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The metric system & denial

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Betsy:
Hello all,

I come from the generation that didn't learn the metric system in school.  And somehow, after all these years I haven't had to learn it either.  Never even gave it much thought.  While I knew my AN was "about a centimeter", I was picturing it the way it looked on the doctor's monitor...a little corn-chip shaped thing in my head.

Today I used a crescent wrench to tighten up a bolt.  You guessed it...it's a metric wrench.  Suddenly a centimeter has meaning to me.  My AN is something that would fit inside this wrench (which suddenly looks huge).  I got out the other wrenches in the set and matched them up with the numbers on my MRI.  NOW I get it.  Not a corn chip.  And of course, my head is bigger than the picture on the doc's monitor...duh!  Just a bit of denial there...and I thought I'd worked through all that.

Can we go back to food analogies now?  I think I prefer my AN to be "the size of a cocktail olive" or better yet "the size of the cherry in the whiskey sour you get at the airport bar".

Thanks for listening.

Betsy

Battyp:
Oh I remember the day I figured out what size 2.54 CM was.  SHOCKING  :o as that was the size of the thing growing in my head not the pea sized thing my dr. led me to believe it was a quarter size.!

Jim Scott:
Whether measured in centimeters or inches, AN tumors are relatively small - but located in a place that makes having one a  major problem.  My neurosurgeon said that if my AN wasn't where it was, I might never know that I had it and removal might not even be necessary.  He was stating the obvious, of course, but that is still a valid observation.
 
I find it interesting that my AN, at less than 2 inches, is considered huge by the medical community. Iinches or centimeters, it's all relative.

Jim

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