Close to Home by John McPherson for October 25, 2022

Used way to much power.

Yeah, known bug in the Therac-25 model

“Oh, dear. I had it set on elephant.”

I went in for a scan and the tech was complaining that she had to reboot the machine again. “It needs a good dxxxx J0B!” she exclaimed.

…and that’s why the technician always leave the room.

MR is MegaRoentgens? I thought it was MilliRoentgens.

Those machines are quite articulated…

Had it turned up for the knight in shining armor?

I feel a draft

“FIRE IN THE HOLE..!!!!”

On the upside, that tumor is history.

Ooooooh! That’s gonna leave a mark!

that worked a little too well. :\

Just what a radiation patient wants to read right before heading out to an appointment….

My aunt died of radiation…she was a dental technician before they started using protection for it.

That machine is from the X-Ray Blaster 1200 series.

People used to take Radon mud baths.

From the library of Dobie’s stoopid comments, inserted by Ol’ Rusty:

Pro Cooking Tip: Before cooking your Kale, if you will season your skillet with coconut oil first, then also add just a little bit of coconut oil to the Kale… the oil makes it much quicker and easier to scrape it into the trash can and order a pizza.

This is why we have 2 lungs…just in case

The disclaimer did read, “You may feel a slight burning sensation”..

You still have the other lung.

The X-Ray technician is eating her shirt. I’ve seen this several times in this strip…random shirt-chewing.

It’s just a flesh wound…

Those decimal points. Details.

RE: Therac-25

Quite the software was BAD (Broken as Designed). For example, they used a 8 bit counter for errors. If there were 256 errors, the counter would reset to zero.

But hey! It usually worked. :<

I wonder how much the hospital will charge for that? They charge for absolutely everything else. Why not for a boo boo.

Radical. :)

The good news is there’s nothing to x-ray anymore.

This is how I felt after I had radiation treatments when I had cancer.

That actually happened in 1985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap0orGCiou8

OK sir, let’s try that one more time at a lower setting.

3.6 Roentgen? Not great, not terrible.

There’s an book we had to read in college, which covers actual dangers that arose from poor or incompetent design. The book is named, “Set Phasers On Stun” after one of the events covered within. A man went in for X-rays, but a specific filtering plate was missing from the machine. Because there was no interlock, he got an overdose of radiation. And because there was no feedback, they did this several times, wondering why the machine wasn’t working normally. He felt okay for a little while afterwards, but eventually died a pretty gruesome death in the days and weeks following the “mistake.”

This is why we have medical physicists.

That’s gonna leave a mark!