Susiej

Four 10-second swabs was all it took to see if I’m a potential Bone Marrow donor for my friend Seth. The lobby was filled with people filling out forms of their own medical history, a table laden with a big iced-chocolate cake stood by, and stacks of sterilized swabs sat waiting in their envelopes. Over 350 showed up for the event, a visible outpouring of love. The nurses are shipping the packets out Monday, and then, there is the 10-day waiting period to find a match. If we aren’t able to help Seth, we’re all in the BeTheMatchRegistry to help someone else. Just knowing that fact gives me a marvelous feeling.

If you’re considering it, but afraid of what it entails; please know that the procedure was quick and painless. Four 10-second swabs. More details about the procedure can be found here.

Our celebration is mixed with our anxious and patient wait for Seth to wake up. Please remember his family in your prayers.  Let’s just hope that Seth is giving himself a much needed rest before he embarks on his next phase — the bone marrow transplant.

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From my Newspaper Column for the SNP

She has removed the password from his Caring Bridge site, because she wants to spread the word. Seth needs prayers. The next 24 hours are critical. Feb 5, 2010 was supposed to be a day of celebration. The date would have marked the end of Seth’s 6-year battle with leukemia. Instead, Seth received more chemotherapy for the illness that was supposed to leave the 13-year-old alone by now. They also received the devastating news that not one of his 3 sisters is a bone marrow donor match.

Yesterday, a throbbing headache led Seth back to the hospital, where they learned he is now septic. He has no white cells to fight the infection. You can read the details and updates here.

All I can think about is the day, 9 years ago, when Seth was dressed like Robin Hood, running around the tree house in our backyard. Wendi, loving mom, made the costume. She made all of Seth’s costumes — including the Obi-Wan Kenobi , Buzz Lightyear, and Jedi Knight costumes. We were always impressed by her talent. The sun lit up Seth’s golden hair, and his blue eyes twinkled at me as he gripped his light saber, wondering if I was going to take away the light sabers because they were all hitting too hard. Our boys were so young and small then; we could pick them up with one arm, and hold them tight. All day long, I’ve been stuck on that day, trying to will it back. I just want to help my friend.

But we are not there. We are here. His parents want to help spread the word about bone marrow donations. I will do my part. Wendi says, “It’s one of the few organs you can donate without being dead to do it.”

Each year, we donate our blood to stock the blood banks, and this is as routine as filling up the car with gas. But how many of us have ever considered donating our bone marrow?

For some, fear is the reason we’ve never considered this gift. Fear can always be traced to unknowns. Here is what is known: No pieces of your bone are taken. Seventy five percent never need surgery; in most cases you’ll only need to give peripheral blood stem cells, which is similar to donating plasma. A bone marrow donation is a surgical procedure, done under anesthesia. Yet, both are treated as outpatient, and you go home the same day. Some donors are sore afterwards; some are not. In 2-7 days, most donors are back to normal. Most donors say they would do it again to save a life.

Thanks to advances in medicine, many of us will be hearing more about transplants; they’re increasingly becoming a path to save lives. Sometimes, it’s the only hope people have. Just like Seth, over 70 percent are unable to find a donor match within their family. Yet, even with a registry of millions, many patients still cannot find a match.

You can visit www.BeTheMatch.org to join the Be The Match Registry online. They’ll mail you a kit so that you can simply swab your cheeks at home and mail it back. Or, you can register in person February 20 at Premier Women’s Health, (614-459-1000 Ext 2007), from 8 a.m.– 1 p.m.

Since he won’t be getting a bone marrow transplant from one of his sisters, Seth hopes to get his marrow from “someone famous…. that would be cool.” Wendi wrote on Seth’s Caring Bridge web page, “In my eyes, the person who shares this gift of life with my son may not be famous, but will be truly heaven sent. An angel. A lifesaver. What more could you ever hope to be in this world?”

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Fifty million plastic bottles were consumed in the U.S. alone last year. Thirty eight billion didn’t quite make it to the recycling bin — and ended up in landfills. We have until the next millennium before they decompose — but how exactly does plastic decompose?  Does it give off fumes? Do toxins leach out into the soil during bio-degradation?

Flowers here made from plastic milk bottles, from Anthropoligie’s Flickr Pool.

I hope those scientists are wrong. A 16-year old Ontario student figured out how to decompose plastic in just three months. He makes my heart sing. An enormous island of trash twice the size of Texas is floating in the Pacific Ocean somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii. It’s been growing since the 1950s.

Some of the plastic slivers end up along the beach, where they look like sand. Little fishes and crabs confuse plastic slivers for food, putting plastic into our food supply.  Someday we might just have a beach made out of broken plastic slivers. I find this horrifying.

The Farmer’s Almanac Gardening Calendar tells me that today and tomorrow are not good days for planting, according to the moon. But come Saturday, I’m starting some seedlings indoors.  It may be early, but I never do have melons in time for July 4th. Gardening gives me a way to create more soil; to create more earth; to create something green in this oh, so plastic world we live in. I can hardly wait.

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When cold winds move across long expanses of warmer lake water,
clouds build over the lake and eventually develop into snow showers and squalls.

The intensity of lake effect snow increases when higher elevations downwind of the lake force the cold, snow-producing air to rise even further.

This effect occurs in many locations throughout the world, but is best known in the populated areas of the Great Lakes of North America.

