I… want to see that 9 kg necklace. I mean, sounds like it’s just a big-ass chain, but if so, how did it not throw up red flags all around letting this guy wear it around that machine.
how did it not throw up red flags all around letting this guy wear it around that machine.
He wasn’t allowed in the room.
His wife panicked in the MRI, he charged into the room he was told not to go Into.
Imagine the scene from her POV. She’s claustrophobic and having a meltdown because of all the hums and bangs and then her husband comes running in only to get pulled into the machine she is already stuck inside of. He’s screaming and can’t get pulled free while she is being pushed even harder into the machine she so desparately wants free from - by her husband who is quickly suffocating to death
It was a knee MRI. She wasn’t stuck inside it, she just wanted her husband to help get her off of the table instead of just the technician.
Still a horrible scene though, but not quite as horrific as your first imagining.
There probably wasn’t any screaming. MRIs exert thousands of pounds of force at close range. You can imagine what thousands of pounds of metal would do to a neck.
thousands of pounds of force at close range
While you wrote an interesting narrative, if you read the article the story is nothing like this, and even from her point of view would have been nothing like this.
She had asked the nurse to call her husband to help her up from the table. She called out his name and he ran in while the machine was still going.
He was pulled into the machine and was freed eventually but suffered multiple heart attacks after being pulled off the machine. The heart attacks are what killed him in the end in a hospital bed far from the MRI machine. He definitely did not suffocate.
So tragic, jesus. Also, it was obviously stupid, but in his defense he probably went into fight or flight and wasn’t thinking. Unfortunately he paid for it with his life.
He went in to help her stand up from the machine.
The wife asked to see her husband. I don’t think the blame rests solely on the couple. The nurse should’ve stepped in. I’m also not sure why there wasn’t a emergency stop button.
There was on one that I’ve been in, not sure about this one.
From my understanding, when an MRI is emergency stopped it doesn’t stop immediately, and it causes a lot of damage, so staff are less likely to use it in an emergency. Stupid, yes. But when you’re worried about getting fired for hitting a button, you’re less likely to think of a situation as an emergency. You would think “chain strangling a man” constitutes an emergency though…
As for the staff not stopping the guy making a beeline for the door with more than just words, I’m not sure. I would prefer staff tackle me to the floor rather than let me blithely walk to my doom. Of course I’m only in my 30s…
The hospital is absolutely partly to blame, especially if they didn’t properly convey the danger beforehand. All 3 hospitals I’ve recieved an MRI from have been pretty insistent about making sure I have no metal on or around me before I go in the doors though.
I’d say it’s about 60/40 on the hospital.
According to the article, it was a weight training chain
Easy solution : have a pure gold necklace, since gold isn’t magnetic
18kt gold is an alloy with 75% gold and other metals that may be magnetic. I wouldn’t trust a gold chain around my neck with an MRI.
So, an all aluminum chain then?
#Fashion
9kg of gold is worth close to $1mill. Mr T is baller enough to do that
Apparently the chains started when he was a bouncer. Sometimes people would lose them, while getting kicked out. He would wear them, so that had to come and ask him politely for them. His collection built when they were either too scared, or too egotistical to ask for them back.
IIRC Mr T stopped wearing his gold chains because he came to feel that they were tone deaf.
The best part about Mr. T’s gold necklaces is that he got the idea from working a bouncer. The man became a literal living mannequin, holding onto people’s gold chains like some kind of ass-kicking coat check.
it mustve been ferrous material, because gold isnt super magnetic. like steel or iron.
I believe it can still get hot
Moving fields, eddy currents still apply.
Copper isn’t magnetic either https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu1uRvErM80
Well, TIL. There goes my hopes of showing up to the MRI room with a giant gold necklace
Ehh, if you’re gonna go, it’ll at least be memorable :) I suspect we’ll both pass without even a lemmy shitpost.
Easier solution: take off your damned metal necklace.
Was the necklace even related to the death? It says he had a “series of heart attacks” which doesn’t sound like something caused by being pulled toward the machine.
If the necklace impeded blood flow or even put a lot of strain on his circulatory system then it could have caused his heart attacks.
Sounds like it wasn’t him being pulled towards the machine that killed him, it was being pinned against the machine for a prolonged period of time.
yeah what annoyed me was the Lady asking to just turn it off like you can just turn it off. i know she is desperate to undo her and her husband’s stupidity but the article framing those quotes like the tech was incompetent is bad journalism.
