Comment by f2000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by f2000 | Hacker News Reader

A few years ago I fell and broke my elbow. It was a mess and had to have emergency surgery to put it all back together. After surgery I'm sent home with a "ball" around my neck that is a reservoir for some pain meds that are being fed into my body via a catheter that was threaded into a vein in my neck. So I am sitting on my recliner a few hours after the surgery , awake but groggy. Anesthesiologist calls me on my cell phone to check in on me. So the pain med ball has a valve on it calibrated from 1 to 10. It's on like 9. He asks me how the pain level is. I say "no pain". He say's "great, what's the setting our your valve" I say 9. He says "whoa! you need to turn that down! At that level it will be used up in about 10 hours and you need it last for at least 48 hours" I say "okay." He then hangs up. So being a groggy engineer, I think "okay, I will dial it down to like 2 and then as pain arrives adjust up to needed level" So I turn it down to 2. About 45 minutes later I am in the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced. Think teeth clenching. Sweating. Tears. I immediately turn the dial up to 10. The pain lasted for 2 hours. I'm an atheist, but let me tell you I was coming to Jesus in those two hours. Once the pain subsided, I call him back. He says "Oh yeah, you should have slowly backed down on the dial." Upside is that I have a lot of empathy for folks who say they are in pain. Seriously, if that pain had continued I would have taken anything, Heroin, whatever!!!

It's amazing what doctors don't think to explain. Like, buddy, I know you've seen this a million times before, but trust me this is the first time I've ever done this...

I have a different story of pain medication gone awry.

My wife had surgery and there was a hydromporphone pump where she could press a button. The button was then blocked for eight minutes. She didn't understand the system. Then I realized that it had two different beeps, one if the pump delivered a bolus and the different one if the pump was blocked. My wife and I we are both Deaf so we just didn't know. I requested then the pump turned around so she could have a look at the GUI of the pump.

But my wife already lost her confidence, refused to press the button and a few hours later the hospital removed that contraption completely and switched to a different regimen.

Slightly funny story similar to yours: we were having our 2nd kid and my wife was given no2 gas as a painkiller. I got to be in charge of the dial that controlled the no2/oxygen mix. We started at, like, 40% no2 but then she said she was in pain so I dialled it up to 60%. She was still in pain after half an hour so I increased to 80%. 30 mins later she was in a lot of pain and I noted you could actually set it to 100% no2, but didn't understand how she'd get any oxygen at that setting. I should probably have figured it out at that point, but was pretty sleep-deprived. I asked a nurse why the no2 wasn't working and she said "why, you're almost on 80% oxygen now!"

Kind of similar? I've woken up under NO2/Desflurane 2 times in my life and another time had NO2 just didn't seem to have much effect. After the first time I've made it a point to tell the anthesoilogists of my previous experience but with no personal record it just keeps recurring.

Litocane seems to metabolize or otherwise fade in effect faster in me too than what most dentists expect but at least they listen.

Binary search doesn't always turn out well.

9 to 2 definitely isn't binary search.

It could be if you're binary searching the range of 2 to 9 maybe, or -5 to 9.

But if not, you're right it's not exactly binary search, it's interpolation search, which is like binary search it just uses a different midpoint finding algorithm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpolation_search

Reply on news.ycombinator.com