३डी गोष्टी

मी त्रिमिती मॉडेल (3D Models)) बनविण्यास शिकत होतो, तेहा मी रोजच्या जीवनातील गोष्टींची मॉडेल गंमत म्हणून बनविली होती.. ती फार कौशल्यपूर्ण आहेत अशातली गोष्ट नाही. पण माझ्यासारख्याच शिकण~या कोणाला शिकत असतांना मॉडेल कशी बनतात हे बघून स्वतःची मॉडेल फार छान दिसत नाहीत याचे दुःख होणार नाही, या हेतूने मी ती येथे मांडली आहेत.. ही ३डी मॉडेल बघण्यासाठी जे मॉडेल बघायचे असेल त्याच्या नावावर क्लिक करा. मॉडेल लोड होन्यास थोडा वेळ लागू शकतो. तोपर्यंत जरा सबुरीने घ्या. ते मॉडेल उघडले की खालील गोष्टी करा.

1. प्ले बटणावर क्लिक करा. 
2. मॉडेल लहनमोठे करण्यासाठी माऊसचे व्हील पुढे मागे फिरवा.
3. मॉडेल सर्व दिशांतून फिरविण्यासाठी माऊसचे उजवे बटन दाबून धरून पाहिजे त्या दिशेला हलवा. या प्रकारे आपण ते पाहिजे त्या बाजूने पाहू शकाल.
4. मॉडेल हलविण्यासाठी माऊसचे उजवे बटन दाबून धरून पाहिजे त्या दिशेला हलवा.

Bike
by shashankparulekar
on Sketchfab

Bike   Car horn   Car   Vintage car  Crow   Knife   Parrot  Plane   Plant   Plants   Stork   Tank 
Watering can   Watering bottle 

Repairing A Potato Peeler

I wanted to take up woodcarving as a hobby. It would have given me satisfaction from doing something with my hands, other than delivering babies and performing operations, which I do for both happiness and making a living. The main problem was that I could not find any woodcarving tools in the local market. I gave up that idea because there was no way to make it work. But if I had those tools, I would have been able to at least repair our potato peeler much more easily. It was a simple instrument, with a metallic peeler fitted over the end of a cylindrical wooden handle. The metallic part remained fine, but the wood rotted inside the grip of the metallic part, and the handle came off. I tried to fit it again, passing small nails through them both. But the rotted end of the handle would not hold the nails. I could not find another piece of wood that would fit in place of the old handle. I had no tools to shape any other piece suitably.

Then I had an idea. I reversed the handle, so that its other end would fit into the metallic part. But it was broader than the cylindrical base of the metallic part. I had to shave off the extra portion so that it would fit. I was back to my old problem - no tools. I knew it would be a lot easier to buy a new one. But there would be no sense of achievement in it. Besides, the ones available in the market have flat plastic handles, which do not sit well in the fist when you peel potatoes. Luckily I had another idea. We have this machine that we use to sharpen our kitchen knives and scissors. If it could grind metal, why would it not grind wood? I tried and it did that very well.

In the figure above, 'A' shows the metallic part (golden colored) and the handle. Please do not say the other end of the handle does not look rotted. I had to spend a very long time making these 3D drawings. To show one end of the handle rotted would have taken ages. 'B shows the upper end of the handle ground all around such that the cylindrical part of the metallic part would fit over it. 'C' shows the two fitted together. I passed two small nails through the base of the metallic part and the handle within it. 'D' shows the finished potato peeler.
A note of caution for those who want to try this out. Try to fit the base of the metallic part over the handle periodically as you grind it, so that you do not make it too thin. If it gets too thin, you will have to find a new handle and start all over again.