Can you imagine watching your loved one suffer and die in front of you? It sounds extremely brutal
You absolutely can turn it off - it’s called quenching the magnet, and the tech absolutely should have been trained to do that in an emergency. There was no way in hell they were physically pulling him off. It’s obviously that they did eventually, but the article doesn’t say how long it took 🤷♂️ to be fair, I’d bet that basically all of the damage was done up-front, regardless - MRI magnets are so much stronger than most people realize.
They come with an emergency stop button
Did no one else read the story? I read it and it sounds moreso the clinic’s fault
The necklace he was wearing was a steel weighted exercise band, not a normal necklace. He’s not flexing his wealth or anything
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Seems like the technician was told by the wife to bring her husband in to help her up. The technician/clinic made a mistake by letting in the husband, who didn’t seem properly warned about MRIs no metal policy. The technician also somehow didn’t catch the giant “necklace” he’d be wearing.
The “he wasn’t supposed to be there” seems like a coverup for their mistake, since how else would he have known to go in? Someone must’ve told him to walk into the room, it’s not like he could hear through the door.
Edit: 100% the technicians fault, the technician saw it. It even had a metal padlock.
They’d even discussed his training and the hard-to-miss chain with the MRI technician during their previous appointments, Jones-McAllister said.
“That was not the first time that guy has seen that chain” on her husband, she said. “They had a conversation about it before.”Thank the gods for you. I was reading these comments thinking I was insane.
I’m not saying it’s the husband’s fault, but I don’t think it’s 100% on the technician either.
I read it more like she asked the technician to get her husband and called out to her husband who presumably just walked in.
Also, “they discussed the chain on a previous visit” doesn’t really change anything. Depending on how many people that technician sees and when that last visit was, they might’ve just forgotten.
When McAllister entered the exam room with the technician, the machine suddenly “switched him around, and pulled him in,” Jones-McAllister said.
This was part of the other article I linked. It’s a lot of “they said she said” but I’m gonna put more faith in the victim’s word and not the clinic’s.
Why even wear the stupid necklace when going to the MRI in the first place? Like, how thoughtless and selfish can you be? Always assume you are surrounded by barely-functional morons, especially in the medical field which seems to attract these types of people, and think defensively.
“Geez, I’m going to be near an MRI machine, maybe I’ll wear a 20 pound piece of steel around my neck? Genius! Let’s do it!”
That’s an extremely privileged take. Not everyone knows about what an MRI does. Don’t just judge someone’s education and circumstance like that.
Common sense is that a person should be able to trust the medical professional. If the professional doesn’t properly warn them, how would they know?
It’s in almost every medical drama. It’s also explained to you by the personnel.
Privileged is walking around with 20 pounds of shit strapped around your neck and expecting the world to yield to you.
Again you make an assumption that people should automatically know about an MRI. I’m privileged enough to know because I love watching medical video essays and have the free time and access to do so. Not everyone has access to the same resources as you and I. Some people didn’t have the opportunity to go to college. Some people had no easy access to the internet when growing up. Some people don’t have time because they’re working 3 jobs to survive.
I’m not going to insult someone because they don’t know about x thing, because education is meant to be for helping others, not belittling anyone you meet just because you know more than them. Your first instinct shouldn’t be to ridicule a deceased person for not knowing as much as you.
Put into example it’s for a newfound medical examination that both you and I have no knowledge about. You trust the professional treating you that they know what they’re doing. A clinic isn’t going to assume you know every little detail about this. That’s the job of the clinic and their technician.
You also conveniently ignore that the technician was with the said person when he entered the room, aka he trusted the technician that he wasn’t doing something wrong. It’s not a case of he’s not allowed to be there and just so happened to trespass in with metal. He TRUSTED the professional here that he was allowed in and that there wouldn’t be any issues. The technician failed by not making sure he didn’t have anything metal. They should’ve thoroughly checked and even double checked before letting him in.
Knowledge about how many things work in the society you live in isn’t privilege, it’s fucking common sense.
Also, walking around with a 20 pound fucking necklace is stupid, and especially so if you’re doing something else at the time.
“He TRUSTED the professional”
Do you just give gas when the light turns green?
You should probably reread the articles if you still think it’s an actual necklace and not a weighted exercise tool.
