Flight Risk: Caught in the Act

Flight Risk Legal Definition: Someone accused of a crime and considered likely to flee from the country or the court's jurisdiction before their trial begins.

The shortest possible interval of time in the science of quantum mechanics is called a "Planck Time" unit, which is approximately 10^-44 seconds. The scientist, Max Planck, derived this definition around the year 1900. One Planck Time unit is one divided by an enormous number, one multiplied by ten forty-four times. Shorter than this miniscule time interval, all known laws of physics break down. Spatial dimensions, time, mass, and energy are granular and totally unpredictable. Anything can happen, although vanishingly improbable, even the creation of a new universe. To put short intervals of time in larger and slightly more understandable terms, light travels at 186,000 miles per second. It travels the distance of one foot in one nanosecond or one billionth of a second or 10^-9 seconds. That's one divided by one multiplied by ten nine times, still a very small number.

Humorists have devised an anecdotal means of expressing the very smallest interval of time. It's often expressed in a simple question and answer that we all can appreciate, "What is the shortest possible interval of time?" The answer is, "The time it takes after the light turns green before the guy behind you honks their horn, telling you to move your car and get out of their way."

I have an anecdotal story about another smallest interval of time. It was impressed on me on my recent stay in the hospital for spine surgery, and the chance that an accidental fall could ruin everything accomplished during that surgery. My status as a patient could be termed as a "fragile" person who could be harmed in a fall, or even cause litigious actions against the hospital for not keeping them safe.

Naturally, they are very concerned about patient safety and don't want them getting up and leaving their hospital bed without the assistance from the nursing staff. All the nurses and staff carry a safety belt that they put around you, even for a short visit to the john. The use of a walker with wheels is also mandatory. That is placed far away from the hospital bed so that the patient knows it must be retrieved by a member of the staff before it can be used.

Unknown to me, in the interest of my safety, my bed was equipped with a pressure transducer or sensor to warn when my weight was no longer pressing evenly on the mattress. That signal was instantly transmitted to the nursing station to warn them that the patient had shifted his weight on the bed. Activation of the sensor represented a possible "flight risk" of a patient, under the surveillance of the watchful eye of the hospital, attempting to leave their jurisdiction before the their official release from the hospital. I wasn't fleeing, just barely contemplating sitting up and hanging my legs over the side of the bed, relieving the pressure of the mattress on the painful brand new 8-inch incision running down the base of my spine. I'm sure that with all the serious drugs in me (I could be delirious or at least impaired) that even contemplating moving to the edge of the bed was a dangerous proposition.

I had no sooner, and painfully shifted my weight on the bed, when the monitor, maybe in the blink of a Planck Time unit, "honked" the nurses' station and a nurse appeared instantaneously to restrain my motion. It's a little more complicated than my "green light/honk" analogy, but I was impressed that the hospital was looking out for my best interest and could do that at the speed of light. Kudos for keeping me safe and supervising my stay at the hospital. The fact is, I needed all the supervision I could get. This "fragile" patient really appreciates the compassionate and expert care they provided. In gratitude, I gave them the highest marks in the on-line patient survey they sent me within a nanosecond of arriving home from the hospital.

My dream after this back surgery, and a lengthy recuperation, is to get back doing what I love to do, hiking. You can now see why this hiker is frustrated. The recovery time for this surgery is at least three months.