USS Wisconsin (commissioned 1944) was one of the most powerful battleships ever built, much like an armored city with Armageddon firepower. During the Korean War, she was cruising in convoy along a seaside mountain. Suddenly, a North Korean artillery position, hidden somewhere in the mountain’s vast forests, fired on Wisconsin. The Korean 155 shell plinked off one of Wisconsin’s turrets, injuring a couple crewmen and barely denting the turret.

USS Wisconsin aimed all three of her house-sized heavy turrets and unleashed a full broadside, enough firepower that it pushed the huge ship sideways and blew the side off the mountain.

As the volcano-like smoke cleared, the mountain crumbled, and the reverberations faded, USS Buck, the smallest ship in the convoy, signaled Wisconsin two words:

“Temper, temper…”

So…

I started a medical blog with several injuries and the deaths of everyone in an artillery encampment… and so with that single sentence, the story isn’t funny anymore. As such, this story is analogous to much of medicine—often comedic in abstraction, less so when it’s personal.

Medical tech like transit time flow measurement might not seem personal at all. Who needs flow probes to enrich their human experience, on a battleship or otherwise? Well, everyone who lays unconscious on an operating table while a surgeon stitches a graft, only to measure flow and find an unseen occlusion. That’s who needs it.

Because, unfortunately, to be human is to be vulnerable—to live in a way that any moment could be your last. That’s why medicine exists. It intervenes between the broadside and the mountainside, or, hopefully, averts the decision to fire the proverbial 155 shell in the first place.

You see, the Koreans were firing from a tiny encampment with a weapon that, while effective against another encampment, didn’t have a prayer against an Iowa Class battleship.

Neither the American injuries nor the Korean deaths accomplished anything. And with a little forethought, all could have been avoided. Medically, transit time ultrasound provides that forethought because it gives insight, revealing that flow is or is not sufficient. Thereby, transit time suggests a better idea, such as a graft revision, with the same life-saving value as the idea of NOT firing on a battleship you can’t hope to defeat.

It seems like a strained metaphor, doesn’t it? Revising a graft isn’t nearly as obvious as whether or not to fire on a warship the size of a city. Well, let’s consider that. Afterall, it was a bizarre decision. Perhaps the Koreans couldn’t see well through the foliage. Perhaps the gun was loaded and aimed as standard readiness, and was only discharged by accident. We will never know.

Because not knowing is always the issue. Without transit time ultrasound, a surgeon never knows for sure. They just close up and send the patient to recovery, having no idea whether or not there is a fatal time bomb in their chest. When the patient passes a month later, it’s chalked up to something else. Anything else. And if it’s your loved one or your patient, that’s every bit as catastrophic as blowing the side off a mountain.

It’s worth thirty seconds of your time to click here and see the enhanced safety we can offer you and your patients and loved ones.

Thanks for reading,

               Transonic Systems, Inc              

                              The Measure of Better Results