Innovative Hat Camera

Most of the open surgical operative still pictures and videos are shot using a camera that gives a line of vision that is somewhat different from that of the operating surgeon. The line of vision of the surgeon is the best, because he chooses the best one to operate well. When I worked on an atlas of operative techniques, the camera was held behind and by the side of my left ear, and when the operative field was to be photographed, I would move to the right and the photographer would move the lens of the camera to where my eyes had been before taking a picture. I positioned the video camera at a suitable angle when I shot operative videos. But I remained dissatisfied. When I explained my requirement to my son, who is a software engineer, but also a gamer, he understood the need immediately. There is such a view when one plays 3D games.
"Get a good webcam and fix it to the forehead" he said. "That will give you the view you need. You will not be able to zoom, but otherwise it will be very good."
That was a brilliant idea. The main problem was finding a method of fixing it to the forehead. I asked my wife to lend me her ENT examination mirror. I fixed the camera to the head strap of the mirror and wore it around my head. The view was good, but the weight was too much. I returned the mirror and tried to think of another solution. Google glass was a theoretical option, but not very practical because it was not available in the market at home, and it was terribly costly anyway. A few days passed, and suddenly I had an idea. A 3D image of the idea is shown below.

I took a hat with a visor. It had an adjustment band at the back. I hooked the webcam in that band and wore the hat back to front. It was a little wobbly, because the band was not designed to take that extra weight. So I put a big rubber band around my head, passing over the handle of the webcam. It fitted perfectly, the angle of inclination could be adjusted as required, and the images were excellent. I shot with this assembly about 100 pictures of different instruments and surgical knots for a new book I am working on. It was a bit of a bother when both of my hands had to be in the picture. But there was no one to help. So I placed the laptop near my foot and clicked the left mouse button with my great toe when an image was to be captured. It worked like a charm, except that toe business. I suggest you get an assistant for that purpose, unless you are a Yoga expert and can bend your lower limb joints impossibly.

City Bus Mischief

The city transport service has employees of all sorts. Some are good people, some are not. Well, I don't blame the city transport service for that. Don't we have the same situation in every job and profession?
The bad sorts come in all types and flavors. There was that conductor today who did not stop the driver who had taken off from a bus stop without the signal from the conductor. Small children were getting down, ready to go for their school exam. Their only fault was that they were exiting from the back door of the bus, not the front one near the driver. He even encouraged them to get off the bus while it was in motion. After some time, when the bus was well away from the stop and the school, he stopped the bus and made them get down. The poor frightened children got down, and walked in the sweltering heat at 1:00 P.M. to the school. I could have got his badge number and complained to the city service administrators, but I knew nothing came of it, other than perhaps the employees beating up the complainant.
The bad sort exist even in the bus workshop too, I suppose. They fix the seats, hand grips, windows and stuff that need fixing. That day I was commuting to work on a city bus. It was hot and humid. People were sweating. I got a seat near a window, which was closed. I tried to open it and found that it had no stopper. There was no way it could be pushed up. I started feeling very warm and suffocated. I should have had second thoughts about selling off my car and opting for public transport to conserve national oil resources. But I was too uncomfortable to have any thoughts other than those on somehow opening that window. I looked carefully and found that the stopper was fitted on the outside of the window while the other window stoppers were on the inside. I have shown a 3D view of the same in the image below. The top part shows the view from the inside of the bus, and the bottom part shows as it would be seen from the outside. The first window on the right side of the top part of the image (which happens to be the front end of the bus) is the one with the wrongly fitted stopper.

The guy at the workshop probably hated commuters, most of whom made much more money than he did. Perhaps he had other reasons to hate people. So he must have fitted the stopper on the outside, so that the commuters would not be able to open the window from the inside of the bus. The other possibility was that he was plain dumb, though I do not think anyone would tolerate a dumb worker for long. What he had not considered was that some of the commuters would be smarter than him too. I put my hand out of the window in front of the closed one, released the catch of the stopper from outside the window and pushed it open. I was used to troubleshooting so many things that went wrong in the civic hospital, that this was a child's play for me.

