Hello everyone I have a couple of photos to share with you today was going to just post them for Wordless Wednesday then I realised it was Thursday what the hell how did that happen it feels like I have lost a day.

It must have been because yesterday morning instead of going to see my nan, mum and I went to Charlestown to do some shopping for socks, knickers and bras, as on Friday mum finds she never seems to have the time or she forgets about going to Best & Less which is not on the same level of the other shops we go to.

Anyway back to the photos here they are, this is a small gift I received from a bloody wonderful blogger Nicole she can be found here: www.cauldronsandcupcakes.com I feel so blessed to receive these the necklace is a little tight but I will just use my extender with it and it will be all good, in fact I will wear it on Friday when I go shopping.

I can’t say thank you enough to Nicole if you have not visited her blog you should do so, she is awesome.

Here we are at another Tuesday afternoon, this week in History Tuesday I am going to tell you a little about the history of the ultrasound why because this morning I had to have one done on my stomach area. I think we are used to ultrasounds although I am sure there are people who only think they are used on pregnant women but that is far from true.

In 1794 Lazzaro Spallanzani a Physiologist was the first known man to experiment with ultrasound.

Then in 1826 Jean Daniel Colladon and Physicist used under-water church bell an early ultrasound transducer under-water to calculate the speed of sound through water to prove that sound travelled faster through water than air.

Let’s jump forward to 1915 when Paul Langevin another Physicist invents a Hydrophone (1^st transducer) to detect Icebergs and Submarines during the first World War.

However, it wasn’t till 1942 when a Neurologist and Psychiatrist Karl Dussik at the University of Vienna used ultrasound for medical diagnosis he was looking for brain tumours.

The in 1948 George Ludwig M,D described the us of ultrasound to diagnosed gallstones.

Ok let’s move onto a bit more about the use of ultrasounds here in Australia, it was in 1962 that the first ultrasound machine was used in obstetrics the machine consisted of a trolley running on a circular track and performed compound scan motions. The patient stood on a angled stretcher and her abdomen was brought into contact with the flexible window on the wall of the coupling tank. That first scan took place at the Royal Hospital for Women in Paddington, Sydney on the 11 May 1962 and a week later on the 18^th May the examination showed that the foetus could clearly be displayed and that some echoes were seen within the foetal boundary. Examples of this work were presented by George Kossoff at a symposium, held at the University of Illinois in the USA in June 1962 and was acknowledged as the state-of-the-art for the time.

A couple of years later in 1964 the first ophthalmic echoscope was used at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown Sydney and in 1966 the first breast echoscope was installed at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In the early 1970’s the same type of ultrasound used to scan the abdomen was used to look at babies and children’s brains. To scan with this machine each cross section had to be scanned in 17 seconds.

The sonographers’ training in contact scanning techniques was undertaken by scanning in rhythm with a metronome and timed by a stopwatch until the technique was mastered. The later development of the analogue scan converter, thankfully relaxed the method.

They have come a long way since those first days, now days there are several different scanning modes in medical and obstetric ultrasound, the most common and standard is 2D scanning although 3D is also quiet common now usually with obstetric scans, with 3D scanning instead of the sound waves being sent straight down and reflected back they are sent at d different angles, the returning echoes are processed by a sophisticated computer program resulting in a reconstructed three-dimensional volume image of the foetus’s surface or internal organs.

3D ultrasound was patented by Olaf Von Ramm and Stephen Smith at Duke University in 1987

Hello Monday and what a bloody cold Monday it has been, I am thinking I am going to have to try and tell Blain he has to let me do my blog post before he can have the computer during the days he is here. O didn’t get a chance on Friday to do a post as in the morning I was out shopping and in the afternoon Blain was here, he was also here on Saturday as was Leo and my granddaughters Sydney-May and Summer and by the time they all left I just want to put my feet up and watch some telly.

Yesterday Natasha and Jessica with their boys came over for breakfast and when they left Tim and I popped out to the shops for a few things when I came home I read some blog posts then I decided to take a break and watch telly, then before I knew it Kathy was here dropping off Sydney-May, she had a sleep over at nanna & pappa’s house last night and she is still here she will be staying here for the day while her mum is at work, Kathy will pick her up around 2.30pn by that time Blain will be back for the night.

School goes back tomorrow so that means we will be having Blain here 3 or 4 nights a week again he doesn’t like staying at Jessica’s place that much, he does like it at times but he says not that much when he has to get up and go to school the next day, I don’t get what the difference is but he says he likes being here and have to say I don’t mind having him here, same can be said for having Leo I like having him here and the night we don’t have Blain is the night we have Leo sleep over.

