It was a grand series of events with superb hospitality and a lotof good people with whom I talked and celebrated. It is too bad I was unable to have any of the other Florida .
Geelhoeds join in again.It was not just the medical school, but a group of people with the similar kinds of interest across the campus. I was especially interested to see the rest of the campus form my excursion on the second day over to the Departemnt of Anthropology, and a chance to meet with a number of the faculty and a whole class there. I had dinner on Monday night with the core of the group who got the Office of Global Health started at a place called the Stonewood Grille. This was probably the first place where I might start thinking of taking a drink other than an electrolytesalts repletion solution, since if i had had any alcohol before,in addition to having it dehydrate me further, it might have put me away for the duration! I was getting back toward a baseline of just stiff and sore, and not disabled for the purposes of going downstairs backwards. I was introduced to a researcher named Bill Hausworth by Parker Small when he heard that I was a guide runner for a fellow with retinitis pigmentosa. Bill has actually cured this geneticdefect with injection of gene therapy linked to adenovirusassociated virus in a congenital model of blindness in dogs. I told him all about Joe Aukward and his brother, and he encouraged me to get in touch with him. He is about to start a human clinical protocol and i will be sure I get Joe involved in this from the associations in which Joe is involved, like the group they had visited in Chicago, when the whole family went up bytrain. I got my own private seminar on retinitis and the loss of vision from this single point genetic mutation, all of which has become known only since the last time I was in any ophthalmology classroom!
One other chance association occurred with my going
to Mike Parsons office in the Biomedical Communications
area where a fellow named Roger is the photographer,
but is also a massage therapist. He offered upon
my arrival to do a sports massage to…Omake it easier
for me to move around, but I had gone bustling though
my activities and only on the last day while sitting
inthe office with Mike Parsons after trying to send
you the email with the APR-B-7 story of the Bull Run
Run did I take him up on the offer. Even clothed
and lying on the photography cutting table, the brief
and light massage just to "flush out all the
inflammatory products and loosen up the tight muscles"
made my lower extremists almost back to normal, which
I certainly needed and quickly, since I am off again
to bang them up again soon enough! I am becoming
a therapeutic massage believer.Arlen Rosentahl is
a pediatric endocrinologist with a number of associated
folk who have been active in support of the OGH, and
he and his group took me to dinner on Tuesday night
at theParamount Cafe, in part, to celebrate his birthday.
As in all cases illustrating the "five degrees
of separation", in the case of the overlapping
Venn diagram of my interests, this cones down the
numbers of people with my kinds of interests to a
precious few, and sure enough, we are almost all aware
of each other. He has been active in getting the
Ecuador an program together, and when I started talking
about the rather unusual event that got meto meet
the whole family of the Roderigo Crespo Toral family,they
all became very excited.
He had called his friend Challo Mantila, Dean of
the University of San Francisco de Quito, and he knew
me from my visit and lecture there at the Metropolitano
Hospital when I went to the Galapaogos with both my
sons to welcome in the new decadeof the 1990's on
New year's Eve 1989.
They, in turn, mentioned me to a fellow who had
operated with me in Saipan Commonwealth of northern
Marianas, who just happened to return to Ecuador as
the Minister of Health, Edgar Rodas, who had participated
with me at the ACS Clinical Congress on Outreach two
years ago in the co-authored article now published
in the Journal of the ACS.
Alan Burns, a real prince of a fellow with one of the premier departments of anthropology in the US, asked if I would be interested in coming back to the University of Florida and mentioned a new field "GIS Epidemiology." This would combine the Geographic Information Systems with the kinds of health questions my talk had illustrated. In the interval, I agreed to be on an external review for the Office of Global Health for the University of Florida's medical and allied health student programs, and may be making a trip with them, possibly to Ecuadorto finally make that long promised climb of Chimborazo!
It seems that I may be experiencing the area where Paul Farmer has worked in Haiti, and, of course, I cut my teeth as my first outing, exactly at the age and stage of these medical freshmen in the Dominican Republic. So, life is a short recycling, and the friends made in one sphere are accumulated forever!
Speaking of that, I am now on my way to Long Island New York, where I will be hosted by the Chief of Pediatric Surgery,Alberto Pena, who was a recently arrived Mexican in Boston with his wife Rosalinda and a small baby with Biliary Atresia when I first met and befriended him 34 years ago. I visited him and his orthopedist brother in law on my first ever trip to Mexico City in1969, and he came to Derwood when I had just moved there in the1972.
And, now, from subtropical Florida, I am heading north into a very atypical late spring Arctic jetstream snow and ice temperature plunge to be chauffeured out to Great Neck and Grand Rounds at Long Island Jewish hospital where Alberto now is thenumber one in a small field of pediatric surgery, like that of Max Langham, my host on the prior visit to the University of Florida's Department of Surgery just last month, with whom I had lunch this Tuesday noon. He has given me the encouragment to take the plunge in a total gut and remodeling of the house, since they are just now moving back in after being outside thei rremodeled home for the last nineteen months, having decided to rebuild their house right where it is.
The "high temperature predictions" for this coming weekend are clustering in the upper forties for New England, which has implications for this long run from Hopkinton, and the USA Today says that a special computer program will be following the 20,000 computer chipped runners with an expected 500 injuries as a "chaos model" of a mass disaster model. I will be part of that shivering chaos, including a start with inflammatory muscles still in the early stages of resolution. At least the recovery has been pushed forward by the massage I received on departure form Gainesville, so I can start over in another of life's rapidrecyclings!