most of this was in the paper today

so i don’t think i am doing any kind of HIPA violation. soooo here goes…

lots of stories in the news all the time, from every city, about violence, crime and the police. if you know anything about me, you’ll know that i give anesthesia at a medical center that is the trauma center in the area. so, if you see a shooting (and there seems to be alot of them around here) or a big ol’ car crash or the like around here, chances are, someone i work with, or myself, is doing the anesthesia.

so, an alpha* was called monday – and when traumas do come up to the OR, there usually is some sort of story attached, but, obviously, we are all there to work, not gossip, and those stories are a lot like the game “telephone” when we were kids? i mean to say, the stories can be pretty inaccurate after they have traveled through several people – anywho, i was in another case when i heard one of the circulators talking about the alpha was coming up and it was a cop shot in the line by an AK-47 during a routine traffic stop. the alpha came up, and when i finished my case, i went into the trauma room to see if anything was needed. i’m not even on the chart or anything for this case. i brought melissa, who got this young man, a police officer, off to sleep and was managing his anesthetic, more needed narcotics and benzodiazipines, placed an NG tube, and tried to clean this young man up a bit – there was a split second when i felt myself get slightly choked up, just cause he looked so young. i’ve been checking out the papers and local newsfeeds to see what the dealio was. and the story is just so bad on every front.

firstly, i think this officer is doing well and the paper today refers to having talked directly with him. having said that, apparently, he was indeed a rookie cop, as i had heard, but was actually off duty and driving home in his own vehicle, though still in uniform and with a bullet proof vest on. he was passed by officers in vehicles and heard the calls on his radio and joined in to assist fellow officers. in summary, he pulled up to the scene of a car crash resulting from an abduction and subsequent car chase. alleged kidnapper hops out of van as officer pulls up and sprays officers jeep with bullets from an assault rifle. officer is hit, is extricating himself from jeep, and squeezes off several rounds, apparently killing assailant. second runs and escapes, is later found by a K9 unit. abductee is dead in the van, apparently killed by the assailant guy.

turns out the shooter was released from jail DUE TO CLERICAL ERROR  (this is the second murder committed by an incorrectly released prisoner in like a month) and went immediately to kidnap some guy who gave some information against the guy. kicker – the kidnapped murder victim had some sort of issue with the law, and his public defender stated that this man never asked for any dismissal of a weapons charge he was facing in return for cooperation.

it’s like how could this story get any worse?

 

 * at my hospital, the convention is to overhead page either alpha or bravo teams to the ER when major traumas arrive. when we in the OR hear those pages, we know that an ”alpha” may well be on their way right to the OR – and we have the always ready trauma room assigned to someone standing by- or it stays a bravo, which could come to us, but wouldn’t be immediate. occaisionally we hear the “alpha upgrade stat” call indicating the patient is more critical than anticipated.

american widows project

i heard about this on NPR and jezebel linked it today as well

the american widows project was started a year ago by 21 year old taryn davis, whose husband was killed in the war last year. in response, she started this site. their mission statement:

The American Widow Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to the new generation of those who have lost the heroes of yesterday, today and tomorrow, with an emphasis on healing through sharing stories, tears and laughter………Military Widow to Military Widow.We are currently in production with a documentary covering the lives and hardships of widows from the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars. From the day we met our spouses, to the knock on the door, these stories are a key to healing. Whether it be sharing your journey or listening to someone else, we all have the opportunity to help others in our shoes. After production has wrapped up, the documentary will be distributed to all the widows to come, as well as those who have already started their walk.

its definitely worth your time..

rest in peace, eight belles

from sally jenkins at the washington post:

The camera cut away from her, but it should have stayed on her. Eight Belles had run herself half to death yesterday, and now the vets were finishing the job as she lay on her side, her beautiful figure a black hump on the track. Horses don’t just fall down like that, you thought as NBC flitted away, cowardlike, from the sickening picture to the more appealing image of the Kentucky Derby victor, Big Brown.

