Miracles of Life...

Life, existence of all forms, truly excites me!! I love to read about medical miracles and I love learning about medicine...the thing is though, when you're in medicine, you are always learning!! Or re-learning....sometimes it really helps to refresh your memory of things you learned once upon a time. Since I'm soooooo very fascinated in medicine, I'm going to try to start posting medical miracles from time to time...

I don't know about anyone else, but this stuff just gets me goin...
Sometimes we all have patients whose family members will ask you, "Well, how long do you think he has?" or "The doctors give him 3 months, what do you think?"

I always tell them that in life, there are no guarantees and that no one knows when they will die...or if someone will get better, etc...

When all hope is lost, we expect to give up!! Most of us anyway, but there are the occasional few that "never" give up!! and for them, sometimes it pays off!!!

I got the following article from Yahoo news... and it's fascinating stuff!!

Please read:

OKLAHOMA CITY - Four months after he was declared brain dead and doctors were about to remove his organs for transplant, Zach Dunlap says he feels "pretty good."
Dunlap was pronounced dead Nov. 19 at United Regional Healthcare System in Wichita Falls, Texas, after he was injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. His family approved having his organs harvested.
As family members were paying their last respects, he moved his foot and hand. He reacted to a pocketknife scraped across his foot and to pressure applied under a fingernail. After 48 days in the hospital, he was allowed to return home, where he continues to work on his recovery.
On Monday, he and his family were in New York, appearing on NBC's "Today."
"I feel pretty good. but it's just hard ... just ain't got the patience," Dunlap told NBC.
Dunlap, 21, of Frederick, said he has no recollection of the crash.
"I remember a little bit that was about an hour before the accident happened. But then about six hours before that, I remember," he said.
Dunlap said one thing he does remember is hearing the doctors pronounce him dead.
"I'm glad I couldn't get up and do what I wanted to do," he said.
Asked if he would have wanted to get up and shake them and say he's alive, Dunlap responded: "Probably would have been a broken window that went out."
His father, Doug, said he saw the results of the brain scan.
"There was no activity at all, no blood flow at all."
Zach's mother, Pam, said that when she discovered he was still alive, "That was the most miraculous feeling."
"We had gone, like I said, from the lowest possible emotion that a parent could feel to the top of the mountains again," she said.
She said her son is doing "amazingly well," but still has problems with his memory as his brain heals from the traumatic injury.
"It may take a year or more ... before he completely recovers," she said. "But that's OK. It doesn't matter how long it takes. We're just all so thankful and blessed that we have him here."
Dunlap now has the pocketknife that was scraped across his foot, causing the first reaction.
"Just makes me thankful, makes me thankful that they didn't give up," he said. "Only the good die young, so I didn't go."

END of article...

so, the question is, "When should one give up?"

We can't keep every life going just to see if they ever get better...right?

Then there's the guy who was in a coma for 19 years and all of a sudden he woke up...
He has a daughter and he doesn't know who she is because she was just a baby when he went into the coma.....

stories like that are truly amazing...
hmmm, makes ya think doesn't it?

kT

Flooding Update

http://www.youtube.com/katierrt04


if you're interested in seeing more of the flooding in my area, please go to youtube..the videos were very heavy files and it was taking forever to load them up, so if you want to see all that I've posted...go there...

The water never did come into the house and the highlight of yesterday was when the Missouri State Water Patrol parked their boats in my back yard to ask me where they were...they wanted to know my physical address so that they could determine where on the map they were...they said since everything was flooded, they couldn't tell where they were....

The water in my back yard is now receding and dumping into the Meramec River heading down to Fenton Missouri...I've lived around this place to see 3 floods in my lifetime and I was only severely affected by the 1993 flood...The 1982 flood we sandbagged down in Fenton for a couple of days before the flood hit, but it didn't make that much difference. This flood I didn't sandbag because I was worrying about my own place...sand is now becoming very hard to find around here and in some areas it still doesn't make a difference...but it doesn't stop the community from pitching in to help out...

This weekend Valley Park had over 200 volunteers and Fenton enlisted over 300...
Thank you very much to all who have helped out!! We appreciate you greatly and it does my heart good to know that there are still people out there that are willing to help people in need...

I love living in Missouri even though we have our problems here, tornadoes, flooding, straight line winds..etc..and though we've been labeled as the city with the worst crime or the best sports fans, we also have some of the best volunteers and most caring people when the chips are down!!!

I read somewhere one time that the wild fires, flooding, earthquakes and most other "acts of God" are some of the ways the earth resets itself
Whether that's true or not, it makes me think...what if all those things didn't happen?

hmmmm...I wonder!

well, I have to go, I still have 2 more 12 hr shifts to pull and tomorrow is all overtime!!!
yay!!
good night
kT

The Flooding in my back yard