Mobile MRI Unit

When I was at Penn for my residency, there was a major problem with the MRI machines. I think the Radiology Department didn't have enough machines to adequately deal with the number of inpatients who needed MRI scans, and it was a not uncommon scenario to have patients staying in the hospital a few extra days while they were waiting for their MRI scan to take place. Seriously--you had to call down and seriously beg in order to get your patient on the schedule in a reasonable time. Anyways, Penn's eventual solution to the problem was to get a "mobile MRI Unit"--a trailer that was parked on the street just outside of the Radiology Department which contained an MRI scanner that the hospital rented. I don't know why, but I found the "mobile MRI Unit" incredibly funny. Perhaps its the fact that you have a piece of super-sophisticated medical technology in the back end of a semi-truck. Perhaps its the fact that it conjures up memories of the time that the Popeye's Chicken restaurant I was living next to in New Haven summer of 1994 had a major grease fire and they brought in a "mobile Popeye's fried chicken unit" as a replacement. In any case, I thought it was funny.

So of course I had to bring my camera in to work and snap a picture of the virtually identical "mobile MRI Unit" that has recently popped up in front of Tour Lavoisier at Hôpital Necker, the place where my lab is located. There you go.


I've also included a photo of an advertisement for the new "Spider-Man burger" at Quick (a French fast food chain à la McDonalds), which includes "100% Fromage Filant" (100% stringy cheese, presumably to mimic Spidey's webbing). As many of you may know, I'd be one of the last people to turn down the occasional fast food-based meat product....but in my opinion this looks absolutely disgusting. Who were the ad wizards that came up with this campaign? Who wants to associate cheese with stringy spider webs? Ick.

French for the Day: the word MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) in French is IRM (imagerie par résonance magnétique) .