If it wasn’t so cold; it would have been raining.

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Is having more time to look at the stars. I know Winter Solstice is bringing us longer days… but it’s still pretty dark around here. Here’s an article from my newspaper column.

I saw no stars on that cloudy night at the Perkins Observatory. Instead of stardust, the astronomers there sprinkled my mind, and the minds of the first- and second-graders there, with wonder.

They reminded me that when we look up, we see the past; the light is already billions of years old. They reminded us that our vast galaxy is just beginning its life. Our 4.5 billion-year-old sun is still less than halfway through its life. The future lying ahead is more prolonged than the past we’ve seen.

These concepts are staggering to comprehend, but the gem here comes from remembering what my seventh-grade history teacher used to repeat: “You can’t understand the future until you understand the past.” Four hundred years ago, Galileo turned his telescope away from the sea and began to look at the heavens, and thus 2009 is our International Year of Astronomy (IYA).

Galileo’s shift of his telescope changed the world not simply because he looked, but because he observed the sky night after night while meticulously filling in the details in his observing log. He saw that the stars do shift positions, and when one star vanished, he discovered not a star, but a moon hiding behind Jupiter.

Because our word shares the same sky, astronomy is a great unifier, and may even hold our potential for world peace. Satellite pictures of our earth show us the geographic boundaries of our continents, while the political boundaries vanish.

This revelation led astronomers in Iran to create StarPeace, a project of IYA to hold joint public star parties near the borderlines of two neighboring countries. On Dec. 4, people from Indonesia and the Philippines came together to make a peace bridge on South China Sea, with teachers and astronomers offering free public viewings of the stars through high-powered telescopes.

The amateur astronomer George Eric Deacon Alcock discovered five comets on his own through meticulous viewings and recordings in his observing log. Backyard astronomers, like you, can use their eyes, telescopes and binoculars to create their own observing logs. Binoculars provide a wider field of view than telescopes.

In the winter, no other constellation is more distinct or bright as Orion, the Mighty Hunter. This month, if the sky is clear — a minor  miracle — look for three bright stars that form Orion’s Belt. One of the brightest stars in the night sky, Rigel, represents Orion’s foot. His two shoulders are made of the stars Bellatrix and Betelgeuse.

Orion will wait for you; he will remain recognizable in the night sky for the next 1 to 2 million years, making it one of the longest observable constellations.

As we stand solidly on earth looking up, we can barely fathom our place in a galaxy that is showing us our billion-year-old past. But imagine, for a moment, looking at earth from space, where there is no solid footing. An astronaut once revealed to me the universal secret astronauts hold: They are homesick. Not for earth, but for space.

He described the familiar heavy pull of gravity as the carrier sped back toward earth, and he instantly felt a longing for the lightness he knew in space. With tears in his eyes, he also added, “The earth looks beautiful from space. The earth glows, and it pulsates with energy.”

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Russian and Chinese cyber spies have inserted software into our electrical grid that could disrupt our system, says, The Wall Street Journal. Should a war or national security crisis hit the United States, the officials said, the spies could shut off our power. In addition to the electrical systems, nuclear power plants and financial networks, water and sewage systems are also at risk. Senior Central Intelligence Agency official, Tom Donahue said last year there were cyber attacks in “multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands.”

The silver lining, if there is one, lies in our national trade relationships. Officials say they “don’t see an immediate danger. China, for example, has little incentive to disrupt the U.S. economy because it relies on American consumers and holds U.S. government debt.” Was this the reason they exported our jobs to other countries?

Shaken to my core, I put the newspaper down, sipped more tea, and walked back to my bedroom to adjust the blankets so it looked as if I really did make my bed. I turned on the light without even thinking, and then I realized how much I take for granted.

The story itself sounds more like a fictional plot for a James Bond movie than a riveting account in my morning newspaper. A story so creative and fantastic that I almost wanted to spin the tale out for my boys to hear, as entertainment, like the pirate stories we read. But I won’t say a word to them. The story stays with me, and my lips are sealed.

The Associated Press photo of Robert Moran, who wears that blue-checked shirt and monitors the electrical grid in Dallas, could be our new everyday American Hero, like the flight crews were on April 14, 1970.

I need to dissect another miracle; to reassure myself these good things do happen. I peered over to Wikipedia to read the account of Apollo 13, when they said, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” When the number two oxygen tank of Apollo 13 exploded, the cause was tracked to an unlikely chain of events where one problem fell like dominoes on the next. “Considerable ingenuity under extreme pressure was required from the crew, flight controllers and support personnel for the safe return.” The world watched the riveting drama on television. Electrical power was severely limited, making even voice communications difficult. There was a point when the crew was asked to suspend urine dumps, as that could alter the trajectory of the spacecraft. The lives of the crew hung in the balance like the flutterings of a feather.  As a result, one crew member even ended up with a severe urinary tract infection from limiting his water intake. Ironically, or miraculously, depending on your view, the crew’s lives may have been saved by the same malfunction that caused the danger.

Our world is rich in stories like these; stories of successful failure. Cyber spies are really birthing the stories of our next generation of American Heroes.  Although, I can wait to read it’s next entry on Wikipedia.

Inside my mind, things look different today. That mountain of laundry doesn’t make me cringe. I can’t wait to turn on the washer and watch that hot water spill out at my command; it is my privilege to wash those clothes today.

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