The square, black and yellow boxes hide in a corner of our dining room. Relics of the pre-digital era, they contain Kodak slide carousels, those circular containers with 80 or 140 slots for 35 mm slides which are mounted upside down and backwards for projection purposes. I say they are hiding because they know that soon we are going to go through them, choose the few worth transferring to digital format and then trash the rest.

I rotate and click in place a carousel on our old Kodak projector, mentally drifting back to the early years of my radiology career at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Our department put on a lot of continuing medical education courses at the Hotel Del Coronado, a popular, world class venue. I’d paste a smile on my face as I drove up to the hotel entrance and showed them my adaptive driving device to explain why they should let me self-park the car. Then another extra-nice smile as I asked for someone to carry the two or three boxes of slide carousels to whatever auditorium our meeting was being held in. In the early years, there was not an elevator to the big hall so I’d clunk along behind an employee with my toy-soldier gait  and cane along the “rainy-day walkway”. I swear, this route was at least a quarter of a mile long.

As a disabled radiologist, missing both legs above the knee and my right arm, slide carousels were a pain in the butt.  A 50 minute lecture might have 30 or 40 slides with a combination of x-ray images and word slides, all which fit into these pesky carousels.

In retirement, the focus of my talks has changed. Instead of teaching radiology with chest X-rays and mammograms, they are motivational and more personal. The slides show me as a triple amputee–raising a family, wilderness camping, traveling, butt-walk racing. Anything I can use to connect with people dealing with disabilities or illnesses, in  particular, Parkinson’s Disease. According to my rough calculations, now days a typical thumb drive with 62 GB of memory can store about 775 carousels of lectures. Those would probably fill up my dining room and living room. Amazing!

Still musing, I push the projector’s ON button and an image appears on our dining room wall. I giggle as a thirty-year-old memory reruns in my mind. In it, I’m coming to the end of a lecture on chest trauma at the Hotel Del when I glance over my shoulder to make sure I’m talking in sync with my slides. I do a double take and pause for a second…is that slide upside down? I back up one slide- that one’s ok. Pressing the clicker, the same upside-down slide returns to the huge screen. Thinking fast, as my voice trails down, I advance to the next slide. Uh-oh, this one is upside-down AND backwards. I take a deep breath as the next to last slide comes up…backwards.

In my mind, I hear the deep voice of my mentor, Dr. Ike Sanders. “Linda, if something goes wrong during a talk, don’t make excuses, just keep on going.”

I turn back to the audience, take a deep breath and roll my eyes. “I’m not sure, but I’m wondering if my 5 year old son may have been checking out my slides last night. What do you think?”

Laughter broke out as I finished the talk with, “This is what happens when you let moms be radiologists.”