Set phasers to Stun? @MedPageToday: Taser Voltage Enough to Kill http://t.co/SMgm8e7H
AEI and Brookings unite @washpost: Gridlock is the GOP’s fault http://t.co/fNx6LQNo
I do a lot of writing for University of Colorado Hospital, in particular for a publication called UCH Insider, which goes out to… well, guess. Biweekly, via e-mail.
Amazing stories happen in this academic medical center. What I like is that the stories generally involve people. When I write for Compliance Week, which I also do (though unless you pony up the $1,200 a year annual subscription, you can’t get in to read the stuff — I can’t get in to read my own stuff, as a matter of fact) or CleanEnergy.com (pretty much every word on the site at this point came via this keyboad), that’s not always the case. I think that’s a big issue with energy issues in particular. The stories, besides those involving families who can set their tap water on fire or who live near places where mountaintops are being decapitated for the coal inside, are about companies, economics environmental degradation and a lot of money, mainly.
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve done a couple of interesting pieces for the hospital. One was about BASE jumper/surgeon Omer Mei-Dan, who leaps off radio towers and operates on hips (though not at the same time). The second turned into two pieces, a news story and an accompanying opinion piece I felt compelled to write late at night, about someone struggling to strengthen his body after receiving a new heart.
I wasn’t having a particularly bad day when I walked into the Anschutz Inpatient Pavilion that morning, but I wasn’t having a resoundingly good day either. A few seconds in the presence of James Lilly in the hospital’s surgical intensive care unit put things in perspective. The man couldn’t breathe on his own. Yet he was about to be put through physical rehab, right there at his ICU bed, tubes be damned. He blew me away, as did the physical therapists working with him.
These are the kinds of pieces where you’re compelled to push yourself as a writer — the material’s too good to rip through, no matter how busy you are. And it doesn’t matter that the audience is tiny. The stories are great, the subjects are worthy, and they deserve your best shot.
Even a few India-Pakistan Nukes would trigger global famine: @AFP via @newsweekpak http://t.co/UtXWLJbp
Maya, my six-year-old daughter, approached my home-office desk the other day and stood behind me for a moment. I face a wall, sort of box-canyon like, because the home office is a small converted dining room. But I could see her hazy reflection in the monitor.
She should have been having snack. I’d walked the puggle over to the bus stop, walked the puggle and the two daughters back home, placed a peanut butter tub (Lily) and a soy nut butter tub (Maya, allergic to peanuts), one sticky honey squeeze bottle (Maya), one mostly empty jam jar (Lily), two plates, two knives and two glasses of milk on the table for snack. I view doing this to be like giving the dog a cow tibia. Here you go. See you in 15.
It was more like three.
“Dad.”
“Yes Maya.”
“Lily called me the ‘F’ word.”
I stopped typing. I swiveled. Her chin was soy nut buttered. Blonde hair everywhere.
“She what?”
I was thinking: Lily’s nine. I hadn’t heard the ‘F’ word bandied about among the third-grade set, particularly as a pronoun. So this was big. Not good.
“Lily called me the ‘F’ word.”
“Lily!” I said, not significantly louder than I’d been speaking anyway. Our house is small; Lily was listening anyway.
“Yes,” came the answer, peanut-butter impaired.
“Could you come here please?”
“Yes,” she said. A moment later she stood next to Maya, not much taller, hair much better-controlled.
“Maya says you called her something,” I said.
“She called me the ‘F’ word,” Maya said again.
“Yes I did,” Lily said, having finished chewing. The gravity of the term seemed to be escaping her.
“Maya,” I asked, “What’s the ‘F’ word?”
“Freak,” she said.
—
I was running a few quick errands with Maya today, reflections off the giant smile of a crack in the minivan windshield distracting me. Had dropped Lily off at the rink and mail at the Montclair post office, had swung through the Wells Fargo ATM, and was headed down Colfax Avenue to the new Ace Hardware on Oneida. Colfax is gentrifying, but slowly, and it’s still a medical-marijuana-dispensary kind of scene. Outside one green-cross-sporting place a guy stood bouncing and swinging around an arrow-shaped sign. On it was printed, as best as I could read with all the bouncing and swinging, “1/8 ounce, $25.”
Maya saw it, too. She didn’t ask why the man was standing outside jiggling around a sign. These people seem ubiquitous on the lesser boulevards of Denver. Sometimes, they wear chicken suits. Almost always, though not this time, I say, “You don’t want to be a human signpost for a living, ladies,” and hold short discourse on the importance of cognitive development and skill differentiation.
I hadn’t done that this time, perhaps distracted by sharp reflections from my injured windshield.
“What’s he selling for $25?” Maya asked.
“Oh, medicine,” I said.
As I turned left into the ACE lot a minute or so later, Maya announced, “I learned a new swear word.”
“Really,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“What is the swear word, Maya?”
The was silence in the pink booster behind me.
“Maya, I know lots of swear words. It’s O.K. to say it.”
“Shit,” she said, slowly, deliberately, as if it were a spelling-bee answer.
