Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Meet my new toy:

Cam­era: Nikon D70s
Lens/Filters: NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8 D AF with +4 Dioptre Close-Up Filter(s)
Focal Length: 50mm
Expos­ure: 0.0125 sec
Aper­ture: f/2.8
ISO Speed: 200
Post-Processing: White Bal­ance cor­rec­tion, res­ized and cropped for web

Splendi­fer­ous, isn’t it?

It was given me as a com­plete sur­prise on Sunday and was a “Thank You” gift for suc­cess­fully selling Chris’ cars on my web­site. The purple BMW was snapped up sev­eral months ago and the cus­tom Yaris (com­plete with a copy of the magazine and cal­en­dar it was fea­tured in) went hap­pily to its new home last weekend.

For those of you that keep up with my Twit­ter­ing, you’ll know that I’ve filled up my white 5^th Gen­er­a­tion 30GB iPod, so this new 4^th Gen­er­a­tion 16GB iPod nano is an addi­tion very much welcomed.

His name is The Purple One and he is FUNKY.

Cam­era: Nikon D70s
Lens/Filters: NIKKOR 50mm f/1.8 D AF with +4 Dioptre Close-Up Filter(s)
Focal Length: 50mm
Expos­ure: 0.0125 sec
Aper­ture: f/2.8
ISO Speed: 200
Post-Processing: White Bal­ance and col­our cor­rec­tion, res­ized and cropped for web in Pho­toshop. “Cross pro­cessed” in Poladroid.

The gift roun­ded off a pretty good week­end; we spent Sat­urday at The O2 (the white ele­phant formerly known as the Mil­len­nium Dome) hav­ing got tick­ets to see the BODYWORLDS and the Mir­ror of Time exhib­i­tion. The exhib­i­tion of real, pre­served human (and animal) bod­ies was amaz­ing and I recom­mend get­ting a wiggle on and going to the O2 to see it. Sadly, K didn’t take to it too well and ended up slumped against a wall after com­ing over all pecu­liar and almost black­ing out after see­ing the pre­served X-week old foetuses and the Preg­nant Woman. After sev­eral attempts to per­severe, she ended up deep-breathing in the gift shop for an hour whilst I went round the exhib­i­tion on my own.

The exhib­i­tion took you on a fas­cin­at­ing jour­ney from con­cep­tion, right the way through life, the age­ing pro­cess and even­tu­ally, to death and all the while used real human spe­ci­mens (pre­served using a tech­nique called Plastin­a­tion) to show you the effects of vari­ous life­styles, med­ical con­di­tions and diseases.

Per­sonal high­lights for me included: Real­ising and being able to truly appre­ci­ate just how small and fra­gile (and lucky) I was when born after see­ing actu­ally foetuses at a sim­ilar gest­a­tion hav­ing died and been pre­served. See­ing skeletal struc­tures that had exper­i­enced sim­ilar Ortho­paedic sur­gical pro­ced­ures that I myself have. Being able to actu­ally see the phys­ical impact and lit­eral dif­fer­ences in brain tis­sue between that of a nor­mal, healthy brain and those that had been irre­par­able dam­aged through strokes, haem­or­rhages and Alzheimer’s Disease.

Hav­ing suffered sig­ni­fic­ant, per­man­ent and irre­vers­ible brain injury myself, I was blown away by the fact that you could actu­ally see it and see what parts of the brain were affected just by look­ing at the brain tis­sue, without scans and such.

Maybe it’s because I’ve con­stantly been in and around “med­ical” envir­on­ments and have had numer­ous ser­i­ous sur­gical oper­a­tions and dia­gnostics and x-rays and been poked, prod­ded, stud­ied, examined, cut to bits, pulled apart and put back together again that I’m pretty used to feel­ing human. I’m fully aware and com­fort­able with the fact that I’m just bits of (wonky and twis­ted) bone, gore and squishy stuff and that my brain that’s sup­posed to make it all work and be won­drous was in fact, faulty on arrival. Part of me thinks it would be really inter­est­ing to donate my body to Med­ical Sci­ence when it’s dead and I think of how fas­cin­at­ing it would be to see how far removed my brain and body is from the “nor­mal” human exper­i­ence. But then, I get dis­ap­poin­ted because I think well, I’ll be dead and I won’t be there to see it for myself and mar­vel at it. And that’s a shame, because I’d love to see it, to appre­ci­ate what I’ve lived with and through. Doc­tors and med­ical stu­dents will see it; see the dif­fer­ences, but they won’t appre­ci­ate it, won’t under­stand the full weight and the mag­nitude of those dif­fer­ences, not really. Whereas I’d know what it was like to live and see life through the con­fines of a body like that and it would mean so much more to me because of it.

I have always felt quite dis­ap­poin­ted that I wasn’t born in more recent times as now it is stand­ard pro­ced­ure to scan the brains of infants that have been thought to have suffered dam­age. When I was born, this wasn’t the case as either the tech­no­logy wasn’t all that or it was just too expens­ive, or both. I’ve always wanted to see a scan of my brain and have it explained to me what parts were/are affected and to see it com­pared to a “nor­mal” example. Dur­ing my A levels, my Psy­cho­logy class was offered a chance to take part in a Psy­cho­lo­gical study that involved hav­ing your brain scanned whilst doing cer­tain activ­it­ies and I was really excited at the idea of see­ing just how my brain did and didn’t work and what the dif­fer­ences were. Unfor­tu­nately, it was because of those very dif­fer­ences, that I wasn’t eli­gible to take part as my brain dam­age would have acted as a con­found­ing vari­able in the data col­lec­ted. Only Nor­mal Brains Allowed, appar­ently. And you had to be right-handed and I’m a lefty, so I clearly just wasn’t destined to be part of the fun.

Maybe one day, someone will want to do a study on broken brains and I’ll get my chance.