Absentee voting rocks

Absentee voting is clearly on the rise. It might even be the future.

Absentee voting’s advantages are many, including the opportunity to study candidates and charter or constitutional amendments before deciding instead of being caught unprepared in the booth on election day.

If you’re voting absentee, you’ve got until tomorrow by mail or Saturday by walk-in. Do it sooner and you’ll have another edge: Not having to pay attention to any more campaign ads.

Imagine how patient felt

Even the wiring had to be wearing its scrubs at the Kaiser Moanalua Medical Center last week. Special hookups went into the operating room to enable a surgical procedure — repair of an aneurysm — to be livestreamed thousands of miles away to a medical conference.

On Wednesday, Drs. Peter Schneider and Michael Caps repaired an iliac (lower abdominal) artery of a man with a family history of dangerous aneurysms. Watching the operation: about 2,000 doctors at the Vascular Interventional Advances conference in Las Vegas, who witnessed procedures from several other hospitals this way.

Wielding a scalpel has got to be nerve-wracking enough. Just imagine all that stress and an audience, too.