MR. Yeah, I know someone else who has had some gallbladder issues still has a gallbladder, but said that the first time that it really flared up. Similarly, there were concerns that it was something cardiac happening. Yeah, and I mean I don't I have not had this happen in my own body, so I don't know what it feels like. But apparently that is a thing where symptoms can be easily confused, so there's steps that have to be taken to rule stuff out.

00:07:30
Speaker 1: Yes, I had all of the imaging, I had the extra I had the CT scan, I had the ultrasound, and then they were like it's MRI time, in part because they some of the imaging made it look like there was a gallstone lodged in the valve between my gallbladder and my stomach. And if that had been the case, which I think, I passed it while I was in the hospital, but if it had been stuck stuck there, they would have had to do two procedures, one like a similar to an endoscopy, but it's a surgical removal of that, and then the second one which is when the gallbladder gets its walking papers. I will say like, thankfully, very thankfully, Like my surgeon was amazing. I've had a very easy recovery, to the point that I almost feel guilty, like I've had a cliffs Notes version of it.

00:08:16
Speaker 2: But I'm very thankful and I feel a million times better because I think it was making me lethargic and droopy for a while and I didn't know that's what it was, right, Yeah, Like I was shocked when they were like, your gollblader's coming out of what yeah is it? Uh? Yeah? Yeah. You were updating me on what was happening over the course of the weekend, and I did not realize that it had resulted in a full gallbladder removal until like later, and I was like, oh, that because I don't expect you to like tell me everything that's going on in your body over the weekend. Uh. But it was afterward that I was like, Oh, the whole gallbladder's gone. Now she's gone, she's gone. I want to talk some more about Raydomadian, let's do it and later ber and this whole issue, because I feel like there was there has.

00:09:12
Speaker 1: Been in the whole argument debate about it. There has been bias in play on a lot of people's parts, Okay, where Like, on the one hand, I mean Ray Tomadian did develop the machine even if he didn't develop the imaging, but it also wasn't really going to do the stuff until Lauderber and Mansfield figure out the way, figured out the ways to get actual good images that were accurate and detailed. But the problem kind of comes up. I do think whether or not it impacted the Nobel Committee's decision, I do think that two things worked against Raydmadian. At that point, he had already been in so much litigation with so many companies dealing that so many of those companies employed scientists that were working in this field that I think there was probably, whether it was conscious or not, just a bias against him as being a pain.

00:10:14
Speaker 2: In the neck. Yeah. And then I also think the issue of his religious beliefs caused some scientists to write him off. And in some ways he did not help himself on this one. Because I want to make clear, like whatever anybody believes is great, whatever works for them is wonderful. But like he went specifically on a radio program that was very religious and very much like science can't explain anything, and even had this jingle that was sort of like scientists are conceited if they think they can explain the work of God kind of thing, And I'm like, I don't know that he necessarily agreed with that kind of mentality, but being as associated with programming like that probably did not help his standing in the scientific community. Right.

00:11:08
Speaker 1: There are also some interesting aspects to Lauderber's side of things, because he initially did seem to talk about like, oh, yeah, I watched this person replicate Tomadian's experiments, and then as time went on, that mention fell out of his discussions of what had happened. And I don't know if that was because he wanted to somehow write Demadian out. I don't get that vibe, but I didn't know him personally, so I don't know, or if he was just trying to distance himself from mention of Domadian because he knew it was contentious. And it is a thing where I don't know where I stand on all of that. I do feel like both of these people did some pretty important work, and you have to do the messy work up front that maybe doesn't work exactly right before I mean, in any field, in any invention, usually it's very rare that someone's like, I have an idea, I'm going to invent a thing. Here's the thing I made it, it works perfectly. That doesn't really happen. We've talked about many patent cases where like you know, I mean, even if we go back to the first combination patent of the sewing machine, it was like a lot of people were working on this concept and none of them could.

