April 4th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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My parents are strong believers in the idea of purposeful exercise. They couldn’t imagine working out in a gym, laboring on a treadmill with nothing accomplished at the end beyond sweating. No, for them, activity is critical – but it has to result in a tangible, quantifiable product.
And so it may come as no surprise that they left Manhattan in the early 70’s to raise their kids on a farm in Canada, where we were kept very busy herding cows, lifting milk crates, feeding pigs, fishing on the nearby ocean, and weeding our very large organic garden.
But as Manhattanites, my parents made sure that I read the New Yorker (we grew up with Calvin Trillin’s children), attended summer school in Paris and ski camp in Switzerland. We took a family vacation each winter to some tropical island, where I played with vacationing city kids.
But this strange combination of “country mouse, town mouse” occasionally produced some rather bizarre traditions – my favorite of which is the annual, December “Easter egg hunt.”
My parents would take us to a rather exclusive golf course on one of our vacation islands, sign up for a round in the late afternoon when most golfers were finishing up, then find us an empty bucket for golf balls. Then we’d walk off in the direction of the 9th hole, and my mom would tell us that there were golf ball “Easter eggs” hidden in the rough patches around the golf course, and that it was our job to fill up the bucket with as many balls as we could find. For young kids, I can tell you, such a challenging and large Easter egg hunt was really exciting.
So I searched fairly systematically through all the patches of rough, proudly announcing each new egg that I had uncovered: “Mom, I found one!” I’d beam, “and this one is bright orange!”
My younger sister wasn’t as successful at locating golf ball eggs. She tended to try to pick them off the fairway, where they were sitting targets. Of course my parents would have to reel her back in, explaining that the Easter eggs were only hidden in the deeper grass.
And we would spend hours and hours on our Easter egg hunts, until the sun set and the crickets drowned out the sound of the ocean waves. We often found an annoyed golf course crew waiting for us to return so they could close their pro-shop. My sister would hand them a bucket brimming with golf balls, saying “we found all these Easter eggs!” And the cuteness of her innocent glee would melt their annoyance as they put the bucket behind the counter, eyeing my parents suspiciously.
But those were good times – where exercise was effortless and fun. Where a common goal drove an entire family to activity, and kids maintained interest in something beyond the TV set.
Now as the real Easter approaches, I imagine what it would be like to return to my childhood activities at a local golf course. I suspect that my physician colleagues would frown upon me collecting stray golf balls at their respective courses. But to tell you the truth, I think that would be more fun than actually playing a round, don’t you?
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 28th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in News
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This is one of the coolest David & Goliath stories I’ve heard of in a while. As part of a science experiment, two 14 year old girls from New Zealand set out to test the amount of vitamin C in a popular black currant drink. Ribena’s marketing campaign suggested that the black currants in Ribena syrup had four times the Vitamin C of oranges, but the teen girls discovered that the syrup actually had about ¼ the vitamin C of oranges, and that the ready to drink form of Ribena had no detectable Vitamin C content at all!
The Commerce Commission had pushed for a fine between $275,000 and $350,000 and corrective television advertising. Glaxosmithkline wanted a fine of about $60,000 and no corrective television advertising.
GSK has a worldwide turnover of more than $61 billion, second only to drug giant Pfizer.
Although it’s unclear what the ultimate fine will be, this high school science experiment led to ensuring honesty in advertising. A far cry from the usual volcano/dry ice project that most of us worked on!
And by the way, Ribena is quite delicious.This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 23rd, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
–Mark Twain
Parenting is a difficult job – and one that few would sign up for given full advanced disclosure. I suppose my parents had their share of woes – my near-death experience as an infant, my being mauled by a vicious dog as a toddler, my getting lost in the woods (collecting poisonous toad stools) at age 4, my facial surgery after a bicycle accident, my head injury from a fall out of the tree house, my toboggan versus barbed wire fence encounter, my front teeth versus metal bar incident, my rib fractures and nearly ruptured spleen from another fall from a bunk bed, and my ski accident requiring knee reconstruction surgery… I guess you could call me accident prone.
Looking back it makes sense why my parents encouraged me not to play contact sports, but pursue academics. I took to jogging and tennis instead (yes, I managed to sprain my ankle and catch a racket to the eye nonetheless), and physical training in the gym. But my redirection towards reading and homework was probably a good thing – as it helped me to develop intellectual discipline, and at the very least kept me out of the ER.
So what is the moral of this story? I guess if you have a kid who’s physically challenged – or at least seems to be a magnet for high velocity metal objects, do not lose heart. With a little direction, he or she can grow up to become a doctor who helps other kids who injure themselves repeatedly in creative and unexpected ways.
Were you an accident prone kid, or do you have an accident prone kid? I’d like to hear some of your war stories!
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 11th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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I’m afraid you’re going to need a box of tissues for this next post. My good friend Carolyn (she is the Cancer Center Manager at Revolution Health – and has a great blog) sent me a link to a story she wrote about a school program developed to raise awareness of the dangers of drunk driving. It’s called: “Fatal Choices – Shattered Dreams.”
