Random Thinking

Your heart beat is controlled by the sinoatrial (SA) node or sinus node. This is a group of cells in the right atrium which produce the electrical impulses that make your heart beat.The impulse travels from the SA node down to the ventricles. As the signal goes from the atria to the ventricles, it passes through specialized conducting tissue called the atrioventricular (AV) node.

On an electrocardiogram (EKG), a portion of the graph called the P wave shows the impulse passing through the atria. Another portion of the graph, the QRS wave, shows the impulse passing through the ventricles. As long as the impulse is transmitted normally, the heart pumps and beats at a regular pace.

AV Block is when the signal from the heart’s upper to lower chambers is impaired or doesn’t transmit. This does not mean that the blood flow or blood vessels are blocked. It means that the electrical signal is failing to transmit through the heart correctly. First-degree AV block is when the electrical impulse moves through the AV node more slowly than normal. The time it takes for the impulse to get from the atria to the ventricles (the PR interval shown in the EKG above) should be less than about 0.2 seconds. If it takes longer than this, it’s called first-degree AV block. Generally, no treatment is necessary for first-degree AV block.

So why am I bringing this up? Last night Beth was complaining about chest pains and shortness of breath. We assumed this was related to her asthma so we took her over to the local late-night pediatric center for a quick treatment. The doctor didn’t hear any wheezing so they decided to do an EKG. Then they did another one. Then another one. OK, what is going on, Michel asked. The doctor came in and told us to go to the ER because she didn’t like what she was seeing on the EKG, that she was seeing an AV Block.

So off we went to the hospital and they called the cardiologist on call (Dr. Better - really she should be called Dr. Best), who happened to be Mikey’s cardiologist. She ordered another EKG. And a bunch of blood tests. And a chest X-Ray. The ER doctor (the wonderful Dr. Petras who has taken care of Mikey many times over the last nine years) told us the computer wouldn’t let her enter an X-Ray unless she first did a pregnancy test!!! Beth couldn’t pee into the cup but they finally decided do the X-Ray anyway, damn the computer! They finally let us go home at 2:30 AM.

Today we took Beth over to see Dr. Better and she did another EKG and then decided to put Beth on a 24 hour monitor. She told us that it was most likely nothing serious as it was only a first-degree AV Block. Since this was Beth’s first EKG ever, it may be that this is normal for Beth. Anyway, we will know more after the doctor analyzes the results of the monitor.

P.S. Since Beth was such a good patient I let her buy four CD’s. And by “good patient” I mean that she didn’t kill anyone at 2:30 AM.

The Great Influenza
by John M. Barry

It killed more people in 6 months than the Black Death killed in a century. People who were young and strong were the most likely to die. In the US, 650,000 people died. The average life expectancy in the US went down by 10 years. Worldwide, perhaps 100 million people died. And yet, it was only the flu. Even today, 90 years after the epidemic, it kills 36,000 Americans in a typical year and we are hardly more prepared to face another epidemic.

John M. Barry has written a fascinating account of the influenza epidemic of 1918. But the book is a lot more than just a review of the flu. Barry starts out by examining the state of the American health system at the time of the epidemic and how it reached that state. He explores the revolutionary changes to medicine that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th century and the people who led those changes. He shows us why, even today, a cure for influenza is beyond our reach, explaining in layman’s terms how the influenza virus changes to become deadly and changes again to lose that deadliness. He explains how an endemic virus can lead to an epidemic of unimagined proportions.

Barry also shows how the demands of World War I on troop movements, the propaganda campaigns to keep morale high, and the failure of leaders to listen to the doctors and researchers led to a killing field of historic size. His account tends to concentrate on Philadelphia because the city was hit extremely hard and much of the research going on was near that city but he does cover other areas around the world hit hard by the virus, although his coverage of the flu outside of the US is sketchy at best. He gives us writings from diaries and newspaper articles to show what was actually happening and how the media tried to downplay the epidemic. He gives us detailed accounts of the research (and the researchers) that was done to fight the epidemic, explains why this research was mostly unsuccessful, and does it all in a way that is easy to understand even if you don’t have a medical degree.