00:12:20
Speaker 2: Quite get it all together. Needed to come together and make one big patent as a group to make it all really a functional piece of machinery that could be marketed to a consumer market. And so this kind of feels the same, but nobody was willing to do like a combination patent on it. And I have you know, I read a number of accounts that were written by scientists or opinions that were given by scientists in various news articles, et cetera, and a lot of them kind of come to the point of I think both of those dudes thought they were the one and that was the problem. It's wild to me, yeah, because this is like what's wild to me is that this argument continues over a thing that is demonstrably a life saving technology. That was one of the things that really struck me reading through this, Like, there there are people who have had things like cancers or other illnesses detected early enough that it could be treated because of the work of these men, And I say that collectively that would not have have had that opportunity otherwise. But like, we still can't seem to work out like how to give both of them their due equally. It's wild. Yeah, I had a lot of just I also think this is a situation where, because we don't necessarily know what was in their inner world, it is really easy to sort of come up with a narrative that explains this behavior and just kind of assume that's really what happened. I am very curious about the Nobel decisions. I know, I wonder if in twenty fifty three, like, yeah, this argument's gonna get real real again. Yeah, I'm if I'm still around, I'll be so old at that point, will I still care? Right? Well, and both of these men have living descendants, Yeah, sure. I didn't get into like the personal lives of many of them, except for that cute meeting on the ship, because it was just so.

00:14:23
Speaker 1: Charming, but like there were certainly a lot of these these people that you know, they have family that will still be alive when that happens. I don't know, you know, we generally try to never talk about people that are still living on the show, unless it's a really unique circumstance. Yeah, So I give it's an event and there are people associated with it's still alive. Yeah, And I certainly did not go digging to find out about their families and their stances or where they have been in the midst of all of this. So I am curious, but also respectfully don't want to get all up in their business.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: It's fascinating. I'm glad their MRIs. Yeah, yeah, even if I didn't enjoy Yeah, I'm glad that MRI I revealed I did not need to have knee surgery. Yeah, I'm glad it mine revealed I didn't have to have a second one. So yeah, thank you, Mr. I. Yeah, I just had to be on crutches for like seven weeks. I remember that we were not working together yet when that happened, but I remember seeing you at stuff because we had crossover social people. Yeah. Yeah, we also just that came up on the show not that long ago. My time on crutches. I don't know how I would do on crutches. I have been having a hard enough time with the rule of don't lift anything over ten pounds ye for a lout. Yeah, so I found being on crutches very exhausting. Also, you know, my body was trying to make new bone and that also was exhausting. And at that point, I mean, this was so many years ago. At this point, we were in an office that was next to the Buckhead marta station. Yeah. So that's so like this would have been not twenty years ago, but you know, fifteen at least. And I wound up negotiating to work at home part of the time because getting to work and getting around our not very accessible office on crutches was really hard. That's something that we also didn't talk about about MRI specifically, Like we talked about all the barriers to access in terms of money and availability and all of that stuff. With an MRI machine, there are people with various disabilities who like getting positioned into the machine is its own barrier, even without you know, some kind of medical device that could cause an issue with the machine itself. So yeah, yeah, there have been efforts, I know, Phone are worked out a lot of positional MRIs to like try to address some of those problems. And even now, if you go to their website, they show one where you're kind of sitting upright and it is not the tube of the Tube of fear.

00:17:11
Speaker 1: If you're me, I am still having nightmares about the slightly off center stripe that runs through the machine. Again because I'm claustrophobic.

00:17:20
Speaker 2: I think when my mom had to have one, I don't remember if they put a washcloth on her face or if they offered to put a washcloth on her face just to like have something there. So it's not seeing the inside of the machine so close and not being able to move.

00:17:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I I've never wanted to flap my arms so bad in my life. I'm a very fidgety person, so that was a hard one for me. Me too, Me too. I do know someone who has the opposite problem, which tickles me that they have had to have a number of MRIs and they find it oddly soon and fall asleep. But that creates the problem of like their head, we'll move to the side when they drop off, and they have to do the whole thing over yeah, and I'm just like, I can't imagine what it would be like to be in that machine and be like, oh, naptime, this is cozy, when I'm like, how can I claw my way out? So, if you ever have to have an MRI, I hope that you can get in the right mental headspace to not have it be stressful, and that you have an amazing tech like I did, and that everything goes smooth as silk. I also hope that if this is your weekend coming up, that you get to relax a little bit and not think about anything scary or stressful in any way, and that your health is wonderful. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic episode, and then on Monday we'll have something brand new.

00:18:52
Speaker 2: Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.