It was a rare case and the operation planned for it was something I had never done or seen before, only because no patient with that condition had reached my unit before. That patient had a chronic total inversion of the uterus. She.went to another consultant in our hospital. One day I got a call from that colleague while I was working in another OT. That patient was anesthetized and in position for vaginal correction of the inversion, and would I go help? Would I! I left word to inform me if there was any problem in the management of any of our patients, who were fortunately scheduled to undergo routine, minor operations. I reached that OT. I washed up and started helping out. A lot of people had gathered to see that operation. An enthusiastic resident doctor was video recording the operation on her mobile phone. The operation was tricky. When the last critical part could not be managed by the operating surgeon, I took over when requested and reduced the inversion. I was happy because I got to see and partly do a case that one gets may be once in a lifetime if one is lucky. I was also happy because there was a video of it with someone.
"Let me see the video when you transfer it to a PC" I requested and left. I got the video after a couple of weeks.
"Oh! This video is shot sideways" I said. It was running at an angle of 90 degrees.
"It is like that in parts" came the answer, and so it was. The resident had been rotating the camera periodically, and the video had turned through 90 degrees in parts.
"We cannot expect viewers to turn their heads through 90 degrees while they watch the video" I said.
"True."
"So we have to cut the video into parts, those which are straight and those which are turned through 90 degrees."
"Um..." It looked like I had to do it or at least tell how to do it. I had a free video cutter, but it refused to recognize the mp4 file that the resident's phone camera had produced. So I finally resorted to Google search. I found a software called MooO, which was excellent for purpose (and free too). It was unbelievably fast and precise. The next step was to rotate the videos. I was skeptical I would find software to do it, but a Google search helped again. I discovered that VLC player, the media player that I use did this work. I used it and found that it was unbelievably fast, but put a scrolling tape looking like candy cane one third distance up the bottom. I searched again, and found another software which did the job, but put the frames vertically.
I realized that after a lifetime of watching movies and videos in which the frame is a horizontal rectangle, one could not adjust to a vertical rectangle, and definitely not to part horizontal and part vertical frame movies.
I was angry with the resident for creating all this trouble and pleased at the same for making me learn something new. When I went home and had some time to think things over, I wonder who had educated me in this process. I came up with the following possibles.
- The resident doctor who created the need.
- Google, who gave me the links to the solutions.
- People who posted those solutions on the internet.
- People who created the situations (like shooting videos through 90 degrees (or any other angle) rotations, prompting other tech savvy people to find solution to that problem.
- Software developers who developed solutions for these needs, like cutting videos, rotating videos, joining videos.
- I myself, by thinking of what needed to be done, searching for solutions and implementing them.
- All these factors jointly.
I would prefer my readers cast the vote in favor of option 6, while I know deep inside that it is option 7.
