Fools Rush In: Saving Two Lives

I started another Blog, 'Snippets Of My Life', here is a sample.  If you like it go to this link and follow that Blog also.  Also please leave comments.

We were living in Vienna Va. and I was working at the American Red Cross Blood Research Laboratories at the NIH campus. The director of industrial design for the Am Red Cross was the regional director of the Industrial Design Group. They arranged a trip to the Amish area of Pennsylvania to tour the John Deer design facility. We had great tour of the design facilities and saw some of the first 3-D CAD systems in the world. We then all had dinner at a family style Amish restaurant. And we left to drive the two and a half hour drive back to DC at about 8 P.M.

We started driving on route 83 from Pennsylvania toward Baltimore. There was a detour and we had to leave the highway and go on a small two lane road that went through a very mountainous area near Hereford MD. Margie was driving and I was sleeping in the passenger seat. All of a sudden Margie stopped short thrusting me against the seat belt. I quickly awoke and looking out the windshield I saw in front of the car before us a tractor trailer laying on its side having rolled over between 120 and 150 degrees, about halfway between being on it's side and being on it's top. There was fuel spilling out of the tank onto the road. I rushed out of the car to the tractor and climbed up to the drivers window.


I climbed up the twelve feet to the window on the drivers side and looked in. I could see the driver trapped by the steering wheel and climbed through the window. He groaned "my brother". All I could see was a massive amount of chains in the back seat of the cab. I quickly realized that his brother was under all those chains. I quickly started to dig out the brother from under out. He had been sleeping in the back seat. Fortunately, I was able to get his head exposed. Neither of them were conscious at this time. It took almost 17 minutes for the local volunteer fire department to arrive. During that time I was keeping the neck stable on the brother in the back seat (I suspected a severe neck injury from having hundreds of pounds of chains fall on him (they were in the compartment under the matress he was sleeping on). Also he was unrestrained and likely to have injured his neck. While I was doing this the driver, his brother vomited. When the Hereford volunteer fire Dept arrived I refused to leave until someone with at least comparable training to myself arrived. I had worked seven years with the FAST team of western NY, was an EMT, had three years of surgical residency behind me. I explained I was already in the best position to render aid and the best skilled at the scene. They explained it was a highly dangerous situation because of the hundreds of gallons of fuel that had spilled. I told them you take care of the fuel and hand me two cervical collars and IV catheters and bags. I started an I.V on each. BTW there was not enough room for anyone else to come into the cab. I was doing this all upside down.I placed an cervical collar on each of the men. Several times I had to clear their months from vomit. I was given the Menaris France Award For Valiant Service in Emergency Medicine at their annual dinner in January 1984.

The Go team from Baltimore Shock Trauma Center was just recently organized and had not flown a mission yet. This rescue was their maiden rescue. The unique aspect of the team was that they had a surgeon, anesthesiologist, trauma nurses and carried O-negative blood for field transfusion. They could set up a full field surgical unit. They arrived about 45 minutes after the fire department and I allowed them to take over from me. I slowly backed out of the cab and was helped down by several of the firemen. It took them nearly 2 hours to get the men extracted. They had to get a crane to lift the cab. They first got a twenty ton crane and it was not enough finally they got a 45 ton crane and were able to get the men out of the tractor cab. We were finally ablee to get on our way about 2:30 in the morning. I took thee next day off from work and slept in. I was given the Citizen Award by the Baltimore County Fire Department. The two men both survived after weeks in critical care and months of rehab.

This Blog Snippets of my life, is going to be a daily blog for at least one year. I will tell stories about me that I hope you find interesting. If you like them please do two things: click to become a follower; and post on your Facebook page or twitter them. I hope to have 10,000 followers by years end. Some stories will be very personal. I will try to remember the correct names of those involved, however, I have a terrible memory for names and some names will be completely fictitious. The stories however are completely truthful as far as I can remember. Hope you enjoy. Some of these blogs may seem mundane. However, they

I RESIGN: Candidacy in Iowa House District 60

I am(or was) the Democratic candidate for the Iowa House District 60, composed of most of the Polk County portion of West Des Moines. I am running against Peter Cownie the incumbent, who I ran against and lost to two years ago when it was an open seat. Two years ago he out spent me 17 to one. His father is Jim Cownie, one of the founders of the cable network in Iowa and after selling it in 1991 one of the richest men in Iowa. Peter Cownie has distinguished himself in the House with a lack luster first term. Looking at his website he can not even site a single accomplishment or single bill he introduced, other then his committee assignments. He has not a single new plan since he ran two years ago.

We have developed not a meritocracy but an affirmative action system for those of privilege. the system we have of private funding of campaigns through raising campaign contributions has led to corporatization of the United States Congress and our State Houses. We have representatives and senators at all levels costing the Government much more money because they spend based upon their contributors interest rather then the fiduciary interests of the public, their voters.

