I’m finally home from school for the summer, and I have one precious week before I start back to work in San Francisco. I’ve also come into contact with a good friend’s family member who works as a supervising nurse at a very large facility who has expressed interest in helping me out. Although I’m very confident in my research, it’s hugely comforting to have a medical professional that is willing to be with me, in person, during the procedure to offer advice and help out.

Current procedure date is 6/22/14, assuming everything goes to plan. I’ve gotten a new ampoule of lidocaine, and have plenty of my #15 scalpels ready to go. The only downside is that my date is the day before I return to work, which means I’ll have a tender finger to start coding with. Nonetheless, I’m happy to find a date that works for both my friend and his family member.

Magnet Implant Tips

With the upcoming procedure in mind, I’ve been going over a number of things I’ve learned from the previous failed procedures and compiled a list of magnet implant tips.

• As I’ve already mentioned, use #15 scalpels instead of #10, so that the scalpel can make both the primary incision and pocket incision.
• Buy NON-antistatic tweezers; antistatic tweezers can be slightly ferrous (or if it’s not ferrous, something that’s slightly magnetic is present in there and makes it difficult toposition the magnet. Ifmagnetically-active plastic tweezers are all you have, use the image on the right as a guide for how to hold the magnet.
  

  Grab the magnet by a corner. It reduces grabbing power but makes it easier to get in the wound, and then hold in place as you let go with the tweezers.

• Take time to breath. In my first procedure, I was ready for the blood and slight pain near the end, but it still was a little unsettling. A few times in the process, I let the knowledge that the lidocaine had me on a clock and the blood oozing out of me get me too hyped up and a little frantic. Taking a few moments to take a deep breath, mentally go over my checklist, and just recompose myself was easily worth the operating time lost.
• When I was doing my sutures, I started too close to the wound edge – practice your suture technique on some surgical tubing or even a taped-up ball of tissues before you use your own skin.

These magnet implant tips are mainly for my own reference as I plan for my procedure next weekend, but hopefully my follies can help others plan a safe and well performed magnet implantation! Happy hacking!