Barefoot Babies

We were taking round of our antenatal ward. Suddenly a small girl started walking between two rows of beds. She was barely two years old. We all were amused because she was wearing her mother's slippers, the right slipper on the left foot and the left slipper on the right foot. Her mother was admitted with another consultant and was lying on her bed in another row. She saw us watching her daughter, got up hurriedly, picked up her daughter and took her to her bed. I do not carry a camera around on ward rounds. So I could not capture that moment. Later I had some time to think about what had happened, and it suddenly dawned on me that the poor woman had no money to buy any footwear for her daughter. The daughter had a strong desire to walk wearing some footwear, found her mother's slippers near her bed, and made the best of the opportunity.
A few years passed. I was on my way to the outpatient clinic the other day, when I passed by a mother and her toddler standing outside the OT.
"Here, take mine" the mother said, in response to something the child had said. I looked at them. She was taking off her slippers and offering them to her child.
"But will they fit me?" the child asked her.
"Yes, of course" she said. "They will fit you perfectly."

He trusted her. He slipped his tiny feet into the slippers which seemed huge on his feet and started walking. His mother noticed me looking at him and smiled, proud of her son. I smiled back showing that I liked her son, and walked on. Actually I was moved by the mother's love for her child, her child's intelligence in judging the disparity in the size of his feet and the slippers, and his total trust in his mother which overrode his logical reasoning. At the same time I was upset that there was so much poverty that small children had to walk barefoot. I did not have a camera with me that time too; and even if I had one, I could not have snapped a picture without hurting that mother. The image shown above is my 3D graphics effort at reproducing what I saw that day.

Conferences and Us

We have a huge main lecture hall that can accommodate 300 people. A number of conferences are hosted there. They get pharma and instruments manufacturers to keep stalls outside the lecture hall and make a bit of money from that. The pharma and instruments companies are there to make sales to the delegates. They want to attract the buyers. So they make the stalls and surroundings look posh.
This conference seemed to be grander than usual. I could tell that the moment I stepped into the quadrangle in front of the lecture theater on my way to the department. Look at the following images (3D, not actual photographs) of the appearance before and after the conference people moved in.
Before

After

Normally two stray dogs sleep there near the left side wall all day. The conference guys drove them out, and put posh looking carpets on the floor. Later on they put their stalls over the carpets along both right and left walls. The poor dogs looked miserable standing outside what they considered to be their home.
The other posh thing about the conference was the pleasant smell of air freshener one could smell in the exhaust while passing along the corridor behind the toilet block, where one normally smelled ammoniacal smells in varying strengths. They had probably put so much of the air freshener there that the cost of that would have fed a family of five (below poverty line, of course) for a month.
The only thing that was not different was the people who attended the conference. On my way home in the evening, I saw plastic cups of mineral water thrown in pots of plants in the garden near the entrance. Praise the lord that they had not discarded the lunch dishes there too.

Thermal Protection to Vaccine

Some vaccines have to be maintained in a cold state, from the time of manufacture to administration, so that they do not lose their potency. When vaccination is done on a mass scale, it is not practical to keep the vaccine in a refrigerator and take it out for every person who is to be administered the vaccine. So they have an ice pack, which is made of a polymer like plastic, and has a coolant fluid inside it. It is to kept inside a refrigerator for cooling. Then it is used in place of ice to keep the vaccine cold during transportation or when it is kept on a table during mass vaccinations. It has a socket to contain the vaccine bottle.
That day I was taking round of the postnatal ward. On my way out after the round, I found a couple of pediatrics resident doctors sitting at the table, waiting for mothers to bring their babies for oral polio vaccination. The vaccine was kept on the top of an ice gel pack as shown below.

I was somewhat surprised at the arrangement. So I stopped and asked the doctor, "is the area of contact between the bottom of the vaccine bottle and the ice pack enough to keep the vaccine cool?"
She looked at it, thought for a couple of seconds, lifted the vaccine bottle, inverted the ice pack so that its sockets faced up, and placed the vaccine bottle in one of the sockets. Now the vaccine was totally surrounded by the cold coolant. It looked like this.