I feel we are long over due for a Clean Election Bill here in Iowa. There have been lots of court challenges of this because of potential unfairness to third part candidates. As described in Wikipedia:

Unlike traditional campaign finance laws that focus primarily on restricting spending and placing caps on campaign donations, Clean Elections laws provide a public grant to candidates who agree to limit their spending and private fundraising. Candidates participating in a Clean Elections system are required to meet certain qualification criteria, which usually includes collecting a number of signatures and small contributions (generally determined by statute and set at $5 in both Maine and Arizona) before the candidate can receive public support. In most Clean Elections programs, these qualifying contributions must be given by constituents. To receive the government campaign grant, "Clean Candidates" must forgo all other fundraising and accept no other private or personal funds. Candidates who choose not to participate are subject to limits on their fundraising, typically in the form of limits on the size of contributions they may accept and the sources of those contributions (such as limits on corporate or union contributions), and detailed reporting requirements.

I am as I describe myself a community activist who supports myself by being a Vascular Surgeon. I went to Haiti on two medical missions two weeks and two months after the devastating earthquake. I have developed a plan to allow every student attend college/university/professional/technical school and not pay a dime till they were working and then pay a fixed relatively small percentage of their salary for ten years. I developed a plan to pay for all health care in Iowa and not cost the taxpayers anything more. Several news sources credited me with keeping health care as a major issue in the last Presidential caucus cycle by attending and asking questions at 224 caucus events from all 18 candidates of both parties. I started my activism in High School and was one of ten to conceive of and run the first March of Dimes Walk (the first walk to raise money for charity) and developing the first program in the country for High school students to get academic credit for community service. Here in Iowa I have received National Volunteer of the year award from both the March of Dimes for my advocacy for the child health insurance HAWK-I and from the American Diabetes Association for conceiving of and getting passed the Farm-to-School bill and the seed that became the Healthy Child bill. The question and follow-up I asked Mr. Lightfoot in 1998 led to Vilsak being elected Governor (yes one person can make a difference). Seven months ago I completed a nine month diet losing 95 pounds and today is the seven month anniversary of completing it and I haven't gained a single pound back.

Speed your computer Ditch the bitchy virus software.

This is a draft the full version will be out later today.

Last week I was at Dragon-Con, the worlds largest Science Fiction convention. I happen to be the Volunteer director of the Blood drive and this year we were about 200 units short of the world record for a non-disaster blood drive (well there is always next year). I attended a session at the Electronic Freedom Foundation track ( the same track were I was a panel member discussing medical marijuana), on Why You Should NOT Use a Virus Scanner. My view of virus software was changed forever. I have already made the changes on both my office and home computer and plan to do this on all 7 computers at my medical practice, both desktops and all laptops at home.

First your need to understand that virus and worms need to have administrative permission to do what they do. If they are opened in a user that does not have administrative permission then they just sit there. You don't get infected.

Second you need to know that you can only get a virus if you allow it in. It is like a vampire that it cannot enter your house unless you give it permission(at least according to True Blood). So you have to be super careful not to open attachments you are absolutely sure about. Not to click on any part of a pop up. If anything is suspicious then restart your computer or use task manager to close it. Even if you get am e-mail from a close friend or loved one, unless you are expecting it do not open it.

Third thing to know is that virus/worm/hazard protection is the biggest hog of CPU and memory on your computer. Also you may have multiple competing programs running. i just finished doing this to my wife's computer and she had 7 different forms of protection. Also you will probably be infected before the virus software has your virus's information. Additionally virus software can get expensive. I spend over $450 dollars a year between all the computers at my medical practice and my family. Also it isn't unusual for the protection to lapse and a system not to be protected anyway. So why not ditch the BITCH.

Here is what you do:

• Update and run what ever virus software you have.
• Do a Back-up of your system.
  
• Using Add/Delete Program from Control panel remove every virus/ad-blocker/spam filter/protector you have on your computer.
• For good measure while your at it remove all this programs you haven't used in two years.
• I also removed all the Microsoft Office and Word-perfect software (ultimately replacing it with Open Office).
• Using Google Chrome Pack I loaded Spyware Doctor and Google Chrome(safest browser to use to prevent malicious programing), you can also load other great free programs at same time.
• In Control Panel I opened User Accounts and added user with limited access (no administrative capabilities). I called it by person using computers first name.
  
• I then run Spyware Doctor after updating it and also Defrag and disk Cleanup. All of which can be found in the Control Panel.
• I then open my computer Browser and in Documents and Settings, I copy the contents of the current user(with administrative abilities), into the folder of the new user with limited abilities. This gets all your e-mail and bookmarks and preferences to the new user. You obviously don't need to do this if you are setting up a new computer or don't have anything you care about if you were just getting a new computer.
• I then turn off all the features of Spyware Doctor so it will not run at all. This is very easy, on status page click the two green on buttons so computer immunization says Disabled and Intelliguard protection is off (when you click it you get pulldown and ppick the never(not recommended) line. Then in settings unclick every box but let it download updates silently.
• Now turn off computer and when you restart only open limited user. **Never leave administrative user running in back ground.*****
• You are ready to go.

But, you must remember that you need to change some of you habits:

• Never open attachment you are 100% sure about.
• Never hit reply to e-mail you are not 100% sure about.
• If you end up on a web page you didn't expect (i.e you got redirected), then close browser and re-open browser and resume your browsing.
• If not sure of e-mail instead of hitting return or clicking on link go to email program or browser and send e-mail asking to clarify if it was ligit email, link or attachment.
• If you do need to download something. down load it and then check it with a Web (cloud) based virus scanner, before opening or running it. It is actually less often then you think you will need to do this. I will post here a site to go to later today so it you see this before come back tomorrow.