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Laci Davis, an 8-year-old in Cincinnati, Ohio, accidentally ingested her necklace and heart-shaped locket, which lodged in her throat.
The third-grader was in excruciating pain.
“It felt like something was stabbing me right in the middle of my chest,” she said.
Doctors at St. Elizabeth sent her to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. It was the car ride that changed everything.
“We hit a pot hole and she looked at me and said, ‘oh mom, I feel better.’ I said what do you mean you feel better and she said ‘I don’t feel it anymore,’” Amanda Cullum, Laci’s mother, said.
The pothole dislodged the locket, which then dropped down into Laci’s stomach. The pain was gone, and Laci could breathe normally.
“It was my hero and I when I got home I was like thank you bump,” she said.
Doctors told Laci the locket will come back out “the old-fashioned way.” Laci says she’ll get a new locket instead retrieving this one. Link -via Fark
(Image source: WCPO/CNN)
When photographer Darren Samuelson set up to take photos of Manhattan with his massive six foot long view camera that weighs over 70 pounds, authorities were alerted and the police had to be convinced that he wasn’t pointing a weapon at the city!
This amazing device, which Ansel Adams will likely come back from the dead just to get his hands on, was created to use x-ray film three feet wide, and it takes some truly awesome panoramic photos. Hit the link to see a short video of the big daddy view camera in action!
Link –image by John B. Carnett
ps-here’s a link to the artist’s website that I should have included with the article in the first place. Sorry Darren!
Core77′s Design for Social Impact contest winner created underwear specifically for going through TSA security. For covering up your private parts during an X-ray, the set includes bras and boxers with the fourth amendment on them printed in metallic ink.
An electric razor that shaves close to the bone! This x-ray, featured at Modern Mechanix, was taken in 1941, back when x-ray scientists and technicians didn’t bother wearing lead aprons and spent their spare time coming up weird things they could x-ray. Link -via J-Walk Blog
(Image credit: L. F. Ehrke, Westinghouse Research Lamp Laboratories)
There are quite a few creative minds who are making art using x-rays, each with their own distinctive style. Dark Roasted Blend has a roundup introducing the works of Wim Delvoye, Ben Kruisdijk, Steven Meyers, Bert Myers, George Green, Judith McMillan, Yury Shpakovski, Nick Veazey, and others, including links so that you can explore more of each artist’s work. And don’t miss the bonus story about bootleg Russian music recordings at the end! Link
(Image credit: Yury Shpakovski)
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Japanese artist Takayuki Hori created a lovely series of origami animal figures with printed skeletons. When displayed under the right light, they look like folded x-ray images. Here’s how he does it:
each translucent sheet is first printed with either the images of fragments of an animal’s skeleton, or, on some pages, human-made discarded objects that are often ingested by the animals in the wild. using the ancient tradition of folded paper, hori assembles the pages into a three-dimensional model. once the paper is folded, the printed components are united as a whole, telling the visual story of the animal’s plight to survive in an increasingly polluted and hazardous ecosystem.
Link via Geekosystem | Photo: Design Boom
Galaxy M87 is an enormous collection of heavenly bodies, but astronomers who have studied the effects of its black hole see similarities to the recent volcanic eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and have dubbed it a galactic super-volcano. We covered the shockwaves associated with the Earth mountain previously, and parallels can actually be seen in the distant galaxy.
In the analogy with Eyjafjallajökull, the energetic particles produced in the vicinity of the black hole rise through the X-ray emitting atmosphere of the cluster, lifting up the coolest gas near the center of M87 in their wake, much like the hot volcanic gases drag up the clouds of dark ash. And just like the volcano here on Earth, shockwaves can be seen when the black hole pumps energetic particles into the cluster gas.
“This analogy shows that even though astronomical phenomena can occur in exotic settings and over vast scales, the physics can be very similar to events on Earth,” said co-author Aurora Simionescu also of the Kavli Institute.
Chandra X-Ray Observatory has much more info on this and other astronomical wonders.
Link – and here’s just the X-Ray version of the phenomenon.
