The metric system & denial

[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  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