"That is nice" I said. "Sorry to have bothered you."
I wonder if she caught my sarcasm, and if she did, if it did any good. I wonder how many babies had been administered not cooled vaccine by her and by others like her all over the country. I made a note of the event, planning to talk to the pediatrics professor after the round to advise his resident doctors on this issue.

Door Stopper

A door stopper prevents a door from closing. Our operation theaters have automatic door closers, which keep the doors closed when no one is passing through. It makes moving about inconvenient to theater personnel, who open a door fully and tie its handle with a string to something unyielding on or near the wall. This is a door stopper of sorts. It causes stretching of the spring in the door closer permanently after a while, so that it does not function ever again. They do not know what their actions do, and they don't care when they are told what their actions do. They want the door open and they get the door open and keep it open. Period.
On the other hand, we need door stoppers in the house so that the doors remain open and don't bang closed with strong winds, especially in the monsoon. We have wooden stoppers fitted to the door frames, which wedge in the angle between the frame and the open door. Unfortunately their hinges become loose and it is a hassle to get a carpenter to repair them - carpenters want to be hired for the whole day, not just for a small job. I wonder if any doctors do that to anyone, especially to carpenters - get hired for the whole day, not just for removal of an appendix in half an hour or a toenail in five minutes. Anyway, getting a carpenter not being an option, I had to fix a door stopper somehow. Initially I tried putting folded pieces of thick card between the door and the floor. It worked until the card-wedge got thinner due to continued use, or the maid servant swept it away into trash. Then I had an idea. I use a lot of ballpoint pens to write patients' notes, do office work etc. The pens are use-and-throw type. I saved a cap of one such pen, heated its open end over a gas flame, and compressed it with pliers. Thus it turned into a wedge. It stayed put between the door and the floor when wedged there. It did not get soggy when the maid servant cleaned and she was smart enough to know it was not trash, especially after we told her so. Now it functions as a good door stopper. The following picture shows it in a 3D form from two different angles (A and B).

I could make as many of them as the OT personnel want, but won't because I care for the automatic door closers in the OTs.

Repairing a Sterilizer

My wife has a boiler type of sterilizer in her clinic, that she uses to sterilize metallic instruments before storing them. She gets them autoclaved before they are to be used. She could primarily autoclave them, but she does not use them often, and the effect of autoclaving does not last for more than 24 hours. She does not like to just get them washed and dried after use, because they can still harbor bacteria and viruses.
The sterilizer started leaking water one day. The electrician could not repair it, and advised us to get it sent to the manufacturer.
"I think the rubber washer has gone" she declared. "Can you fix it?"
"I would love to" I said. She knew I loved to fix things like this. So she smiled and handed it over.

The sterilizer had an electric resistance element inside it, which came out of one side through a circular opening. A disc shaped rubber washer was fitted between the element and the inside wall of the sterilizer, to prevent leakage and also for electric insulation. It had stiffened and broken into pieces from repeated heating and cooling. We removed it. But we could not find a suitable washer anywhere. Finally an electrical shop offered us a washer. It was thinner than the original one.
"What if I put two of these?" I asked the shopkeeper. "The combined thickness of the two should be equal to the original one."
"Yes. You should fit two washers" he agreed and sold me two washers. Good salesmanship, I can see it retrospectively. I fitted two washers, one above the other, between the element and inside of the sterilizer. My wife filled it with water and it leaked promptly. I started thinking about what had not worked properly. Finally I had an idea. 'Maybe water leaks between the two washers, and if I use only one washer, it won't leak.' So I removed one washer and refitted the element. My wife tried it, and it did not leak a single drop of water.
"So the thickness of the washer had nothing to do with it" I said. "One learns as one works, what?"
"Yes" she said, happy that I kept learning and solving her problems. :-)

LED for Ear Examination

Usually there is no power cut in Mumbai, and a torch is required but occasionally. I use a torch may be once or twice a year. In this idle period, usually the battery cells have leaked all their charge and the torch does not work when required. When our maid servant brought her young nephew for an emergency ear examination the other day, our torch did not work. My wife tried her mobile phone's torch, but the light was not enough. Then I had an idea.

