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I Had A Splenectomy At Age 17

In a t-bone car wreck, the arm rest of my Fiat Spyder busted my spleen. Those cramps they're talking about are not just your normal cramps. Your entire abdomen tigtens up to protect your internals from injury, I guess. It took three of those emergency guys to get my legs down.

This was back before so many people were into fitness, so when I was in the emergency room, and the doc was showing me to some interns, one of them remarked about the "curious striations" on my stomach. I didn't have much muscle back then, but I had hardly any body fat. She was talking about my six-pack!

The doc explained to her that some young men the stomach muscles are well-defined like that. But really, it was only because of the intense cramping.

The doc called in another group of interns to watch as he showed them a new technique he had just read about in the latest medical journal. He held the pages of it open so they could see.

Then with only a swabbing of topical anesthetic, he tried to punch this huge needle into my abdomen to find out if I was bleeding internally, this was the new technique. The needle was about as big around as a pencil but maybe two feet long, and with a plastic handle on one end.

The Doc tried twice to push it but it wouldn't go. He told my Dad he might ought to wait outside. Then he bore down on it with two hands and most of his upper body weight and it finally went in.

Some blood started coming out of the top, which he explained to his interns was a positive sign of internal bleeding. He was either pulling the thing in and out, or my breathing was making it feel that way. I tried to be polite and not interrupt his lecture, but after a while I asked him if he could remove the needle, and he said "Wha...? Oh, yes of course."

They split me open from my belly to my sternum because they have to pull a bunch of stuff out to get back to where the spleen is. And they put this drain tube in the side of my stomach, which really felt good when they pulled it out some days later. Now it looks like a gunshot wound.

I don't know if I've suffered any ill effects from it. They still aren't sure what if any ill effects people should have after a splenectomy.

Now I See Why I need Something More Than A Blog

I need something to takes notes with when I'm not at home.

Topic
Nonviolence - Yesterday, Today, & Tomorrow

Guest
Dr. Michael Nagler

Description
In addition to the 5th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001, September 11, 2006 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Nonviolence Movement based on a speech made by Mahatma Gandhi in Johannesburg, South Africa. To commemorate this anniversary, the Dallas Peace Center is bringing Nonviolence scholar and UC Berkeley professor Dr. Michael Nagler to Dallas for two talks this weekend. We'll get a preview of his presentations on "the recovery of human wisdom in a time of violence" when he joins host Krys Boyd this hour.

Events/Appearances
Dr. Michael Nagler will speak at 7pm on Friday, September 29th and 10am on Saturday, September 30th at Unity Church of Dallas (6525 Forest Lane). These events are free and open to the public. Visit www.dallaspeacecenter.org for more information.

Links
Dallas Peace Center
METTA Center for Nonviolence Education

Mr. Nagler mentioned something called "cultural creatives".

Greenhouse Gasses and Global Warming

In answer to a taunt about water vapor being the main greenhouse gas.


Contribution of water vapor to the greenhouse effect is well known. That doesn't mean the other greenhouse gasses have no effect.

Without any GHGs, the Earth's average surface temperature would be -18 C, or -0.4 F. Thanks mostly to water vapor, average surface temperature is more like 15 C, or 59 F. That's a difference of 33 degrees C, or 60 F.

Raising CO2 levels by 35% has raised that by about 0.6 C, or 1 F. Lucky for us isn't a huge effect!

Doubling CO2 will raise Earth's average surface temperature by another 3 C or so, 5 F. Still not huge, but it's enough to change things significantly.

But then suppose we're also in a natural warming cycle that will heat us up by another 3 C for a total of 6C, 11F. That's a huge change, enough to have truly drastic effects.

This is the gamble we're taking, the big experiment we're conducting on our home planet from which there is essentially no escape. And it's a gamble that can't be taken back for at least a century. If nothing else we need to be prepared for the consequences.

From A Yahoo Discussion Board by dvz88

People should really stop name-calling with science they don't understand. It is one thing to speak bad about something if you are educated on the topic. It is another thing to spout hate, when you are not fully educated on something.

I am a Ph.D. microbiologist and have been in science for 14 years. It is a disgrace that people out there think that we, as scientists, are devoting our lives to solving disease/problems at a low paying jobs (we get paid as much as or less than people with high school educations), and that we are doing this with "bad moral intentions". Ridiculous.