(Image credit: NASA/CXC/KIPAC/N. Werner, E. Million et al); Radio (NRAO/AUI/NSF/F. Owen)
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Ron Sveden of Brewster, Massachusetts already suffered from emphysema, and when he took a turn for the worse, he expected he might have cancer. Instead, x-rays showed a pea plant sprout growing in his lung!
For two weeks they ran tests but they all came back negative for cancer, until one doctor found the plant growing in his lung.
“Whether this would have gone full-term and I’d be working for the jolly green giant, I don’t know. I think the thing that finally dawned on me is that it wasn’t the cancer,” said Sveden.
Ron said he never felt anything growing in his chest, just a lot of coughing.
Doctors suspect he had eaten a pea at some point in the last couple of months and it went down the wrong way, and then began to grow.
“One of the first meals I had in the hospital after the surgery had peas for the vegetable. I laughed to myself and ate them,” said Sveden.
Previously: A tale of a pine tree growing in a lung that was later found to have been inhaled as a branch instead of a bud.
Someone must’ve really liked Marilyn Monroe – either that or chest X-ray – because they’ve shelled out $45,000 for it:
A 1954 x-ray of the stunning starlet’s chest sold at auction in Las Vegas on Sunday for a sizable $45,000. This was well above the estimated $800 to $1,200 it was expected to fetch.
The bizarre medical photograph was one of several of Monroe’s belongings that were up for bid at Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino via Julien’s Auctions over the weekend.
"[The x-ray] was taken around the time she was believed to be pregnant, and rumor has it that she had a miscarriage," President/CEO Darren Julien told the Daily News back in April.
Link (Photo: Julien’s Auctions)
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When you show up at work or school wearing a cast and people ask what happened, you can show them with a Castoo. The company makes all kinds of decorations that you apply to your cast and seal with the heat of a hairdryer. Some pre-designed Castoos show arm or leg bones with breaks. You can also get one custom-made with your particular injury by sending them your x-ray! Link -via Geekologie
At Chromoscope, you start with a boilerplate view of the Milky Way galaxy. Select options to view it in other wavelengths such as x-ray, infrared, microwave, or radio. Above is the hydrogen alpha wavelength view.
Link. Blog with video explanation. via kottke.
A Dutch medical magazine asked its readers to send in their stories of strange medical cases. One respondent told the tale of Margaret Daalman, who came in to the hospital 30 years ago complaining of a stomach ache. An x-ray found 78 forks and spoons inside her!
When she went in for her surgery, Ms Daalman, a secretary in a local estate agents, told doctors: ‘I don’t know why but I felt an urge to eat the silverware – I could not help myself.’
Medics also revealed it was not the first time that she had been treated for eating the cutlery.
They said she had been diagnosed as suffering from a borderline personality disorder that left her with an urge to eat forks and spoons.
She never ate knives, however – and could not explain why not.
The photos and x-rays were not made public until now. Daalman went into therapy after the surgery and is said to be doing well today. Link -via Unique Daily
65-year-old Hou Guoying recently had a bullet removed that had been lodged in her face for 42 years! She was shot accidently during the Cultural Revolution in China in 1967.
The bullet apparently hit her when it ricocheted through a wall during a fight in between rival factions of Red Guards.
But doctors initially told her that her wound was only superficial, the Chongqing News reported.
Constant headaches and difficulty eating eventually led to an x-ray in 1978 that revealed the bullet.
She had refused an operation because of poor medical facilities in Chongqing at the time – resulting in three more decades of discomfort.
This year, the pain began to spread to the rest of her body, so the bullet finally came out. Hou is recovering from the surgery. Link -via Arbroath
How does a grown man accidentally swallow a pair of scissors?
Lin Kong had borrowed a four-inch-long pair of nail scissors to use instead of a toothpick to clean his teeth after a meal.
But as one of his friends told a joke, the 27-year-old laughed and swallowed the clippers.
As he tried to cough up the scissors, the points, which were facing upwards, dug deeper into his throat, causing serious damage.
Surgeons in Putian, China used local anaesthetic and surgically removed the scissors. Link -via Unique Daily
