Tag: Hektorama
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Yellow blood: Learn from yesterday
Meguna NakaiNagoya, Japan In 2020 Japan will host the second Tokyo Olympics. When the first Olympics were televised in 1964, people were surprised to find that Japan had developed so quickly even though only nineteen years had passed after World War II. Yet there remained much to be done. One urgent need was to improve…
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The mysterious Red Cross boy
Emeka Chibuikem V.Enugu State, Nigeria Who is this Red Cross Boy? This is the question to which I could find no answer until this day. I am Alex, from the Igbo tribe in the South-East of Nigeria, and I was born out of wedlock in 1991 to a single mother who died in 1998, while…
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Destination assured—The power of the cross
Kelsey Wollin DunnOregon, Wisconsin, United States The most powerful and mysterious statement ever made about blood was first uttered about two thousand years ago by Jesus of Nazareth. In the present day, it continues to be recited regularly throughout the world by Christian leaders to more than two billion followers.1, 2 Holy Communion is an…
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“The Blood Battle”: Using science to combat the fear of blood
Kayla PeñaProvidence, Rhode Island Forty years ago, the University of Michigan and Ohio State University competed in their first “Blood Battle.” Although typically known for their football rivalry, in 1982 the universities decided to expand their competition to see which school could donate more blood.1 Now every November, the students volunteer their veins to help…
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Grit
Romalyn AnteWolverhampton, England My mother is right—my brother’s blood is getting dirtier. A nurse like me, she had read the result of his glomerular filtration rate, a test that measures how well the kidneys clean the blood. It had dropped below 15, an indication that his chronic renal failure was reaching its end stage. Some…
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Blood at Maidan – Kyiv, Ukraine 2014
Olena KaguiRhode Island, United States There was no physical blood present when I stepped onto Maidan Square in Kyiv, Ukraine. Yet signs of it were everywhere. Bullet holes pierced the shields and helmets that memorialized the fallen. Flowers, the color of blood, sat inside the cavern of the helmet. The space, once occupied by a…
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Training wheels
Shannon KernaghanAlberta, Canada From the beginning of Paul’s dance with doctors, I have sat next to him and squeezed his hand through the pronouncement of hemochromatosis. The first doctor said his high iron level, if left untreated, would make him sicker than he already felt, possibly kill him. The laundry list of complications started with…
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Wilder Penfield
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Fig 1. Wilder Penfield, Stamp Wilder Penfield was not only a great surgeon and a great scientist, he was an even greater human being. -Sir George Pickering, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) (Fig. 1) was the most gifted pioneer of Canadian neurosurgery.…
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From eponym to advocate: The story of Stephen Christmas
Peter Kopplin Toronto, Canada The 1952 Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) had an unusual but fitting article. It was titled “Christmas Disease, a condition previously mistaken for haemophilia.”1 The seminal patient was five-year-old Stephen Christmas and the title suggested an unusual lack of British reserve. Rosemary Biggs and colleagues were giving the…