Turning a Medical Crisis into a New Lease on Life

Author:  Bryon Ater
Source:  The Shot Peener magazine, Volume 21 / Issue 2, Spring 2007
Doc ID:  2007008
Year of Publication:  2007
Abstract:  
There are probably hundreds of Shot Peener readers that have experienced something similar to my story. Your day starts out as it usually does. You go to the same job that you have taken for granted for many years and then something happens that changes the course of your life. I was making progress building the business and then all of a sudden I had to have major surgery again because of the same medial condition. I was down again. Who was going to run the business and was I going to lose everything that I had worked for? Those are some of the thoughts that went through my head while I was lying there in bed doing nothing. As I watched the hospital staff do their job cleaning the furniture and wiping down the rails on the beds and the floors, I asked a staff member what she was using to clean these areas. The young lady looked at me and said "a bacteria cleaner". As I lay there and watched her spray the cleaner on and then wipe it off, I remembered a TV program on diseases in the hospital. The program had acknowledged a number of cases where people have gotten sick as a result of being hospitalized. I started kicking around some ideas in my head related to shot peening. While I recovered from surgery, I began pursuing the notion of using shot peening to help cure hospitals' bacteria problems and, at the same time, eliminate fatigue and stress corrosion problems. I consulted with Matco labs, a testing lab with which I worked, and the metallurgist on my company's advisory board to see if they thought this was a possibility. They shot me down. I was told that this could not be done because I would create more problems by shot peening than I would ever be able to cure-the shot peening process could trap bacteria in the metal.