My cousin had gifted us an LED laptop light source. We never used it, because we did not really need it. I connected the LED light source to the USB port of the desktop, switched on the mains, but did not boot the computer. The current passed through the SMPS to the LED light source, and it gave out intense white light.
"This is very good" my wife said. "It is even better than the examination light in my dispensary."
The maid servant was duly impressed, and I suppose so was the nephew. My wife gave appropriate treatment to the nephew and they went away happy. I was happy too because my original idea had worked, and also because I had opportunity for developing a new 3D model. The one shown above is the one I made.

Syringe Suction Vacuum Drain

We use a low suction tube drain in the subcutaneous tissue during surgical closure of an anterior abdominal wall incision, when the thickness of the fat layer is 2.5 cm or more. It prevents would breakdown by collection of blood / fluid in the fat plane. Such suction drains are commercially available. They cost a bit of money, but then, what does not cost a bit of money these days? Some of us use a low suction drain built locally using syringes. The originator of this idea is not known. However here is a masterly article in our online, free, open access journal - JPGO. You can read all about it and see the drain at the following web address.
Syringe Suction Vacuum Drain: A Cheap Alternative
I am writing this article for two reasons. The first one is to direct my readers to our journal, where innovative ideas are presented. The other is to show my 3D model of this drain. It looks as shown below.

It requires one syringe, two additional pistons of syringes, a drainage tube, and a clip to occlude the drainage tube. The following picture shows the finished product, in which the three pistons are stuck to one another using adhesive tape.

I am no less proud of my 3D model as the originator of the idea must be of his/her idea. :-)

Show Off

I have never been a show off. I believe in just doing what I do best, and let people appreciate if they feel so. I feel good if they do, and also if they don't, because my happiness also stems from achieving something.
Today I suddenly felt like showing off, when I opened my 3D models folder.

It so happened that I had developed this 3D model a long time ago, and had kept it for a blog post. But I never got around to thinking of any text which would be supplemented by it. So I thought, why not just show it off? So here it is. You know what guys? It felt good. But I wonder if this feeling is because of showing off, or because I could use the 3D model and move on?

Dynamic Handling of Tocodynamometer

The well being of the baby during labor is assessed by recording the fetal heart rate and maternal uterine contractions during labor. The uterine contractions are recorded using a simple gadget called as a tocodynamometer, which is shown below.

The transducer used for this is strapped to the patient's abdomen over the upper part of the uterus. It has a disk projecting out from the middle of the maternal surface. There is a spring under the disk. When the uterus contracts, it rises forwards and compresses the spring. This mechanical energy is converted into an electrical signal, which is carried through a cable to the recorder, which writes on a moving strip of paper. The fetal heart rate is recorded on the same paper using another device.
The job of fetal heart rate monitoring is usually done by the Resident Doctors. Actually all transducers have to be strapped to the patient's abdomen, so that they do not fall down. They break if they fall down. Another reason for strapping the tocodynamometer is that the spring has to be compressed to a fixed level when the uterus is relaxed, and only then it can give an idea about the force and duration of the uterine contractions.
Once we were taking a round of the labor ward. I found a patient connected to a monitor there. The patient was holding the tocodynamometer with her hand, while the heart rate transducer was strapped with a belt. The Resident Doctor who was doing the monitoring was with another patient.
"May I ask why the transducer is not strapped to the patient's abdomen?" I asked.
She promptly replaced the patient's hand with her own. "The other transducer is strapped" she said.
I took the transducer from her and asked her if it was recording uterine contractions well. She said it was. I held the disk over the spring facing away from her and pressed it. The record immediately showed a powerful contraction which just would not go away, because I kept pressing on the disk.
"What a strong and long uterine contraction!" I said.
She looked suspiciously at my hand. "You are pressing on the disk" she said accusingly.
"Exactly" I said. "The same thing can happen when the patient gets a painful uterine contraction, or just holds the transducer tightly. She might let the grip become loose, which will result in loss of recording of the contraction. If you are holding it and someone calls you, you turn around and the hand presses the transducer on the patient's abdomen. That produces a false record of a contraction." I demonstrated what I meant. It did what I had just said it would do.
"Now I hope you understand why both the transducers should be strapped to the patient's abdomen."
I hope she understood it. I am hoping against hope she will do what I told her to do - after all there are many reasons for not following standard operating procedures.

