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scam #102 - good times behind enemy lines
despite yesterday's success, i almost chickened out.
deep into my lunch hour, far corner of the carpark, engine idling: there's an usually good cover of ceremony on the radio, and i'm staring at the faceless shuffle trying to remember the artist. i'm stalling. no, i'm pacing. i'm in a shadow.
18 stories of hospital, block the sun, tower overhead. i can do this. pull the key, open door, straighten shirt. i can do this.
..........
in the lobby of the main building, it's open, yet crowded. 15 feet to the right, a corridor of elevators, top button already glowing. just as i reach it, the doors glide open, and the car is half full. a few squeeze past me, step inside. hesitating again, i wave them on.
the doors close, the button goes dark. i can do this. as i reach forward to push it again, i speculate on the number of sicko, germ-infected people have pressed this in the last hour; returning my hand to my side, i wipe it discretely on my pants. ewwww.
flicker. flicker. a power surge, a brown-out, it doesn't last but a second.
now, resonating in the hollowness before me, i can hear alarms. each tone shift reflects the respective car's relative distance from my floor; a chaotic kaleidoscope of tinny metallic noise as i stare at my own reflection in polished brass doors. smiling.
that, was close.
i turn on my heel, head for the stairs. up up up. with even landings, the alarms grow louder, only to fade again in the odds. at floor 10, i spill out into a wide open hallway, and fall in step behind some doctors walking just a few feet in front of me. dumb luck!
there are signs above, and on the walls. radiology: C wing. we continue straight ahead. now to the left. i slow as one member of the group waves his badge over the wall mounted reader, then doubletime to catch the opaque glass door, just before it latches. 20 feet beyond, the image library desk.
smiling, (beaming), i hand the receptionist a carefully prepared 3x5 index card containing my name, my hospital ID, and my birthdate: "the attendent last night was to set aside some image media for this patient?"
she takes the card, scans it briefly, looks up at me, smiles. "sure, just one second." shuffling through a poster-tray filebox mounted to the wall behind her desk, she selects a small manilla envelope and turns to hand it to me. "we also included hard copy reports of the physician's image evaluations for the post-op review on april 19."
"excellent, those will be very helpful. thank you."
i'm already half way out. through the door, to the stairs. the alarms have stopped now, but i'm not taking any chances.
...........
[ some time later ]
i must admit, it took a little work to find a utility which could read files in DICOM image format, but once opened, it was pretty straightforward to convert them to another web ready format. [ wanna see? ]
Comments
You could always have asked Slashdot seven months ago :-)
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/10/0051247
Posted by: Slashdot at May 13, 2005 11:40 PM
indeed... that looks like it would have been a handy linkâtoo bad i didn't stumble across it myself.
ultimately, google was pretty useful at producing a score of potential hits: the catch was finding one that i was comfortable installing, and then actually worked. ;)
fwiw, to convert the images, i used a free java utility i found at this site: http://rsb.info.nih.gov/ij/download.html.
Posted by: jack b. at May 14, 2005 10:36 AM
holy crap that looks like it hurts. but now you have a story to tell, which you might never have found reason to tell had you not been a stupid boy on a stupid skateboard. sigh.
Posted by: juju at May 14, 2005 11:43 AM