I'm still recovering from the disaster that was last week.
With two reviews due, and one that was late, it was a busy time. The late one wasn't actually
late, it just got past the 'soft' deadline. But the other two were due-due, and missing those deadlines results in the governmental 'hell to pay' program.
Still, I was treading water admirably right up to Wednesday afternoon. The 'late' review and one of the due-due's were safely closed. But the last due-due was due on Friday, which meant that I had to have a polished rough draft to my mentor by 5:00 Thursday. But the due-due's do date looked do-able, so I was duly, um, the dude?
Or so I thought before I went in to see one of our department's surgeons at 4:30PM Wednesday. The manufacturer had, among other things, modified their device by moving some holes about a centimeter or so. Their rationale was given as, "Our surgeons said this would make it fit better'. A nebulous answer, for sure. It begged me to ask what the hell they meant by that and be done with it. But just in case I was missing something that would be bleedingly obvious*(1) to a surgeon, I showed it first to our surgeon.
He was glad that I did. Not only was it not obvious how fit would be improved, but he also recalled that about 10 years ago, a similar trochanter-inserted fixation device had distall cannulation moved to the inferior tip, which resulted in affixation breaching from the epiphysis into the diaphysis which gave way to an abnormally high causality of stress-induced peri-implant failure, which resulted in all future manufacturers adding a distal buffer. I dutifully wrote down the name of the device he mentioned, then went back to my office to research its history, so I could figure out what the hell he just said.
By about 9:30 PM, I gave up. A 20 year history of the device didn't show any recalls or any significant papers written about a bunch of the things breaking. There is a database of device failure reports available nationally, but it's spotty on a good day, and finding specific evidence there would be like finding a needle (that had its eye moved about a centimeter or so) in a haystack. Defeated, I tried instead to dance around the issue by writing a very vague question about moving holes and things breaking, and hoped that the manufacturer would know what the hell I was talking about. If he didn't supply the right answer, I could always write another letter.
The next morning was spent trying to settle that issue. It went on until the surgeon got back from a conference late that afternoon, and corrected me that the device wasn't breaking, the bone it was installed in was. (There were a few papers on this) Revisions continued later into Friday than I felt comfortable with. Comfort was not helped by the getting of "Where the hell is it?" e-mails from the director.
I had no idea where I had gotten the mistaken notion that the device was breaking. But I figured it out later that day. Another engineer remarked that the surgeon liked to use the term, "peri-implant failure". The suffix "Peri-" means near. The term meant that something near the implant broke, not the actual implant itself. Mystery solved. And here, I thought the term referred to the inauguration of another horrible Texas governor.
*(1) OK, that was a bad choice of words.