I’m not gonna continue with this since you think trusting a professional is equivalent to trusting a stoplight
It’s the same thing as a stoplight. The green light just means it’s legal to go, not that it’s safe.
Same goes with your blind trust in professionals. Medicine is the last place you’d do that.
9 fucking kilograms!? For my fellow Americans, that’s almost 20 pounds!
Can you convert that to tennis balls? I can’t do this math on my own
Somewhere between 150 and 160, depending on the tennis balls. Hope this helps
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=9kg+%2F+mass+of+a+tennis+ball
Edit: Additionally, that’s about 63½ European swallows, assuming an average weight of 5 ounces. Given that a European swallow must beat its wings 43 times per second to maintain airspeed velocity, it’d be a proper racket.
Tap for spoiler
Those numbers are from monty python and the holy grail and are very wrong. I am spreading misinformation online.
And if it’s an African swallow?
Not covered in the film and I refuse to get my information anywhere other than Monty Python. The mass of an african swallow is therefore unknowable.
It’s a fair cop
Society is to blame
It’s seventy-nine sticks of butter, plus a pat or two
Aka 6 “knobs,” according to Gordon Ramsey.
aka “the bare minimum”
The only units I understand are bananas or bald eagles. Please adjust accordingly
I used robots and the answer was 160 tennis balls, which is actually much less than I expected.
I feel like someone should have noticed. I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen someone wearing a twenty pound necklace.
What kind of hospital let him get near the room with that kind of metal around his neck? I’ve had to be in several hospitals recently for different imaging issues and every time the MRI is a thing I have to remove everything metal to go past a certain door (escorting my daughter and son for medical reasons). I don’t know who let him anywhere near the room with something that large.
Edit for Clarity: I’ve had to be the one removing all metal even though I’m not the one being scanned. For me to progress beyond a certain part of the hospital toward the MRI I needed to get rid of everything. My children were being scanned, not me. So, I’m not sure what hospital system allowed this man with a 9kg chain get this far deep into the imaging area.
He wasn’t supposed to be in the room. There was a scan in progress when he entered.
Seems to me all they needed was a magnet of equal or greater strength placed opposite of, and perhaps a bit closer to the doorway, to pull intruders away from the MRI room.
His wife told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table. She said she called out to him.
Whole thing is heart breaking all around. I feel for the technician who made an honest but very serious mistake. And I’m sure the wife will spend her days regretting asking for help. Just a fucking tragic situation. :/
the technician who made an honest but very serious mistake.
You mean letting someone in while the machine was in operation?
all they needed was a magnet of equal or greater strength
MRI magnets are electromagnets that are supercooled with liquid helium and take hours to start or stop because of the electrical energy that has to be put in or taken out.
So just having a magnet of equal strengh for idiot defense would be a very significant waste of electricity and helium unfortunately
But it would be funny
take hours to start or stop
You mean they’re in constant operation the whole shift?
Surely dialed way down in between scans?No, the magnets are just as dangerous when scans aren’t happening. They are always on.
The dectector and the variable field (that induces the localized measurable changes) stop between scans, but the static magnetic field is kept up.
As long as you keep up the superconductitvity there is basically no electrical loss in the coils. Dialing the magnetic field down would require pulling out the energy, and reinjecting new energy to get the field back up. That’s the slow part, because injecting current quickly would heat the coil above superconductivity, leading to a quench.
I’m not sure how energy is withdrawn in the ordinary shutdown procedure, but I expect it is exchanged into heat and vented to the outside air in some way, rather than reinjected into the grid in a usable form. (The latter would require an inverter to turn the DC back into AC synchronized to the grid, probably would increase complexity by too much). So I suspect it would be wasteful too.
i think the easiest way to think about it is like a very well insulated freezer, it takes hours to defrost it and then it takes hours to build the cold back up.
Maybe lockable doors
Idk bc some of the articles seem to be contradicting but apparently the door had a lock and the deck opened it
So many dumb ways to die…
Another Darwin award.
Only if he didn’t have kids.
deleted by creator
People misuse the term “Darwin Award” a lot. It doesn’t just mean someone died in a dumb way, it means they died in a dumb way before passing on their genes.
