The second smoker I picked up is a Bradley. I know purists deride this sort of thing, but a lot of times, I don’t have the time to babysit the big smoker, or it’s simply too large for whatever I am preparing. The tending for the Bradley is making sure my water bowl at the bottom stays filled and that the pucks are in place for however many hours of smoke I want to run. Other than that, beyond resetting the timer for a full load that takes longer than nine hours, I can leave it pretty much unattended for long periods of time, during which I can get other things done.

Sign me up for quesadillas!

They did numb up my back with a local. It’s a weird thing, because he first numbed the dermis, then did a second shot through to just between the ribs. From there, he punched through the skin, between the ribs, and into the pleural space. That was kind of painful as he first punched through that last bit, but it was more painful as the glut of fluid drained out and the lung started expanding back into that space. As he explained it, this is due both to the expansion and also due to likely inflammation of the lining, so as the expansion occurs, you now have rubbing against that inflamed area. I swear, if I weren’t as old as I am, I’d go back to school and then head to medical school, because this stuff is quite fascinating. When it’s happening to someone else. Remarkably, the picture in this Wikipedia article is pretty much exactly how they had me set up, leaning over a table, with a tube sucking fluid out into a bottle. It’s kind of scary to read about the possible causes of the fluid (or worse, go to “pleural effusion” in Wikipedia to be even more frightened) building up, but having had a cough and pain before the surgery, then the surgery, albeit on the right and not the left side, Im expecting my medical mystery tour to continue when we go back on Tuesday for the results of the lab work on the fluid and the CT scan.

Oh, and typically, the capacity of the human lung is between 4-6 liters, with smaller people having smaller capacities, of course, and larger people tending to have more, just because they’re larger. It reminds me of something from high school. When I was in the band, and the jazz band, the latter group had the chance to have a session with the Navy’s jazz band, which was quite thrilling for us who were in that group. One of the trumpet players, while working with us, was talking about breathing control. For those of us who are (or were) brass players, he led us through various exercises, and then as we all gathered around, he said, in all seriousness, to a bunch of high schoolers, “Just remember, when you think you’re about to run out of air, you’re probably not. You’re always half tanked.” You can imagine how hilarious we found that to be. Looking at what I’ve learned now about the lungs, it’s clear he knew exactly what he was talking about, as most people do not use their full lung capacity. At the time, though, we laughed about that for months.