Ants and Cardio

Ants are industrious creatures. They toil from sunup to sundown, and perhaps afterwards too, but I usually sleep at night and don’t notice what they do. I thought they would never do anything other than work, with the exception of the queen, who has other things on its mind. So what happened in my house surprised me no end.

All was well, until one day I found ants running along one of the walls of the second bedroom. There were so many of them. They were going in both directions. This was a cause for concern. They were probably raiding the larder. So I followed them. They went under the door into the hall. At the end of the wall, they turned along the adjacent wall, and again when they reached its end. Here they climbed up to reach the ceiling, turned through 90 degrees to reach the third wall. They reached the fluorescent tube light. There the line stayed a while and turned back to retrace its route. I traced it the other way. It reached the second bedroom, and finally climbed up the cot. It stopped at a nonspecific spot and turned back again. All the ants kept doing this. They were still doing it when I reached home after a day’s work. None carried any food. There was no place to sleep. There was no water source to take a drink. I have shown their route in the following picture.

“What do you think they are doing?” I asked my wife, after explaining all this to her.

“God knows. Perhaps they expect to find the larder en route” she said. “Let us get rid of them, or they might find the larder eventually.”

So I got rid of them. I think getting rid of ants is legal, and no PETA activists should be at my doorstep protesting.

The next day a new batch of them was at it again, this time visiting the remaining rooms. The route is as shown below. Even this time there was no connection to their colony. They were like gypsies, on the go at all times.

I got rid of the whole lot the second time. A week later they repeated the feat, along different walls in the same rooms. I got rid of them too. They have not returned to do something like this since then.

“I don’t think they were looking for food” I told my wife. “That is done by scouts which move randomly here and there. This was organized march.”

“So what is your explanation?” she asked me.

“I think they were doing brisk walk as a cardio” I said. She gave me a look and went back to whatever she was doing.

Fluid for Distension of Foley's Balloon

Foley's catheter is a self retaining balloon catheter for constant drainage of the urinary bladder. There is a main channel, which drains the urine from the bladder. There is a side channel, which communicates with the balloon near the tip of the catheter. When it is in the bladder, it is inflated with sterile normal saline so that the catheter remains in the bladder. One uses sterile saline, so that if the balloon bursts accidentally, its contents will not contaminate the bladder and cause infection. Have a look at my 3D model of the catheter as shown below, before I tell you the story.