It really sucks, but of course it was an idiot from Nassau county 🙄
For anyone who might not know the area, Nassau County is the place that gave us George Santos. It is burgundy-red, only bested in racism by Suffolk county. The police departments are notoriously racist and will pull you over and interrogate you just for driving a beater. This was one of Trump’s favorite police departments during his first term, he infamously told them to bash people’s heads against their cop cars when arresting them.
Sadly there are many very left leaning people trapped on Long Island, unable to leave because LI is an employment wasteland. It’s not cheap to live on LI either.
Anyways, an idiot from Nassau won’t be missed.
To be fair this seems like a honest oversight
He entered the imaging room unauthorised. It was an honest Darwin Award
Wearing a NINE kilogram necklace.
That’s like approaching a campfire with clothes made out of tinder after soaking in some gasoline and drinking alcohol.
…someone probably should’ve stopped him
You don’t know what you don’t know. He probably wasn’t even thinking about how MRI machines work.
The technician let him in. There was an oversight somewhere but we don’t really know the details. Was the necklace under his shirt, was the receptionist on break, etc etc
The man, 61, had entered the MRI room while a scan was underway
How was that allowed?
he asked the technician to get her husband to help her get off the table.
…while the machine was still working? And isn’t that the job of the technician anyway?
the technician helped her try to pull her husband off the machine but it was impossible.
Those machines have a kill-switch for a reason.
I call this BS or a very incompetent technician.
Plus a Darwin award for the guy.Couple things:
The magnet is ALWAYS on.
The “kill switch” takes about five minutes to actually deactivate the magnet and it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
Isn’t it an electomagnet?
it costs about thirty grand in helium every time you push it.
Oh, right, i forgot human lives have a price in the US.
Its a superconducting magnet that cannot be instantly shut off. I am sorry that the physics of this makes you so angry.
Depends on the machine type. Closed bore machines (the vast majority) use supercunducting electromagnets that are surrounded by liquid helium that creates a very strong magnetic field. To demagnetize them requires dumping the helium.
Some open bore machines use electromagnets, but they’re much less common and not as powerful.
So the helium itself becomes magnetized, is that it?
the helium is liquid, which it only is when it is very very cold.
The superconductor will keep it’s magnetic field forever, as long as it’s superconducting, and it will stay superconducting while it is very very cold.There is physically no way (as in, it is simply impossible, due to how our world works, not money, not people, not technology) to instantly “switch off” the magnet.
it needs to go above a certain temperature, to lose it’s superconducting nature, and it needs to do it at a pace that doesn’t dump a GINORMOUS amount of energy in this magnetic field instantly, because that would be even worse.
the fault here is in allowing anyone with any magnetic metal anywhere near an MRI. And whoever let that happen is going to have a very bad week.
No, the liquid helium cools the magnets to the point where they become superconductive. As to how that works exactly, I do not know. I don’t think I have the math for it.
The US is an outlier in how it charges prices for healthcare services.
But every country in the world has prices charged for cold liquid helium. It’s very expensive to gather, process, store, and ship, regardless of what kind of health care economics apply in your country.
Not just the helium, there’s a considerable time spent “recharging” the magnet with electricity - many patients will lose access to MRI scan service during the multiple days it is down for recharge.
Dont they loose the access to the machine anyway for few day? Im under impression metal slamming to the machine usually breaks it pretty good.
Well, the thing is, to kill the magnetic field within a few seconds would break the machine, so they don’t do that because it would up the cost of a shutdown from tens of thousands of dollars to several hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the downtime would go from several days to potentially several months.
As it is they “quench” the superconducting electromagnet, which then requires a large amount of LH2 and electricity to get going again. I have heard numbers like $30,000 to get the magnet running again, not counting lost revenue during the many days it takes to get going.
Well the thing is still that the weighted necklace pulled by 1.5 to 3 tesla towards the machine will also put it the machine out if comission from several days to several months.
Also the down time of the machine depend from so many things like availbility of components, logistics and the actual damage happened, that even the most pragmatic operator could never calculate the price of the repair versus the value of the possibility of saving human life.
FFS the saved 30k only buys pretty decent slightly used car. Its sick to even start to weight that kind of money to human life.
It’s a super conducting electromagnet, and if you quench it instantly pieces would be flying all over the room
I’m sure he was barely trained and had specific instructions to “never push that button!” When you whole life in the country is tied to your employment, it’s every moron for themselves.
It’s not an electromagnet, it’s a superconducting magnet. And turning it immediately off makes it melt.
