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Amigos y Amigas,
Spanish is an interesting language. While I’m not as fluent in Spanish as I am in German, I did take a few years in high school and of course, I grew up in Arizona so I’ve picked up a little along the way. One thing that I always found curious about the language is how not every letter in the Spanish alphabet really gets its own name.
One example of this are the letters “B” and “V”. The letter “B” is simple enough. Similar to its English equivalent, it’s called “be” (pronounced “bay”) or “be grande” (big “B”). “V” on the other hand, seems to have been deemed insufficiently important to warrant being bestowed with a name of it’s very own, and instead is known as “be chica” or little “B”.
“Why,” you may be asking yourself right now, “is this remotely important?” Well, on October 2nd, I shall leave the warm, safe, friendly womb of the Boeing Company, squeeze out past the armed sentries who so diligently guard her commercial sites, and begin life anew (albeit not bare-assed and screaming) as the sole mechanical engineer at a medical device/biotech startup in lower Queen Anne. A company called Ventripoint.
A six year gestation period is pretty long. I feel like an elephant.
“So,” you might say, “Explain to me exactly what a tool designer from an aerospace company would do at a snazzy, high tech medical device startup? For that matter, what do they make there?”
Well, I’m glad you asked. Let me answer the second question first. Ventripoint is the holder of an exclusive licensing agreement to commercialize a patent from the UW Department of Cardiology. To summarize their website, the system that they’re developing involves using echocardiography (i.e. ultrasound) to accurately determine heart volume, or more specifically, right ventricular volume. Using a hospital’s existing ultrasound machine and a three-dimensional tracking system to determine probe vector, the sonographer will chose from a series of about 30 points on the US scan. These points are then used by the proprietary database of 200 hearts collected at UW to parametrically spit out a number (and sometimes a 3D model) back to the cardiologist. All of this happens in about the space of an hour, from the beginning of the scan to the cardiologist holding the printout.
Why is this important? Tens of thousands of people in the US (and probably millions world-wide), primarily children, suffer from congenital heart disease. As ventricular volume is a primary indicator of the progression of the disease, each of these people are expected to have their ventricular volume checked at least once a year and often twice. Currently, there are only two ways to do that. The first is using fluoroscopy, which in layman’s terms is basically a real-time, continuous x-ray. Not good for anybody. The second (much safer method) is using MRI, which can cost around $10k per scan, take several hours to perform, eats up time on a very expensive machine and takes days to analyze the results. The technology that Ventripoint will be selling will cost the patient $135 and can be done 8 times in a shift.
I could tie this in, in so many ways. This is not an FDA approved method for measuring ventricular volume
My job will be… well, it’s gonna be a lot of jobs actually. I’ll be responsible for validating the 3D tracking system they’ve chosen (or possibly identifying a more reliable one), figuring out how to fix a the tracking sensor to the probe (of which there are probably hundreds of designs out there), developing a calibration routine for sensor/probe pairs (because the probes aren’t made with high tolerances), and a crap load of other things, including designing a mattress to keep the patient comfortable and relatively still.
“OK, OK,” I can hear you saying. “I’ll buy for the moment that you might actually have something to contribute that kind of work, but that doesn’t explain why you’re going. I mean, heh heh… we know it can’t be the money.”
Yes, you are right. It’s definitely not the money. This is already a long diatribe and if I were reading it from one of you, I would have probably quit a long time ago, so I’ll keep this short. I like to think of my friend Kate, who once lamented to me that she was making less than half of my salary studying the mating habits of some species of bird near flagstaff. Ultimately though, I was the one jealous of her. Working at Boeing has it’s ups and downs. Sometimes it’s fun and sometimes it’s nauseatingly tedious, but it’s never been for me what studying birds was for Kate. It’s never been soul satisfying. I want to move out of aerospace and into a field where I can see exactly how everything that I work on will benefit somebody else. Where what I do will make a difference to somebody’s quality of life. Building airplanes is cool and all, but it’s not helping sick children. You know… minus helping them to push just that little bit over the edge from nausea to vomiting that is. I mean, we all feel better after we throw up, right?
Oh and yeah, my commute will go from 30-45 minutes each way to 10 by car. Although I’ll be biking and bussing it from now on. I tell D that that’s not a major factor in my decision to take the job, but that’s a bald-faced lie!
Predictions abound that when that particular period is over (or, god forbid, the company go out of business) that I will one day return to the Boeing Company, as many do over their careers. And I’m sure that after the intial excitement of being out in the real world, I’m sure I’ll be wishing I could do just that. However, just as one cannot climb back into the womb (usually because we’ve gotten way to big) I don’t think I can let that happen. This is gonna be the first step to a brand new world and I’d like to think I’m not the type to turn back from adventure. Call me Indy. It was my nickname in college.
I can’t come up with a good caption this time.
Anyways, back to the spanish thing. See, I’m leaving the “Big B” for the “Little B”. You see what I did there? Get it? Truly, I have been blessed with a wit and way with words that has no equal. Don’t deny it!
