The Microscope!

Di and I have at last seen the microscope. It is splendid. The photo (click on it for a larger version) shows Di in the driving seat. We're in a teaching room at the Royal College of Surgeons, it's the lunch break, and the cadavers have been covered to spare us. The microscope is aimed at some backbone (you can see the image on the TV screen), but it could be used anywhere in the body during an operation.

It's not that the magnification is particularly high, but when you look through it, the quality of the image is startlingly good. Brilliant optics, incredible three-dimensional image, and rock steady support. Something to help the surgeon work on something where precision is everything - the brain, for example.

Di's surgeon Ian Sabin, who is also the neurosurgical tutor at the College, showed her how it worked. And they talked music too. Diana said she had considered supplying a CD of her playing Mozart for him to use during her operation, but had felt that it was too much of an imposition. Ian said he liked Mozart while working and it would have been a good excuse to get it played. In the old days whatever the surgeon wanted was put in the CD player, said Ian, but in this Brave New equal World the iPod shuffle ruled.

When we arrived at the Royal College of Surgeons, on the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields just behind Holborn Kingsway, there was a greeting party that included an official photographer and John Black, President of the RCS. (Here he is with us and Ian Sabin, and another good view of the microscope and the state-of-the-art teaching room.) We were very touched by all this attention. After all, we'd done this project to say thank you to the people who had helped us when we needed it, and here they were saying thank you to us.

We have also seen the bladder scanner that the project enabled, at the Royal London Hospital. They set up a demonstration for us with it in operation, scanning a bladder and showing how full it is. Pretty basic stuff, but here too we received a lot of gratitude. This is the kind of machine that doesn't get on to the 'urgent' list of equipment, but can make a big difference to life on the ward (it was the nurses who had requested it). If a patient is unconscious they can't say how full their bladder is, and certain injuries may feed back the wrong information to the brain anyway. And, staff were keen to point out, the machine can spare people the discomfort and indignity of a catheter, when often it's not necessary.

So there we are, this is my final post. There have been a lot of thanks here, and I want to add my own to all of you who contributed to the fund for these machines. We had a lot of fun doing all this. If you have reason to be grateful to the NHS and fancy a 250-mile walk or something similar, why not give it a try?