I tackled the mantle again today.

Got the cap on and purchased the crown molding. Man that stuff is expensive! It’s a rather intricate design of molding I’ve come up with since the top of the mantle is 6 inches from the top of the brick and 10.5 inches from the wall and the bottom of the mantle is 7 inches from the wall, I’ve designed a 4 layer angled molding pattern that looks good on paper, but will probably fail miserably in reality.

To get the angles right, I borrowed a miter saw from my brother and an air compressed nail gun for the molding work. Of course, I have no means of providing the compressed air for said gun, so I had to borrow his compressor too. ;-)

Tomorrow should be a day of destruction!

I’m surprised I’m up now anyway. I got off a 24-hour shift at 7am today.

One of those shifts where you don’t do anything all day long, but you end up running calls all night long. Those are kind of annoying.

And because Mr. Earnest mentioned it, I did a bit of googling for the Parodi Anti-Embolic System. Interesting reading.

As I’m sure you well know, one of the major risks of any type of surgery is developing a pulmonary embolus, which is basically anything from a fatty clot in the pulmonary circulation to an air bubble. The embolus will get lodged in very inconvenient places such as a lung or ventricle of the heart or perhaps take I-95 up to the cerebrum and cause an occlusive stroke. Sure there are other risk factors for PEs (smoking, birth control, etc.) but surgery seems to be the big one. In my roughly 2 years in EMS, I’ve seen 3 diagnosed PE cases and they all had a recent history of surgery.

It turns out there are several systems currently in practice for reducing the chance of PEs after surgery. Sure you can anti-coagulate the hell out of someone before the surgery (which is usually done), but I’m talking super new systems! One of them is the Parodi system which involves creating a blood flow reversal in the internal carotid artery as a means of preventing PEs.

Anyway, I’m tired and off to bed. Going to try and stick a fork in the fireplace mantle tomorrow.