consolidation

After another late night (as one does these RAPP days with little pressing to do) keeping myself warm with a few glasses of preboiled water, I went to bed. I remember dreaming as usual, but toward the end of that dream, feeling the urge to go to the toilet, finding one in the dream, and using it, but not feeling that sense of urgency and fullness go away (and a good thing at that). I was standing there, going and going and going, puzzling away, when it finally occurred to me that I might be dreaming. As soon as I realised that, I got up, and went to the loo. Its a good thing my body can differentiate dream from real life in this circumstance, seeing that its sometimes so hard to distinguish once you're stuck in there.

Had a conversation last night with a friend, and they happened to mistake the word consolidation for consolation (an error I frequently make when I'm not careful). In that time just before I dropped off to sleep, my mind tumbled that word over and over, with the thoughts branching off in all directions, when I came to an idea. I have no idea whether people have already done or tried this, but here it is anyway. In septicaemia, pathogens, usually from a single source like the urinary tract or lungs, grow in number in their location, and then start to disseminate out into the blood stream. Soon, they start taking over here, causing a major life threatening situation for the person. What if, there were some way (through chemokines and the such) we could introduce a homing beacon of some sort, in a place that was easily assessible (say, close to the skin) and 'collect' the pathogen at that spot. Here, they could either be destroyed locally, or at least filtered from the bloodstream to at least limit the production and numbers there. In this way, we could round up and 'cull' the invaders, perhaps even to the extent of 'persuading' the ones from the primary source to travel out from their locale and hence treat the cause too. But of course, this is just an idea; perhaps I can make some use of it some time in the future.