Basically, the entire school goes through a detailed reenactment of a fatal car crash where several classmates are killed. Part of the program requires that all the kids (and their parents) imagine the goodbye letters they’d write if they knew they would be killed in a drunk driving crash. Carolyn and her daughter wrote these letters to one another, as they imagined this horrific scenario:
Dear Mom & Dad. I really don’t know what you are supposed to say in a good bye letter. I couldn’t even imagine waking up one morning and not coming back to see you later that same day. Today, that unimaginable thing became a reality. Dad – if I could go back to this morning knowing what the day would bring I wish more than anything that I just would have said I love you instead of griping about stupid things. I truly do love you and hope and wish that after my death, you can move on, heal and live an amazing life full of happiness. Mom – my only regret with you is that I did not even get to see or speak to you this morning. I would give a lot just to be able to see you this morning. You are the one person that I would not mind being completely like when I grow up, if I would have grown up. You are more than just my mom, you are the one I can talk to and count on. I love you so much! Both of you mean the world to me and I would give anything just to be able to say good bye. I love you with all my heart and I hope that after my death, everything will be OK. I wish you both the best life you could possibly have and please live it the way you would with me there – with happiness, excitement and adventure. Thank you for everything you have given me. You are the absolute best parents I could have asked for. I love you forever, wherever. Erica
Here’s what Erica’s mom, Carolyn, wrote:
We thought we had a lifetime to talk to you, call you on the telephone or e-mail you, but this will be the final time we will write:
Dear Erica, This is not the proper order of things – parents bury parents and grandparents. We are not supposed to bury our children, but yet, here we are saying good-bye for the last time. We hope you left this world knowing that we loved you more than life itself. If either of us could trade places with you, we would do so without hesitation. Our lives will never be the same. They say time heals all wounds, but not this one. We have holes in our hearts since you are gone, and we will be this way until the end of our days. We will never see you graduate from high school. We can imagine the smile on your face as you are with your friends when you leave high school for the last time as a graduate. We will miss seeing you swim in college, something we know you were looking forward to. We’ll never see you graduate from college – beginning what for most is the start of a lifetime of rich and fulfilling experiences. We will not see the love you show for others as you proceed with your career as a neo-natal nurse. How many babies will never know your soft and caring touch? We will never see you walk down the aisle with the love of your life. We will never hold your children. But the most tragic thing of all Erica, we will never hold you again – something we cannot bear, but must now deal with. Puffy, Puppy and Kissy are with you in your final resting place. We hope that whatever journey you take from here on – that they bring you comfort throughout eternity. Remember us as two people who loved you so much that even in death, we want you to be comfortable and at peace. Good-bye for the last time, Erica. This is not the proper order of things, but we will love you forever.
This sort of program and reflection may truly save lives… Do what you can to support this initiative.
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
March 10th, 2007 by Dr. Val Jones in True Stories
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Ok, so now that I’ve given you a really good example of the dangers of VIPs bullying doctors, I will present the flip side of the coin: a good kind of patient aggressiveness.
A 10 month old baby was vomiting and febrile, and her new mom brought her in to the hospital for an evaluation. She was told that it was gastroenteritis (my favorite diagnosis of late) and that the baby would get over it soon enough. The young mother insisted that she knew her baby, and that the infant had never been this fussy and that there really did seem to be something more serious at play. Again, she received eye rolls from everyone from technicians to nursing staff to physicians. “New mothers are so histrionic,” everyone thought.
But as the evening wore on, the baby became fussier and fussier, and began scratching herself all over. The nurses came in and tied her chubby arms and legs down so that she wouldn’t tear her skin. The mom wrung her hands all night. The doctor went home, yawning and sure that the baby would be fine in the morning.
Several episodes of violent, projectile vomiting ensued, and the mother pleaded for someone to take another look. No one would listen, as the doctor had written in the chart that the baby had gastroenteritis, so that was what it was.
In the middle of the night, after the physician had gone home, the mom insisted that the nurses page him to come back to the hospital. The nurses initially refused, but the mother told them that she would personally make their night miserable if they didn’t comply. The annoyed physician came back to the hospital against his better judgment, and found the mother and baby looking far worse than when he’d left. In fact, the baby’s vitals were becoming unstable and her abdomen was quite distended.
The physician ordered an abdominal x-ray series. It showed an advanced intussusception and the belly was distended with gangrene. He knew that she was likely to die. He asked the mother if she wanted him to call the general surgeon (who had no experience with operating on babies) or if she’d like to take a chance and get the infant to an academic center in New York City that had a team of pediatric surgeons on call. Time was of the essence, but surgical expertise varied greatly between the two options. The mom could tell that the physician was terrified, and her instincts told her that she should get the most experienced doctor to operate on her baby.
A few hours later, the baby was rushed into the O.R. at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The pediatric surgeon on the case told the mother that it was unlikely that the child would live, but that he promised not to give up on the baby. At that point, the baby was septic and seizing.
In a truly miraculous turn of events, the surgeon was able to resect the dead bowel and save the baby’s life. If the baby had arrived even a few minutes later, she probably wouldn’t have made it.
So in this case, I applaud the mother for being persistent and forcing the medical staff to take a closer look at this “gastroenteritis.” In our imperfect medical system, patients and families must sometimes advocate for themselves in order to get the attention they require. This story, in particular, means a lot to me, because I still bear the abdominal scar from the surgery.
This post originally appeared on Dr. Val’s blog at RevolutionHealth.com.