My smile was about the size of the windshield crack. I held back a chuckle.
“Where’d you learn that, Maya?”
“I saw it on a sign,” she said.
Health-related legacy of the #BP gulf spill @thenation: http://t.co/D4x0yRgn
Yesterday I was running a bit late for an appointment. Gorgeous day in Denver, it’s 3.5 miles away, parking is a pain, so I decided to ride my new-to-me (but used) road bike. A 17-pound carbon-fiber Scott CR-1 indeed gets one from Lowry to Cherry Creek faster than a 30-lb, circa-1992 steel Specialized Rockhopper (this was before front suspension, much less rear).
The Scott has clip-in pedals. On the way back, just short of the house, I pulled up to the light at Quebec Street, always busy. I slowed down and was fiddling with the gears, then sensed myself tipping. My left foot, anchored, would not budge. I then sensed myself smashing to the ground, very vivid.
There was pain, but I got up conspicuously quickly, like a wide receiver who’s just been hammered by a free safety. I didn’t check the faces in the cars lined up behind me, but I know I’d have been chuckling. And up the hill and home I rode, my left elbow and shoulder smarting. The bigger issue was the left hand, which I’d torn open and filled with grit right where you used to blister from the monkey bars.
I found some gauze and some medical tape and kludged together a dressing that looked something like an ugly white bracelet about to fall off my wrist.
Which brings us to the random act of kindness. This morning, after riding the Rockhopper to the Anschutz Medical Campus without incident, I chased around Omer Mei-Dan, MD, an orthopedic surgeon who just started at University of Colorado. He specializes in hips these days, but he’s better known in some circles as one of Israel’s foremost extreme-sports athletes. Prior to chasing him around, I watched online video of him jumping off all variety of precipices (precipi?), all over the world. This made the 15 minutes I stood watching him discuss a hip case with a doc in Colorado Children’s Hospital all the stranger.
so I was standing in a crowded nurse’s station, holding a reporter’s notebook, trying to not look out of place (fail), and not really comprehending the discussion at hand (something about a labrum, which, though it sounds gynecological, is not), when a nurse stopped and looked at my very sad gauzy patch-and-tape job. With no irony, she asked, “would you like me to dress that?”
I turned 43 in December, so I’m a good deal more ripened than the Colorado Children’s Hospital’s usual clientele. It also seemed like these surgeons were wrapping up their hip discussion. Plus I felt guilt about stealing nursing time from some child in need.
“That is so kind of you,” I said, “but I think these guys are wrapping up.”
“Hold on,” she said, and disappeared around a corner.
She reappeared just as the doctors were signing off. She held a short stack of medical supplies. She handed it to me and quickly explained what to do. Break this, apply this, stick that on top. I nodded in semi-comprehension. These were not Band-Aids, but hospital-grade wound covers: a bunch of 3M Tegraderm Film in two sizes, Kendall Curity gauze sponges, compound benzoin tincture (flammable!). I was too surprised to ask her name, and she’d probably rather I hadn’t, given the supply expense The Children’s Hospital was incurring at her hand for my hand — that of a University of Colorado Hospital writer, no less.
I walked out more amazed with her than with Mei-Dan. The episode reinforced what I’ve come to understand about nurses, at least at hospitals of the caliber of Children’s and UCH: That so often, they quietly they live up to standards of compassion set by Florence Nightingale herself.
A product of a nurse's kindness (on the left side, the shiny stuff being the membrane-like adhesive of the Tegaderm film; on the right, over a lesser wound, is a standard Band-Aid).
Pot Legalization Could Save U.S. $13.7 Billion Per Year, 300 Economists Say http://t.co/nlfGlnsu via @HuffingtonPost
Pulitzer Prize-winning photoessay from @denverpost photographer Craig Walker. Well worth your time. http://t.co/uLVBQBPu
My book, From Jars to the Stars, is a history-category finalist for the Colorado Book Awards, a real honor. The other two finalists:
Breaking the Ties that Bound: The Politics of Marital Strife in Late Imperial Russia, by Barbara Alpern Engel, Cornell University Press; and
The Beasts of the Buchenwald: Karl & Ilse Kock, Human-Skin Lampshades and the War-Crimes Trial of the Century, by Flint Whitlock, Cable Publishing.
So it’ll be a 20-billion-ton comet vs. marital strife in the decades before Lenin vs. human-skin lampshades. I’m happy with how my book turned out, but it’s hard to compete with human-skin lampshades.
I’ll be doing a couple of events for these — the awards event in Aspen on June 22 and, this Thursday, the finalists’ readings (info below) in downtown Denver. If you’re in the neighborhood, swing on by!
April 19, 2012
5:00 to 8:00 pm
Residence Inn Marriott, Denver City Center
1725 Champa St., Denver, CO
Come celebrate as 25 of the Colorado Book Award Finalists share their work! Invite family and friends. There’s something for everyone, from children to teens to history buffs and mystery lovers! Readings will be followed by a book sale and signing.
