The other day I went up and took a shower. I came down and my little guy went up and took a bath in his bathroom. I sat down to watch a little TV. (A rare occurrence). I hear a drip, drip, drip.
It’s coming from the ceiling just over my head. I ran upstairs, dragged my boy out of the tub, and drained it. He’s still covered in soap, so I sent him to my shower. I went back downstairs.
Drip, drip, drip.
I ran up and got him out of my shower.
Let me run through with you how to diagnose a problem.
There are millions of possibilities. There could be space aliens chewing on the pipes. There could an interdimensional portal connecting the walls of my house to a rainy Seattle, Washington sometime in the future.
I can’t rule those things out completely, but those are zebras. Those are very unlikely possibilities.
Let’s move to more likely possibilities.
My kid thought, “maybe it’s the dishwasher?” The kitchen is on the other side of the house, so that would be very unlikely.
My other kid thought maybe it was coming from the roof. Again, the drip was occurring on our 1st floor, so for the water to make it through the roof, through the attic, through the 2nd floor and down into the 1st floor, well… it seems like that would be a lot of water and we might just notice it somewhere else first.
Still possible, but very unlikely.
When students start out diagnosing things, they start like my kids did. They start with possibilities they can think of, not what is most likely. For people new to medicine, abdominal pain can mean hundreds of things. To people a little more seasoned, you start with three of four common things based on the age, sex and presenting signs. The field gets narrowed very quickly, and then expanded again if your patient doesn’t fit that narrowed field.
In the case of my leaking ceiling, the narrowing of possibilities came down to my shower leaks or the kids shower/tub leaks.
– When the water was off in both places, the drips stopped, so we could deduce that the inflow pipes were not leaking. (This happened to me once with a tiny hole in the water inflow pipe to my refrigerator. It happened while we were away and on vacation and completely destroyed my basement.)
– It’s either water leaking out of the shower/tub or leaking as it goes down the drain.
Can we isolate and test for these possibilities?
Yup.
The day before I had just re-caulked the kids tub/shower, and it was a tighter seal than there had been in 10 years, so I doubted that was the problem.
Although it was a bit of red herring, I had literally re-caulked that tub the day before. Could it have been something I did? I knew that was crazy because even if I did a crappy job it was way better than before, but still….
I took a bucket of water and without splashing any, poured five gallons down the drain in my shower. No leak! That mean the most expensive thing to fix was not the problem.
Then, I re-caulked my shower. Which after inspection looked like it just might be the culprit. Once that was good and dry, I asked my wife to take watch the ceiling while I went and took a shower.
Dry as a bone. Success!
What I want you to see is that diagnosing is a stepwise algorithm. You narrow down the possibilities. You test to rule things in or rule them out. Stop thinking of it like it’s medicine. It isn’t. It’s thinking and problem solving with a bunch of new terms. It really isn’t as hard as it seems. The problem is that you don’t know yet the difference between horses and zebras. On top of that, you might not even know all the horses while everyone is trying to cram your brain full of zebras.
The Final Step can help you sort out some of that. Some of it will take time but knowing the terms and being comfortable with them will help a lot.
Get your copy here:
Brian Wallace