[general_re]

Don't worry about it. If I may make a suggestion, why don't you take a day or so and just rest for a while? While I'm sure that you want to spend as much time as possible at the hospital, you do have your family there to help out, and it doesn't do anyone any good if you collapse from exhaustion and wind up in the bed next to your mother.

Seriously, just take a day off - no hospital, no FR, no work - so you can recharge a bit. Given that I still have no convictions for practicing medicine without a license, and only three arrests, I'd say that I can still claim this to be sound medical advice ;)

[Diamond]

Thank you general, and Patrick. True enough, general. I wish I could follow 'doctor's orders' right this minute (as long as you don't have any convictions yet I can still call you doctor, can't I?) but things are getting critical once again and the hospital is asking me for standard of care decisions. I think I'll probably need one or two more adrenaline pushes before this thing is over one way or the other.

Permit me one brief sanity diversion with an excerpt from the book, The Honey Bee, by James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould. Though it is written from an evolutionary perspective, the authors frequently cannot help but use the language of design in attempting to describe the phenonenon. Here's one example;

"...Beeswax is a fatlike substance that is metabolically expensive to produce: a kilogram of honey plus an undetermined amount of pollen is converted into only 60 grams of wax; it takes about 7 kilograms of honey to produce the comb in an average hive.

The cells are built according to a design that minimizes the use of this expensive commodity; a kilogram of wax is sufficient to work into 80,000 cells. Less social bees generally build cells on a horizontal surface; bumble bees, for instance, most often use the floor of an abandoned underground mouse nest. The cells are basically cylindrical pots arranged in a hodge-podge manner, sometimes sharing a thick wall, sometimes not. In a honey bee colony, the cells are arranged in an efficient hexagonal grid, with every cell sharing a wall with six adjacent cells. The comb hangs down vertically from the top of the cavity, and every cell shares its base with cells opening on the other side of the two-layer structure. The cells are not quite horizontal, but rather tip up 13° from their bases; this helps keep the nectar and honey from oozing out. Moreover, the cells on the two sides are offset slightly, so that the center of a base on one side is the junction of three walls on the other, an arrangement that adds greatly to the strength of the comb. The result of this architectural scheme is that the wax can be incredibly thin: the walls are only eight-hundredths of a millimeter thick, and the base (which forms the backbone of the comb) is only two-tenths. Feather light and brittle, the comb can nevertheless support many kilograms of honey. In especially hot climates, where the comb tends to soften and lose its essential rigidity, the bees mix propolis with the wax flakes during construction to create a strong alloy." (p. 31) [emphasis mine]

Cordially,