Plethysmograph review
Are you particularly fond of breathing in invisible non-o2 gasses and puffing them into a tube? Been depressed that it’s not something that involves up being put in a hot sealed glass box? Don’t like doing it for free? Then I’ve got something for you.
This plethysmograph will enable you to be sternly instructed at by a random person telling you to breathe, exhale, blow, pant like a dog, and other sorts of commands that range the yoga/nazi/bondage spectrum.
Festive too-tight nose clamps add to the inevitable unpreventable claustrophobia that happens when they hermetically seal you into this glass coffin, and the two bags that slowly deflate during calibration will make you feel like the air is being yanked out of your lungs as the pressure slowly changes and the heat perceptibly rises.
A nightmarish instrument that even though the walls are glass, you feel like they’re closing in once the bank-safe-style locking cylinder is in place.
Messing up a test then puts you on time out for four additional minutes that you’ll sit languishing wondering why the temp is rising and your ears are popping.
Not since the MRI where I was placed at at downward angle and could see nothing other than plastic four inches in front of my face have I ever felt a device was designed to elicit the feeling of slowly being suffocated from lack of oxygen.
All this and then you get to wait for days for the results, which might send you back to the box.
I can’t imagine a more apt representation of breathing problems in a machine or the air getting sucked out of your lungs while invisible walls trap you.
The Plethysmograph pictured here (not pictured: computer with Cathy comics on monitor,) is available here through your local hospital supply store for the low low price of $24,866 although you can expect that to fall later in the year when the new models are introduced.
I’ll be back tomorrow.
