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I spotted the machine pictured at the top of this post earlier this week.
It looks a little cheaply built for a medical body scanner, but that was my first assumption. I’ve met medical imaging systems of many shapes and sizes in recent times.
It’s not in the same league as this beauty I snapped at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota:
This is a gamma spectroscopy system, whatever that means. Last year, I was slid into this very machine after (deliberately) ingesting a radioactive solution. So far, machines like this do not have sufficiently fine resolution to show where my prostrate cancer has spread. Through the wonders of chemistry, I’m trying to keep these so-called “micrometasteses” micro and invisible to gamma spectroscopy systems.
Maybe it’s an iron lung like this antique at Ax-Man, a surplus store I like to explore in Saint Paul’s Midway district.
Negative pressure ventilators (iron lungs) came to the fore during polio epidemics in the first half of the twentieth century. Today, only a handful of long-term polio survivors still use iron lungs in the United States. Polio could be eradicated if willful ignorance and war could also be eradicated.
I peered closer at a translucent blue window. Inside, I could see high pressure water jets slowly moving back and forth along the length of the machine.
Then I realized the head sticking out of the machine belonged to a real, live person, not a mannequin as I had previously thought. A membrane provided a watertight barrier between the jets and the man.
I was at the Minnesota State Fair, witnessing an Aqua Massage.
