Erin Olivera waited weeks for doctors to tell her why her youngest son was paralyzed.
Ten-month-old Lucian had started crawling oddly — his left leg dragging behind his right — and soon was unable to lift his head, following Erin only with his eyes.
She took him to a hospital in Los Angeles, but doctors there didn't know how to treat what they saw.
Lucian's legs felt soft as jelly and he couldn't move them. His breathing became rapid. The left side of his smile drooped as his muscles weakened.
Physicians ran test after test, and Erin began spending her nights on a hospital room couch. After Lucian fell asleep, during her only minutes alone between working and visiting her three other kids, she cried.
A terrifying reality was taking hold: Doctors wouldn't be able to give her a diagnosis for her paralyzed child.
"How can I make a decision for him when I don't even know what's wrong?" she said. "What can I do to help him?"
So one morning in July of 2012, Erin lifted Lucian out of his hospital bed, his body limp and heavy. She rested his cheek on her shoulder, the way he liked to be held since he'd become weak.
Erin returned home to Ventura County with a child she thought might never learn to walk.
In the years since, hundreds of children across the country have shown up at hospitals unable to move their arms or legs. Dozens of kids have become paralyzed in the past few months alone.
They suffer from a mysterious illness that continues to alarm and puzzle scientists. This kind of sudden and devastating paralysis hasn't been widespread since the days of polio. Lucian, one of the disease's earliest victims, set off a hunt among doctors to discover its cause.
More ...
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-polio-paralysis-20160823-snap-story.html
Saturday, October 29, 2016
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Doctors thought he just had jock itch. Then it spread. - The Washington Post
Late Friday afternoon on Dec. 4, 2014, Stephen Schroeder was waiting to board his packed flight from Philadelphia to Las Vegas for a much anticipated long weekend with his son when his cellphone rang. On the line was an unexpected caller: his doctor, reporting test results sooner than Schroeder had expected.
Listening intently, Schroeder was flooded with disbelief as he struggled to comprehend what he was hearing. Using the lip of a trash can as a writing surface, he scribbled notes on the back of his boarding pass, making the doctor spell out each unfamiliar word. Then he sent a terse text to his wife, who was at their home in the Philadelphia suburbs, and got on the plane.
Onboard, Schroeder, then 55, fired up the balky in-flight Internet, desperate for information.
What he read over the next five hours left him alternately terrified, stunned and then, as denial took over, skeptical. "I kept thinking this must be some kind of really stupid mistake," he recalled. "The diagnosis had to be wrong."
Spokane sales manager Steve Schroeder, along with his doctors, thought he had a bad case of jock itch for more than a year. (Courtesy of Steve Schroeder)
Schroeder would discover that the pesky rash he and his doctors had dismissed as inconsequential would take over — and threaten — his life.
The experience would provide a crash course in the importance of finding experts who could provide appropriate treatment, in the necessity of learning as much as possible about a disease, and in the loneliness of coping with a diagnosis so rare it lacks a support group.
More …
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/doctors-thought-he-just-had-jock-itch-then-it-spread/2016/10/24/bc722226-83e5-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html?
Listening intently, Schroeder was flooded with disbelief as he struggled to comprehend what he was hearing. Using the lip of a trash can as a writing surface, he scribbled notes on the back of his boarding pass, making the doctor spell out each unfamiliar word. Then he sent a terse text to his wife, who was at their home in the Philadelphia suburbs, and got on the plane.
Onboard, Schroeder, then 55, fired up the balky in-flight Internet, desperate for information.
What he read over the next five hours left him alternately terrified, stunned and then, as denial took over, skeptical. "I kept thinking this must be some kind of really stupid mistake," he recalled. "The diagnosis had to be wrong."
Spokane sales manager Steve Schroeder, along with his doctors, thought he had a bad case of jock itch for more than a year. (Courtesy of Steve Schroeder)
Schroeder would discover that the pesky rash he and his doctors had dismissed as inconsequential would take over — and threaten — his life.
The experience would provide a crash course in the importance of finding experts who could provide appropriate treatment, in the necessity of learning as much as possible about a disease, and in the loneliness of coping with a diagnosis so rare it lacks a support group.
More …
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/doctors-thought-he-just-had-jock-itch-then-it-spread/2016/10/24/bc722226-83e5-11e6-a3ef-f35afb41797f_story.html?
Monday, October 24, 2016
A new divide in American death - Unnatural Causes: Sick and dying in small-town America - The Washington Post
Since the turn of this century, death rates have risen for whites in midlife, particularly women. In this series, The Washington Post is exploring this trend and the forces driving it.
Drugs, alcohol, marketing and lax federal oversight are working to defy modern trends of mortality, perhaps most starkly among middle-aged white women.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/unnatural-causes/
Drugs, alcohol, marketing and lax federal oversight are working to defy modern trends of mortality, perhaps most starkly among middle-aged white women.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/unnatural-causes/
The First Fentanyl Addict | VICE
If the opiate crisis has taught us anything, it's that addiction affects everyone. An unprecedented surge in fentanyl-implicated death—across all incomes and backgrounds, obviously—has sparked public health emergencies across the US and Canada. With each fentanyl overdose reported, we're seeing ignorant assumptions about who uses drugs and why finally put to rest.
But there was a time when fentanyl was almost exclusively used by a very small group, and it had nothing to do with Margaret Wente's idea of a "typical drug addict" or poverty or organized crime. What the general public is oblivious to—but the medical community knows—is how fentanyl addiction took its roots in anesthesiology before it made its way into the mainstream.
Dr. Ethan Bryson, associate professor in the anesthesia and psychiatry departments at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, believes it was anesthesiologists who, familiar with fentanyl's pharmacology and abuse potential, first began misusing the opioid.
"If you look at the history of morphine, cocaine, and heroin, these were all drugs which were initially developed for legitimate medical purposes, but subsequently became recreational pharmaceuticals," Bryson told VICE. "They were all experimented on with people with that access. That's well documented in history."
More …
http://www.vice.com/read/the-first-fentanyl-addict?
But there was a time when fentanyl was almost exclusively used by a very small group, and it had nothing to do with Margaret Wente's idea of a "typical drug addict" or poverty or organized crime. What the general public is oblivious to—but the medical community knows—is how fentanyl addiction took its roots in anesthesiology before it made its way into the mainstream.
Dr. Ethan Bryson, associate professor in the anesthesia and psychiatry departments at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, believes it was anesthesiologists who, familiar with fentanyl's pharmacology and abuse potential, first began misusing the opioid.
"If you look at the history of morphine, cocaine, and heroin, these were all drugs which were initially developed for legitimate medical purposes, but subsequently became recreational pharmaceuticals," Bryson told VICE. "They were all experimented on with people with that access. That's well documented in history."
More …
http://www.vice.com/read/the-first-fentanyl-addict?
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