Barry likes to use foreshadowing, hints of what is to come, to keep the reader’s interest and it does work, even if it is a bit melodramatic. Even the chapter titles, “The Tinderbox”, “It Begins”, The Race”, provide some melodrama to the story. The book mostly moves at a good pace and I found myself having trouble putting it down. Barry has written a book that everyone should read, whether you are familiar with the epidemic or not. It is a fascinating, terrifying, detailed, and extremely important book.

This is an incredible miscarriage of justice. Julie Amero, a substitute teacher in a middle school is told to let the students use the computer and NOT to turn it off. Suddenly she sees all sorts of pornographic images popping up on the screen. She tries to get the students away from the screen (remember, she was told not to turn it off) and runs to get help from the assistant principal. Another teacher goes to get him but he never shows up. Another teacher tells her not to worry about it, that pop-ups happen all the time. So she goes back to the room and keeps the monitor covered for the rest of the day.

Next thing she knows, she is under arrest for showing porn to children! Her defense attorney doesn’t have a good handle on computer issues but he finally figures out what happened and gets an expert but the judge says, sorry, too late. So she goes to trial and gets convicted and could be sentenced up to 40 years!!!

Apparently what happened was that one of the students went to a website that installed adware on the computer and that is what started popping up the porn. The PC was using Windows 98 running Internet Explorer 5 with only middling antivirus protection, no firewall, no antispyware program, no popup blocking and no up-to-date Internet filtering in place (in violation of federal law that requires all school to have up-to-date filtering software on all PC’s connected to the Internet). The police used a non-expert police officer to determine what happened to the PC and he used off-the-shelf software that had never been accepted in a court of law before. He testified that she must have willingly gone to the porn sites and the jury accepted this in spite of all the testimony supporting her including the testimony of the teachers who said she came into the teacher’s lounge panicking because of the pop-ups.

This was not the first time that a computer was infested with porn at the Kelly Middle School. In June and July of 2004, before Ms. Amero worked there, the school had an infestation of pornography that caused local authorities to seize a computer and hard drives. A student printed a nude image to take home in their backpack! No one was prosecuted in that case.

The incompetence of the Connecticut District Attorney is mind-boggling.

Technorati Tags: miscarriage of justice, pornography, Kelly Middle School, Julie Amero

Fox News claims to be “Fair and Balanced” but their report on the childhood of Senator Obama was an obvious hatchet job. But even better from their point of view, they blamed the report on Hillary Clinton. Their source for this story? A right wing magazine called Insight, which is funded by the Moonies.

The Fox News story claims that Senator Obama was raised a Muslim as a child, attended a madrassa (ultra-religious Islamic school) as a child, and since he lied about this he is may be some kind of threat to the US.

Where to begin? First, Senator Obama didn’t lie about anything. In his book, Dreams of My Father, he writes:

In Indonesia, I’d spent 2 years at a Muslim school, 2 years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell mother I made faces during Koranic studies. In the Catholic school, when it came time to pray, I’d pretend to close my eyes, then peek around the room. Nothing happened. No angels descended.  

Second, the school was not a madrassa school as we know them from Pakistan and Afghanistan. It was, in fact, a public school that accepted students of all faiths. This was forty years ago before Saudia Arabia was funding madrassa schools. But even today, the schools in Indonesia are not promoting anti-Americanism. To verify this, CNN did what Fox News didn’t bother to do… they investigated the report.

Technorati Tags: Islam, Stupid Conservatives, Fox News, Senator Obama

The Times chief sports writer Simon Barnes writes about being a father of a child with Down syndrome… I’m a Parent Not a Saint.

The fact is that nothing to do with love seems so terribly difficult when you get down to it. Nothing seems an impossible demand on your time, your resources, your patience, your temper, your abilities: not because you connect with your inner saintliness but because you just find yourself getting on with it: muddling through. Most non-parents imagine that they could never change a nappy. Then parenthood happens and they do it. It was the same thing when it came to living with Eddie. It’s just parenthood: everyone who has done it knows it.  

