[Tonight's last gasp . . .]

Glebs develop in the lungs when aevioli(sp?), the little air sacks that exchange gases, fuse together. Imagine several small soap bubbles merging into one large bubble. When these GLEBS get big and break bad things happen. They occur in people with various lung diseases. Aside from transplants, surgery, respirators, various exotic drugs and dumb luck oxygen therapy is the main line ongoing treatment for a whole host of troubles many of us may face in the future.

High Tech medical treatment in the furure is scary to discuss or even think about given the expectations most of us were brought up with that our lives would grow longer and healthier. Unfortunately, we don't have much ability to solve many of these late stage industrialized health problems without high-tech. An actuary could tell us all the top ten things that will get us. Eventually we will identify what tools we might be able to modify and bring with us into this diminishing healthcare environment.

30 years ago if you needed oxygen you were mostly stuck to a hospital or tent and bottle(big green tanks or even cute little ones). Then liquified oxygen became generally available. This allowed home delivery of liquid oxygen to the patient's tank which slowly let the liguid turn to gas as the patient used it delivered to their nose via a small cannula. These tanks were the size of a beer keg and heavy when full, pesky, weather sensitive and not all that reliable or portable. Eventually a smaller tank was also introduced that was filled from the home tank and could be carried. You still see people sitting on benches outside a mall having a smoke and wearing a cannula with a large purse sized O2 resevoir nearby! Finally a device was designed that extracted oxygen from the air in the room. About the size of a spring water dispenser without the five gallon jug on top they plug into the wall for current and some are able to, also, compress the oxygen they make to be ported to a portable tank. Needless to say they are heavy load appliances and pull some juice. But they do just plug into 110, and they are ubiquitous at this point. Adapting such a machine to run by some other power source, even mechancal, would be a worthy
candidate project to carry forward with us. And a practical endeavor for the hopeful peak oil enthusiast.

Perhaps there is a chain-smoking biomedical engineering student out there who needs a reason to stay in school after reading this website . . .

my apologies this was so, er, long-winded, cough.

TO LIFE during, through and after.