It’s both! MRI magnets are electromagnets that are cooled down to 4 Kelvin using liquid helium. Once they reach those low temperatures, they become superconducting. This way, the magnet isn’t gobbling up tons of electricity to stay at the desired field strength. Instead, the liquid helium needs to be replenished occasionally to keep it at superconducting temperature. Source: I work with MRI scanners.
TIL, thanks
The kill switch is VERY expensive to press, many thousands of dollars, and even when it does an “instant” magnet quench, by the time you hear the screams it’s all over anyway, the metal has landed on the magnet. Quenching the magnet will make it let go, but it won’t unbreak the neck bones.
the high powered magnet is always on. it’s never safe to put metal near and MRI.
We need a /c/NotFinalDestination, this is literally one of the scenes in the last entry to the franchise.
Came to say the same. Probably not the first but definitely the first I can remember a headline about.
In the case of FD, a different part gets injured in that scene.
True winner of a Darwin award
Surely 9kg necklace isn’t something you can just sneak around with, how was he allowed to get close enough to an MRI machine in the first place wearing it?
I would need an entourage of physiotherapists if I had the bling to roll with a 9kg necklace.
Imagine how dope my rhymes would be though. A man can dream…
Because hospital staff have better things to do than baby sit every person that walks in? They are pretty well known for always being overworked already.
Don’t know how quickly custom vinyl stickers can be bought & delivered, but someone needs to slap a “Died Like A Cartoon Character” achievement on his casket/headstone.
put one on the MRI. how many of them actually score a fatality?
Kind of like Tilikum, responsible for 3 of 4 known human deaths by an orca.
I’m rooting for the orca in the med that are eating rudders. Dunno why, I just think they’re neat.
Heck yeah! And they apparently have been teaching other pods how to do it.
ok pod, in today’s class we’re gonna talk about control surfaces - what good is a boat that can’t steer? billy stop clubbing that seal right this moment and pay attention
9 kilograms Necklace?! What kind of necklace is that?
This was not Mr. T.
This was Mr. D Capitated.
Ooh mind you don’t cut yourself on all that edge!
A chain with a 9kg bell weight.
So glad to find that Lemmy is even less empathetic than reddit was. Real faith in humanity killer. Shocking how many people decided to comment without touching the article, really proud to be here…
Welcome to the freely accessible internet. I’m sure there are “private message boards” with much more rigorous vetting of their participants, if that’s what you need.
So, if the MRI spins at 12 RPM, does the dude also spin at 12 RPM?
Asking for a friend.
I imagine his head was plucked like a ripe tomato in the garden.
I doubt it, obviously depending on the applied force.
Skin is rather tough to rip with a blunt tool so yeah, maybe the head was disconnected from the spine immediately, making him look like a giraffe spinning at 12 RPM round and round.
Honestly fuck this website
Nope. Tomato theory hold up better.
Just going through comments spreading MRI information (source: I work with MRI scanners). Nothing is spinning inside the MRI machine. CT scanners have an internal spinning component, but MRIs do not.
Thank you, I actually did not know that. While we are at it: what is causing the sounds? And how often do those machines have to be calibrated, as I believe the RF receivers (?) have to be super sensitive and accurate.
The sound is caused by ‘gradient coils’ that are being switched on and off at kHz frequency, which is in the audible range for humans. The sound is caused by those coils vibrating due to the interaction of the magnetic field with the electric current in the coils: they’re non magnetic but they still feel the ‘Lorentz force’. As far as calibration, there is a pre-scan step (which is one reason why MRIs can take awhile) used to optimize the RF settings to each patient. Patients come in many shapes and sizes so the settings have to be tuned to get a good image every time. I’m actually not sure of how often they need to be serviced, but it seems like the manufacturers are here checking on the machines pretty often!
The detector spins around the patient, but does the magnetic field spin too? I though not, but I’m not that certain.
Nope, the detector is separate from the magnet - the magnet encircles the patient completely, and doesn’t move. I’m sure the magnetic field is affected slightly by the rotating machinery, but that should be consistent and predictable, and would be accounted for in the imaging algorithms.
Yeah I considered the supercooled electromagnert couldn’t possibly rotate, but I wasn’t sure if it could be modulated to change field directions or something. Didn’t seem very likely. Thanks for the confirmation.
Oh, TIL. Thanks!