I was teaching the undergrads the technique of using a Foley's catheter. I taught them the theory, showed them a video, and then asked them to go see a catheter being passed in a patient preoperatively.. One of them had a difficulty.
"Sir, why use sterile normal saline?"
"What would you like to use instead?" I asked.
"Tap water" he said. "It is freely available, cheap and abundant."
"Won't the woman get cystitis if the balloon bursts and the unsterile water enters the bladder?" a girl from the same batch of students asked him before I could say anything. She seemed to be good at her studies and/or her thinking.
"That is right" I said. "Some people use any fluid anywhere. That can harm patients. I remember one of our professors using milk for checking tubal patency in place of methylene blue. Unfortunately the milk was not sterile evaporated milk, as is the recommendation. It was milk sold by the government's dairy. When I asked him about whether it could cause infection, he said, "No. It is sterile. It is pasteurized." It was sad that he did not know pasteurized milk was free of tubercle bacilli, but not of pathogens that can cause surgical infections. I don't know what happened to that patient, nor do I know what is happening to his patients where is practicing his art now."
They were suitably impressed.
"If we want to save some money by not using 5-10 ml of sterile normal saline" I said, "why not use the patient's urine? We could collect it after passing the catheter, and inject it into the balloon. Since it is the patient's own urine, it will not harm her even if the balloon bursts."
They laughed. No one gave the right answer to that question. Just then a senior consultant in the unit walked by, and said, "shall we put methylene blue solution into the woman's bladder? Then we will know immediately if the bladder gets opened."
I looked at the students, who caught on and laughed.
"Better not" I said. "A filled bladder is more likely to get injured than an empty one. Let us be more cautious during our surgery instead, and let us use methylene blue only if we suspect a bladder injury."
We completed the operation under discussion as usual without opening the bladder and there was no occasion to use any methylene blue solution or milk, and definitely not tap water.

Laparoscope to Suit a Big Nose

"Sir, I have come to inform you something" one of our professors said.
"What?" I asked. I could not make out from his voice how serious the matter was.
"A nurse dropped the laparoscope and broke its eyepiece" he said in the same tone.
This was a catastrophe. A price tag of 0.15 million rupess, three to five years in processing of purchase by inviting tenders, and endless tender meetings of the civic body flashed in front of my eyes. I did not say anything because I could not.
"She was saying she could stick it back with an adhesive" he said.
"Please ask her not to do so. The polymerizing adhesive will make the lens in the eyepiece opaque" I said. "Send it to the engineers to see if it can be repaired."
"That's what I told her" he said. "She will show it to you tomorrow."
The next day she showed it to me, intercepting us on our round of the wards. It looked like 'A' in the image below, while an original laparoscope is shown as 'B'. These images are the result of my D modeling, of course, not the real ones. We had only one laparoscope of that size. I could not get an unbroken one for comparison in a photograph.

I looked at it gravely for a few seconds and said "Oh! Now it is suitable for people with big noses. All they have to do is to put the broken part next to their noses."
Everyone laughed. For that moment at least I forgot about the price tag, the pain and the time of the tendering process of the civic body.

Oil Can Engineering

Edible oil is available in plastic cans. We buy it in cans of capacity of 5 L. We transfer a small quantity at a time from that can to a small container, and replenish its contents as required. A problem with this system is that the oil pours out in an unruly manner. That makes the process messy, and wastes a bit of the oil too.
"See if you can fix this problem" my wife told me. I was home because I was on Diwali vacation. I was glad to have something to do. I had known the problem, having carried out the procedure myself once. I thought about it a bit, and realized that the oil poured out of the can creating a sort of empty space inside the can. The can had to suck in air before it could pour out more oil. That produced a very turbulent flow, waxing and waning, and spilling out in different directions with time. There had to be an inlet for air, so that the oil would pour out in a smooth flow. I burned two small holes in the hollow handle of the can using a heated nail. The fixed oil can looked like this (arrow on the holes).

Then I tilted the mouth of the can over the small container. The oil poured out in an even stream, spilling not one drop outside the container. After filling the small container, I put a piece of adhesive tape over the holes, so that air and bacteria would not enter it.
"That was wonderful" my wife said with a broad smile. "How did you think of it?"
"I must have remembered laws flows of fluids from school or college physics" I said. For those who have not been able to visualize what I have described, I have put the illustration below. The left part shows the unruly spill, and the right part shows the smooth flow after fixing the oil can.