We are sacrificing our lives to do this work. And it is to save others: Your grandma who doesn't have it all together any more. Or the boy who was just diagnosed with cancer. Or someone who was in an accident who needs a transplant, a skin graft, or new research to walk again. Or someone who gets infected by a virus or bacteria that needs an antibiotic to survive. Those moments are why we do this for a living when it is far from a glamorous lifestyle. 14-hour days...weekends...grinding away and getting paid less than 50K a year. The only benefit is finding that cure or medicine that you know you contributed to...to help someone else who needs it.

Let me point out two important things:
1) First, an embryo is a ball of cells that hardly constitutes life. The skin that recycles itself daily on your body has the same amount of cells. While a path is set in motion with an embryo to make life, true life...life with a purpose...does not actually exist until much later. We are talking 8-12 weeks when you actually get brain waves and functions.

2) If you really want to understand God's purpose, then go into science and try to understand it. Only then do you really understand how nature functions. Now, people will debate and say that there is no divine purpose. Nature just is, and that may be true. But for me, I study science because I believe it provides a glimpse of higher power. How things function at a molecular level. That beauty, that simple wisdom, I believe can only come from that. Right now we are only scratching the surface of DNA and proteins in your body, and how they all work. That complexity is not beyond Nature's realm. Natural selection explains a lot about how things have gotten to this point. Do you know that some signaling pathways in bacteria...are similar to humans. Imagine that. It is all connected. But I believe, something set it all in motion. That is beauty of it. That is God. Imagine that all of this can come from the big bang. That there is one master plan for life, and then nature just takes over. That is amazing.

So ask yourself. Would you rather be in the dark about science and make stupid comments without understanding its beauty? Or would you rather try to understand how it all works to better people's lives. People who are already alive. Maybe a soldier wounded from a stupid war, maybe his life can be saved by our studying it, an appreciation of how it works. Think about it. Then ask yourself, these same people sent us to war based on lies. A war that ended up killing close to a 100,000 people. Who is more moral? A person devoted to saving others or a person devoted to war and lies.

What I Remember From 9/11

I was driving to work when the first one hit, but I wasn't listening to the radio. I worked for Ericsson at the time, and in our fancy new building built at the peak of the telecom boom, we had two large plasma tvs in the lobby, which most always showed some kind of Ericsson PR, or if not that images of whales under the ocean or something like that.

People were gathered around the two screens as I walked in, I saw that one of the Twin Towers was on fire. Someone said a plane had crashed into it, I assumed it had been a small private plane and went to my desk. The building plan was open, and my desk was near the lobby area, so I could see people milling around, and my co-workers were alternately coming to their desks and going back out to watch. So I went to have a look, and heard that it had been an airliner.

My God, how could that happen, I thought, how could an airliner get that far off course? And then we all saw the second one hit, and we all knew in that instant. Some people screamed a little, there was a lot of hubbub, I remember thinking that was impressive, that someone could have pulled off something like that. Like, Oh yeah, I guess you _could_ do that. Well, you could do it once, anyway.

Then there were the other two planes, I don't remember now the timing of them, but for a while it seemed like they just kept coming down. And they hit the Pentagon, for crying out loud!

I didn't know what to do, there seemed to be no point in standing there watching it so I went back to my desk. Then a co-worker came in and said "The Tower fell!"

We talked about how many people there would be in the WTC, they said up to 25,000 in each tower. I remember trying to comprehend 25,000 people dying in the collapsed tower, trying to get some kind of handle on what was going on. And then the other one fell.

I remember thinking God damn those people. I remembered when they had destroyed the Buddhas at Bamiyan, and I had thought then that anyone capable of destroying a world archeological treasure was capable of any kind of atrocity, and here it was, up to 50000 people killed at once, and another world treasure destroyed.

It made me even angrier that they had used our own trust of the outlaw mentality to commandeer those aircraft. Before 9/11, everyone knew that the safest course of action for everyone in a hijacking situation was to play along with the hijackers. No good to be brave and try to do something because individual bravery would only jeopardize the lives of hundreds of fellow passengers. Even though the details had not yet come out, I knew that this is what they had done.

I thought about my daughter who was born at the very end of the Cold War, and had never known what it was like to live with the spectre of total annihilation, 12 years of relative peace she had seen, and now it would never be the same in her lifetime.

I took long walks during the two days following 9/11, I wanted to experience the days when all flights were grounded as much as possible. There would never be another time in my lifetime when there would be no sound of airplanes overhead, no contrails marring the skies. I wished I were in a wilderness area so I could get the full effect of a world before flight.

God damn those people, God damn them. It still hurts to think about it, more than it should, it seems, for someone who lives so far away from where it happened. Whenever I watch documentaries of it, I still just hurt, my heart races. I want to see World Trade Center, but even just the ads for it get me so upset, I know I'd be crying through the whole movie.