There is no turning away from this fact: Eight Belles killed herself finishing second. She ran with the heart of a locomotive, on champagne-glass ankles for the pleasure of the crowd, the sheiks, oilmen, entrepreneurs, old money from the thousand-acre farms, the handicappers, men in bad sport coats with crumpled sheets full of betting hieroglyphics, the julep-swillers and the ladies in hats the size of boats, and the rest of the people who make up thoroughbred racing. There was no mistaking this fact, too, as she made her stretch run, and the apologists will use it to defend the sport in the coming days: She ran to please herself.

But thoroughbred racing is in a moral crisis, and everyone now knows it. Twice since 2006, magnificent animals have suffered catastrophic injuries on live television in Triple Crown races, and there is no explaining that away. Horses are being over-bred and over-raced, until their bodies cannot support their own ambitions, or those of the humans who race them. Barbaro and Eight Belles merely are the most famous horses who have fatally injured themselves. On Friday, a colt named Chelokee, trained by Barbaro’s trainer Michael Matz, dislocated an ankle during an undercard for the Kentucky Oaks and was given a 50 percent chance of survival.

According to several estimates, there are 1.5 career-ending breakdowns for every 1,000 racing starts in the United States. That’s an average of two per day.

Eight Belles collapsed after crossing the finish line, her front ankles broken so severely she could not be taken from the track. “She didn’t have a front leg to stand on to be splinted and hauled off in the ambulance, so she was euthanized,” said Larry Bramlage, the Derby’s veterinarian.

Make no mistake, most of the people in thoroughbred racing love the animals and want them to be healthy. The Keeneland Association hosted a summit on the “Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse” after Barbaro’s breakdown, to urgently consider how to better protect the horses. Synthetic surfaces are one result of the soul-searching.

But the problem is more complex than just surface; it’s pervasive in the sport. Modern thoroughbreds are bred for extreme speed, maybe to the point of endangerment. Thoroughbreds are muscularly more powerful than ever, but their bone skeletons seem to be getting lighter and frail. A Kentucky Derby horse has to run a mile and a quarter on a dirt track around two turns by the age of 3. It is the horse equivalent of asking a college kid to play in the Super Bowl. A racehorse therefore has to be bred for many things at once: strength, speed, size and stamina, and it has to be fast maturing, as well.

Thoroughbred breeding is like trying to make four dials all stop on the same number. How to mate the right stallion to the right mare so as to produce a perfectly weighted, formed, balanced animal? Too often, the makeup of a horse isn’t right. If it’s fast, it’s not strong enough, or if it’s strong, it lacks stamina. Its chest is too big, or its legs are crooked.

Maybe the trouble starts when people try to take the gambling out of gambling. Breeders try to eliminate the unpredictable from the bloodlines — the weak or the ordinary or the unknown. Maybe they are trying to breed too perfectly, down to the smallest technicality in pedigree. Pedigree is just another way to reduce the dauntingly long odds. As if you can beat luck with a checkbook.

“See, here’s the deal,” Nick Zito said once. “The horse don’t know what it costs. He doesn’t know. Owners put the price on horses, okay?”

Part of the trouble is the makeup of thoroughbreds themselves: They are creatures physically at war with their own nature. The heart and lungs are oversize knots of tissue placed in a massive chest, and huge amounts of blood course through legs that are dainty. Anyone who has spent time around a barn understands that horses love to run. They do it for fun. A few years ago, I stood in a field of yearlings in Ocala, Fla., and watched them tear around in circles like children in a playground.

They need to be given the bodies to accommodate their hearts.

“It’s not always the horse with the most class you remember,” trainer Allen Jerkens once said. “It’s the ones who tried hardest all the time even though they weren’t great horses.”

It’s unfortunate that NBC chose to shy away from the breakdown of Eight Belles, because we need a hard look at the real cost to the horses, no matter how upsetting and painful it is to see.

eight belles – had she raced in the “lillies for the fillies“, would she have been hurt anyway? sigh. the wiki has a succinct page describing the history of the kentucky derby, worth taking a peek.

next time maybe i will pick up

given that i first noticed the helicoptor hovering near by last evening when i walked maggie that went on all night, along with sirens in the distance, and that this was apparently going on, oh, about 2 blocks from where i live, i now see that maybe the repeated phone calls from “alert message” was maybe the police?