[Lowfer] Lowfer TAG

[J D]

On 6/4/2024 8:47 PM, John Andrews wrote:
> Must have been painful. At least painful is better than fatal!

I absolutely agree, JA!

Still, a wasp sting AND an RF burn together is adding insult to injury.

Oddly, my own incident was not immediately painful. In fact, after my 
astonishment of realizing that I had been zapped by RF that had no 
reason to be there in the first place, my nearly simultaneous next two 
thoughts were, "what's this new structure where my fingertip used to 
be?" and "why doesn't it hurt?" A moment later, I had the presence of 
mind to add "...yet?", and headed for the water cooler in the hallway to 
begin chilling the finger pre-emptively. Turned out to be a good thing, 
because when the pain finally hit less than a minute later, whoo-eee. It 
took time to heal, but the pain didn't last too long, and there were no 
complications.

Sixteen years later, the same finger was in a more serious accident 
involving the "low voltage" (2000 volt) side of a DC supply in a 3 kW FM 
transmitter. Weird enough accident anyway: If one of the solid state 
rectifiers in the bridge was open, the 2 KV filter cap could get massive 
charge dumped back into it, even after using the shorting stick. Really 
needed a second ground stick or its own bleeder resistor!

This time, DC zapped the finger, traveled through the arm muscles to my 
torso, which tossed my head back against the concrete block wall. I had 
to consciously remember to breathe for a couple of minutes, during which 
time a series of odd nighttime images flitted through my mind.

Nothing dramatic like my life passing before my eyes or anything...just 
the empty station studio downtown, a deer in the headlights on a bend in 
the highway, and a streetlight out in front of an historic home on the 
street where I lived.

The first scene, in retrospect, was likely guilt over the main safety 
rule I broke that night--working alone around high voltage. But the 
other two are puzzling. If I had suspected they were scenes from my 
_future_ I might have felt better. Now, I claim no psychic ability, but 
I can't explain these "mini-visions" otherwise.

The deer turned up as I was on my way home across the mountain...the 
exact scene at the exact location. Easiest explanation would be a kind 
of stress-induced deja vu, with the brain retrofitting memories into 
logical gaps after the fact. Problem is, it doesn't explain my memory of 
taking note of the presumed coincidence right after the deer sighting, 
THEN further thinking how funny it would be if the streetlight had also 
gone out before I got home, like I "foresaw"! (And it had. Which ended 
up being creepy, not amusing.)

Anyway...the finger was not as lucky that time. Instant pain from the 
first millisecond, plus deep nerve and muscle damage that left the 
finger feeling like a piece of dead meat glued onto the middle of my 
hand. After six months, movement was OK and the sense of touch had 
seemingly returned to normal, but I did not realize I still had no sense 
of heat there yet. One day at the TV station, I accidentally rested the 
finger on top of a lit slide projector bulb for nearly two minutes 
before noticing. I'll spare you the grim details of how the cooked 
hotdog/finger felt and sometimes smelt for months afterward. Recovery 
was again eventually complete, right down to the fingerprint; but I came 
closer to being called "Stubby" that time than I care to think about.

Your recurring nightmares sound more directly ominous than mine, which 
mainly entailed being startled by unlikely and improbable events.

Generally, the dreams that caused me the most long-term distress were of 
the all too common "hey roomie, it's the last day of class, did you 
study for the final exam in the course you forgot you signed up for and 
never attended this entire semester?" variety.

Or sometimes worse for a nerd, when I was at mid-career, the one where I 
get the news, "due to a paperwork error, your diploma is no good and 
your entire life so far doesn't count unless you go back and do high 
school all over again." Fortunately, that one kind of lost its power to 
terrorize me after I started receiving my pension regularly. :)

However, your dream is uncannily like a real-life incident I may relate 
in a future post. It's another tale of safety rules saving the day 
despite myself, and involves nuclear weapons, mercury vapor, eyeglasses, 
vaporized steel, and 1959-era TV transmitter tubes, just for variety.

John D