A 12-year old boy who wasn’t wearing his bicycle helmet wiped out on the pavement near his rural Australian home. He whacked his head and seemed okay at first, but then developed symptoms that told his mother (a trained nurse) that something larger was wrong. She took the boy to the local hospital, which sounds like little more than a high-end clinic. The doctor realized that the boy was bleeding into his brain and would be dead within minutes if he didn’t relieve the pressure. Unfortunately, the hospital wasn’t equipped to perform neurosurgery, nor was the doctor a surgeon. Thinking quickly, he called to hospital maintenance to bring him a cordless drill and phoned a neurosurgeon to walk him through the procedure. The boy is doing fine now.

I love stories like this because they involve somebody thinking outside the manual and MacGyvering up a solution with whatever’s on hand to do something extraordinary. Although intuitively it seems that the drill a neurosurgeon would use and the household equivalent should be worlds apart, they are eerily similar. In fact many surgical tools would look very familiar to any household handyman.

I still recall 20 years back when I was having the hardware removed from my knee after the fracture had healed. It was done as an outpatient procedure, and I remember the shock when the doctor removed from sterile packaging a Torx driver which I could have brought from my own toolbox. (However, mine wasn’t sterile and probably cost $400 less than his.) My initial reaction was shock that there wasn’t some specialized high-tech gleaming tool for the job. But on reflection, he was removing a screw, so a screwdriver was a pretty reasonable choice.

It kind of brings home the point that people are just squishy machines, and the tools to work on machines are somewhat universal. I suppose it also makes sense that a doctor would have the calm detachment opening up a person that I might have opening a computer or an engine. In fact, I expect they’d have to, or they never would. Unfortunately, they can’t do a full system back-up before they start, so they don’t get quite so many do-overs.