…

I live in a nice house in the country, I keep five horses and as a family we are comfortably off. For all these things people envy me. But I have a child with Down’s syndrome and for that, people pity me. And I am here to say: wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I am not to be pitied but to be envied.

It’s well worth reading.

Technorati Tags: down syndrome, parenting

This has been verified by Snopes so I feel comfortable in reposting it. The email exchange below actually happened. A US soldier stationed in Iraq wanted to buy mats to sleep on. When he inquired of a company in Wisconsin of whether they shipped to APO addresses. He received the response below.

One can certainly disagree with the war but for an American company to refuse to do business with an American soldier is outrageous. I imagine that this will be hurting the business of discount-mats. I also imagine that the company will be claiming that this was the work of some lowly employee in customer service who has, of course, been fired and that they will, of course, be happy to send mats to our troops in Iraq.

The owner of the discount-mats.com website is:

Faisal Khetani
PO Box 270693
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53227
United States

Update: The Discount-Mats website is down, “experiencing technical difficulties”. I am guessing that Mr. Khetani may be regretting his response.

Update (From TMJ4 Milwaukee): The Web site’s owner, 23-year-old Faisal Khetani, fired the employee who wrote the e-mail [did I predict this, or what?]. Khetani told TODAY’S TMJ4 the e-mail does not express the views of his company. The Khetani family immigrated from Pakistan in 1992. They became U.S. citizens. Ramzan Khetani (Faisal Khetani’s father) insisted his family supports the troops in Iraq and feels patriotic about the United States.

Technorati Tags: Iraq, stupid things people do, Faisal Khetani, discount-mats.com

You might recall that I wrote about the Consumer Reports article claiming that they tested infant car seats at 35 miles an hour and 10 out of 12 failed, including some disastrous failures. Well, it turns out they might be mistaken. You see, apparently some of the tests were run at 70 mph and not 35 mph as they originally claimed. Here is the article from Consumers Report explaining the recall of the original article.

So the question is, how do you mistakenly run a test at 70 mph instead of 35 mph? The problem, apparently, is that they outsource these studies and have no internal quality control. You would think such surprising results would have made them go back and examine the study before publication. This certainly is a black eye for Consumer Reports.

Not exactly piles of the white stuff and it didn’t stick to the roads or sidewalks and it is probably melted by now because the temperature is in the low 40’s but at least it was snow. My friends in El Paso, Texas told me they had more snow than this so far this winter. And Malibu had more snow.

It must be the day for articles about Down syndrome.

From The Vancouver Sun:

A turnaround in thinking is needed about Down syndrome

High-risk mothers — those over 35 and those who have already had a Down child — are routinely tested and, according to the society, up to 90 per cent of positive determinations end in abortion. Extend testing without changing attitudes, and this begins to look chillingly like an attempt to eliminate a class of human beings.

And this from The Hamilton Spectator:

Less able doesn’t mean less worthy

Here’s my fervent hope: that calls for universal prenatal screening will be joined by an equally strong call for providing comprehensive information to prospective parents, not just about the tests but also about the rich and rewarding lives that are possible with disabilities.

And I found these quotes:

Dr. James Goldberg, a former chairman of American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) committee on genetics, told the New York Times that the recommendation to offer younger women the invasive procedures was worth the risk of miscarriage. He said that for most couples, “losing a normal pregnancy secondary to the procedure is not as problematic as the birth of a Down syndrome child, so they’re willing to take that risk.”

“Yes, it’s going to lead to more termination, but it’s going to be fair to these women who are 24 who say, ‘How come I have to raise an infant with Down’s syndrome, whereas my cousin who was 35 didn’t have to?’” Dr. Andre Lalonde, the executive vice president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada (SOGC), told the National Post.

Is this really what passes for intelligent and ethical thinking in the world of gynecologists and obstetricians? One guy thinks that losing a child because of miscarriage caused by amniocentesis is better than having a child with Down syndrome. And this other guy thinks that it’s not “fair” to have a child with Down syndrome. Lots of things aren’t fair but none more than people deciding the value of human life based on their version of acceptability.

Technorati Tags: abortion, down syndrome