Fixing A Key Ring

One of my acquaintances wanted to wear the key ring on a chain or a tape around the neck while working in the OT. That became essential when the pockets of the OT dress started having holes or the stitch at their bottom started coming off. The key to the OT locker would fall out of the pocket causing no end of a bother. He procured a tape of the type used to wear identity cards around the neck. He put the key ring through the loop of the tape. Unfortunately, the spiral of the key ring rotated in the reverse direction and the ring came off the tape and fell off. Needing this thing fixed and knowing my happiness at fixing things, he approached me. It would have been easy to get the engineers to weld the two ends of the ring together. But it would have been sort of irreversible. The heat of the welding would have burnt the tape too. I fixed it as follows.

I took a piece of plastic tubing of an intravenous infusion set. I heated the ends of the spiral on a flame. Then I threaded one end of the piece on one end of the spiral ring, and the other end on the other end, before the ends cooled down. This produced a continuity of the two ends such that if the ring rotated in the reverse direction, the loop of the tape would just move from one end of the spiral on to the other end, but never come off. I heated the ends of a set of pliers and squeezed the tubing over the spiral ends so that the plastic melted a little and stuck to the spiral. The plastic tubing was transparent, so that the key ring did not look odd. Who is going to notice it in the OT around the neck of a male anyway?

(It took me ten minutes to think of this idea, another ten minutes to assemble the components and tools and do it,  and one hour to prepare its 3D model on my computer.)

Hospital Corridor Puddles

It is the custom of the servants to tie the necks of waste disposal bags and leave them in the corridors of the hospital, until it is time to load them on a cart and take them to the waste collection center. It is not uncommon for the bags to break open and leak the liquid contents, if any, on the floor. Such leaks result in formation of small puddles starting under the bags and spreading centrifugally. We get to see these puddles with or without the bags, depending on whether the bags have been taken away or not at the time of the sightings. It is necessary to diagnose what the source fluid is, so that one can feel more or less miserable when one accidentally steps into a puddle. The diagnostics are based mainly on the color, though one could diagnose them by odor too, if one were foolish enough to bend down and bring one's nose close to a puddle.

Blood from a blood bag or blood soaked rag.

Povidone iodine solution from a bottle broken by an accident prone Resident Doctor.

Cough mixture from a bottle broken by an accident prone relative of a patient.

Urine of a toddler held by an elder over an open bag so that he can relieve himself, or water used by a patient's relative to gargle into the bag after lunch/dinner in the corridor. When such a puddle is seen without a source bag, it could be the result of of a toddler peeing on the floor, a careless person upturning a water bottle, or people gargling on the floor after lunch/dinner in the corridor.

May God give wisdom the people who cause such puddles, so that they won't cause them.
In case it is too much to ask, may God give conscience to suppliers of waste disposal bags so that they will not supply such poor quality bags despite charging the sky for them.

Dustbin High Up

I  was leaving the ward with the unit doctors when the Sister in charge of the ward came along. She was quite upset.
"Sir, I am fed up with the relatives of patients. They eat in the corridor outside the ward, and then wash their hands and gargle in the dustbin kept here. All that dirty water leaks out and spreads on the floor. The servants have to clean it up and they are fed up too."
She had a reason to be upset. I could not blame the people who did this too. This was the way of life for them. They spat on the roads, out of their windows and wherever they went. No one had taught them different and they were not teaching their children different. This problem was permanent and expanding at the same rate the population was expanding.
"But we have to provide a dustbin. Or they will throw garbage on the floor" I said.
"That is true" she said.
I brainstormed alone for a couple of seconds and then I had that brainwave.
"Sister, put the dustbin here" I said, pointing to the wall recess near the dustbin. "Chain it to the wall so that they will not be able to take it down."
They all looked at the place I was pointing at and took in the implications of the suggestion.

That is my artistic representation of what it would look like.
"No one will jump up and gargle into the dustbin that high. Keep the edges of the dustbin dirty so that they will not bring their mouths close to it, even if they stand up on something to reach it."
The Sister and all the doctors laughed. Even the servants of the adjacent OT who were listening from a distance laughed. They were probably imagining people using slam dunk technique like a basket ball player.
"I think I deserve an award for coming up with funky ideas" I said, regretting there was no such award offered by the civic body.