Not only is it cold here it is wet I just looked outside and it is raining so I bet Tim is glad he took the car to work today, he has been wanting to take the car more when the weather is cold and or wet and I do understand but unfortunately most days I need the car to pick the boys up from school, so I have told him he can take it if he can bring the car home by midday and take the bike back to work in the afternoon the only days I really go out is Wednesday when I got to the nursing home with mum and on Friday when I go out shopping and I also often like to go shopping on Saturday morning as well.

Also due to Blain hogging the computer I hand wrote a few letters to my pen pals over the last few nights as I was getting a bit of a pile of letters to answer and after blogging and such I found I kept forgetting to answer them.

Tim loved having Sydney-May here for the night he loved that she wanted to sit on his lap and watch telly and when it was time for bed she came in and got into bed with us, she thought it was so warm in between nanna and pappa. She slept all night and has been a good girl this morning at the moment she is drawing behind me and we have had the telly on her shows all morning which is ok with me as I don’t watch much telly in the morning.

I have the heater on and I am still cold what the hell is with that………………………..

Well since it is Thursday and I didn’t get a chance to post yesterday, Blain was here and hogging the computer, I am going to try and get this written and posted before he arrives for the night.

Ok I can’t think of anything to write about, I could tell that I went to the doctors and my knee is fine just an internal bruise and normal wear and tear, he said I should have normal use of it in the next week or so.

Ok today I want to talk about X-Rays, why, well because yesterday I went and had an X- Ray of my right knee. It is still sore after I had the fall on the 17^th June it is getting better, it’s just slow and the doctor wanted me to have an X- Ray to see what is happening. This made me think of about X-Rays we take them for granted now days but how many of us know how long they have been around for.

I knew that the first X-Ray was in the late 1800’s but wasn’t sure when or who discovered/invented X-Rays. So I decided to do a little research and find out.

The year was 1895 and a German by the name of Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen was experimenting with vacuum tubes and cathode ray generators, he was testing the effect of firing the cathode ray (they are beans of electrons) within the tube and their remote effect on a nearby fluorescent screen. Understand that, nope, that’s ok neither do I………………

A shimmer of light was appearing, suggesting that an invisible ray was being produced in the tube. It was only when he attempted to track these rays when he noticed that a piece of cardboard did not hinder the effect. He tested with thin pieces of metal next, finding varying levels of transparency to the rays, however was shocked when he saw a skeletal hand on the screen – the shadow of his hand.

his wife’s hand

He spent the next weeks experimenting with these X-Rays, named after the common mathematical unknown, finally taking a famous image of his wife’s hand that shocked the world. Within a month, the technology was being used to image fracture bones, even though the rays were still a scientific mystery.

He was awarded the first Nobel Physics prize in 1901 for his discovery.

His discovery transformed medicine almost overnight. Within a year, the first radiology department opened in a Glasgow hospital, and the department head produced the first pictures of a kidney stone and a penny lodged in a child’s throat. Shortly after, an American physiologist used X-rays to trace food making its way through the digestive system. The public also embraced the new technology—even carnival barkers touted the wondrous rays that allowed viewing of one’s own skeleton.

Ok it’s Friday again and this week might be a little more difficult to guess the theme, or maybe not but let’s us see.

Dick Francis

Robert B Parker

Kerry Greenwood

Maureen Jennings

Ruth Rendell

Easy or what ?

I am going to do a number of posts about things that my mum has taught me, or things she has always said that I agree with.

On of those things is that she has already said will it matter in the long run, as a young women I didn’t get it but the older I have got the more I get it and now I usually think to myself does it really matter. Will it matter a year from now, or hell will it matter tomorrow so often the answer is no.

Of course that doesn’t mean I don’t get upset or angry over things that matter in the here and now that is normal, but how upset or mad I get depends on how important it will be tomorrow. I also think to myself a lot that “it’s done” so why bother getting so out of shape about it. Usually we can’t undo things, if it can be undone the do so if it can’t accept it has been done and try and work around it.

It is like going off your head because your child has flooded the bathroom floor when they had a bath or shower, it’s done all you can do is clean up the mess have a chat with your child and explain why it was wrong, if the child is old enough get them to clean up the mess that will help them understand why it was wrong, it is a big mess to clean up.

Going off your brain about it is not going to make the mess not be there and will achieve nothing expect making the child cry and giving yourself a headache.

How are you at letting things go?

Do you replay over and over things that have upset you or made you mad?