Can we offer you some Tamiflu?

Excerpt from a public letter Roald Dahl wrote encouraging people to vaccinate their children. Olivia, my eldest daughter, caught measles when she was seven years old. As the illness took its usual course I can remember reading to her often in bed and not feeling particularly alarmed about it. Then one morning, when she was well on the road to recovery, I was sitting on her bed showing her how to fashion little animals out of coloured pipe-cleaners, and when it came to her turn to make one herself, I noticed that her fingers and her mind were not working together and she couldn’t do anything. “Are you feeling all right?” I asked her. “I feel all sleepy,” she said. In an hour, she was unconscious. In twelve hours she was dead. The measles had turned into a terrible thing called measles encephalitis and there was nothing the doctors could do to save her. That was twenty-four years ago in 1962, but even now, if a child with measles happens to develop the same deadly reaction from measles as Olivia did, there would still be nothing the doctors could do to help her. On the other hand, there is today something that parents can do to make sure that this sort of tragedy does not happen to a child of theirs. They can insist that their child is immunized against measles. I was unable to do that for Olivia in 1962 because in those days a reliable measles vaccine had not been discovered. Today a good and safe vaccine is available to every family and all you have to do is to ask your doctor to administer it.

The measles outbreak in Texas is reminding me of the public letter Roald Dahl wrote about losing his daughter to measles in 1962, just before the vaccine was publicly available.

One of our supporters shared this with us—people are getting creative tonight!

This is the worst flu (influenza) season (US) in the last 15 years.

IT IS NOT TOO LATE TO VACCINATE.

Being vaccinated makes it less likely that you will: die from flu infection, be hospitalized, and typically reduces the severity of your illness.

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a cartoon mouse wearing a purple cape stands in front of an orange background ALT: a cartoon mouse wearing a purple cape stands in front of an orange background

Isn’t that The Secret of N.I.M.H?

Alaska lawmakers have overwhelmingly approved a resolution urging President Trump to abandon his plans to rename the continent’s largest mountain from Denali back to Mount McKinley. #ISTANDWITHDENALI

A non-government business that contracts with the federal government received notice today that in order to do business with the government they must certify that they don’t participate in DEI. So it’s not just the feds, it’s any private biz that contracts with the feds. Here’s the message they got:

Hand embroidered sunflower on a blue-gray chair

Hand embroidered sunflower on a blue-gray chair

Finished.
#ThreadPainting #Embroidery

“Antibiotics are among the most potent psychoactive drugs in all the pharmacopoeia. They are incredibly potent anxiolytics.They just act on the prescriber rather than the patient” -Dr. Brad Spellberg #idsky #medsky #AMSsky

Watched trauma faculty eat candy off the floor or Room 4(Trauma room).

Just a reminder as we get closer to closing out this year bit by bit:

Be kind.
Be kind fiercely. We're gonna need more of it.
Just be kind.

It's not weak. It takes strength to be kind.

Cruelty, malice, wrath--those are easy. Small.

Gentleness is power under control. So is kindness. You have--

Coming along. My eyes are crossing.

Hope I'm the first to post this all time classic on this platform

A duck, mostly shadowed by morning backlight on the pond.

A duck from this morning’s walk

The USPS will honor Betty White with her own stamp in 2025 Having received hundreds to thousands of fan mail each week, it's only fitting to honor White with a postage stamp.

Looks like I'll be buying some stamps next year. Icon.

www.npr.org/2024/11/17/n...

Xolo’s head. Ears pricked and intense, because someone down the block is barking.

Morticia looking intense. Someone was barking, over there.

Outstanding detail. Beautiful. Don’t abandon it!

Medium?

I like case based. I wrote a deck for a talk to RTs that’s was based on the gnarliest airway of my career.

I feel like tying pearls to a good story helps it stick better.

Tiny mushrooms around the base of a tree. One in the foreground is out of focus.

Tiny mushrooms from my walk the other day.
#nature #fungi

I think in the near future, it will be especially important to have effective science communicators. As someone who has been doing this for a while, I thought it might be useful to explain my major principles for science communication that I use in my own work 🧵:

Subcuticulars are really nice here, though. Especially in kids and folks with dementia, since they don’t have to come out.

I was most concerned about whether the anonymous trauma surgeon was angry about the baling wire.

I asked my friend if I could read the op note.

It said, “foreign body removed.”
#medsky

a drawing of a blue and black bicycle helmet Alt: a drawing of a blue and black bicycle helmet

I dreamed.
A friend with whom I attended med school, residency, and public health school came in to my trauma room after massive thoracic injury.
I quickly grabbed some baling wire off the pegboard in the garage and wired her rib cage back together and shipped her to the trauma center.

Massive pulmonary emboli. Correlate clinically.