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Even though we have been here since August of last year, May 10th was our first tornado experience in Oklahoma City.

And they don’t call it Tornado Alley for nothin’. Dorothy wasn’t kidding around.

Brandon has experienced his fair share of tornadoes in Nebraska, but I am fortunate enough to only have a faint second-hand recollection of the twister that swept through Edmonton in 1987. We get some pretty amazing storms and weather up in Saskatchewan, but nothing of the destructive funnel cloud type. Pretty lucky for the prairies, I know.

Yesterday, a few storms started brewing in the northern part of the state over the course of the afternoon. Weather tends to move from the southwest to the northeast around here, so we weren’t in the path of those twisters and baseball-sized hail.

Around 4pm, I turned on the TV. I still have no idea why I did that. I never watch TV during the day… A local station had interrupted their regularly scheduled program for continuous advertisement-free coverage of the storms. I couldn’t help but be sucked in as tornado tips and warnings scrolled along the bottom of the screen, listing counties that were predicted to be in imminent danger.

Pretty quickly, two innocent looking storms to the southwest of the city made their presence known. The 3D radar and fancy weather technology on the screen flashed shades of red and animated swirly clouds. You could tell the news anchors were getting a little anxious. People around here still talk about the May 1999 storm as if it just happened yesterday. This one had 100mph winds and was sweeping across the map at 55mph. It had the potential to quickly develop into something big.

And it was headed straight for metro Oklahoma City.

Brandon called soon after to ask me to pick him up from work. Even if there was no threat of a twister rolling through our neighbourhood, he wanted to protect his car in the hospital parkade from the aforementioned baseball-sized hail. By the time I picked him up, the urgency on the radio had quickened and city-wide sirens were blaring.

We have no basement at our house (I’m surprised at how rare those are here!) and no storm shelter. So we went home, picked up the dogs, and drove the 5-7 minutes back to the hospital underground parking garage. We sat in the 4Runner and listened to the storm trackers on the radio.

The storm crossed highway I-35 and you could tell the announcer was frustrated that so many cars had decided to try and drive through the storm. What a disaster if a twister touched down! The stopped and blocked traffic ended up worse off than sitting ducks.

Instead of heading into OKC, the storm veered more directly to the east and swept through Moore and Norman. The National Weather Service thinks 21 tornadoes touched down throughout the state that day. The damage in the FOX photo above is from an outlying area of Norman. There are reports that two people died (including a mother of three) and 104 were injured.

We headed out of the parkade about 45 minutes later and were met with bright shining sunlight. The one good thing about a fast-moving storm with no other weather systems on its heels is that it passed quickly. We were all safe.

My heart goes out to those families that lost loved ones and their homes. I hope they find comfort and security and the strength to rebuild in the coming weeks and months.

it’s always sad when two of my favourite subjects come together in a negative way.

Two neuropathologists are prominently spotlighted in an article by Malcolm Gladwell in the October 19 issue of The New Yorker. The article explores a provocative question raised by autopsy results on football players: namely, should football be illegal?

Featured are Dr. Ann McKee, neuropathologist at the Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts and Dr. Bennet Omalu, forensic neuropathologist and San Joaquin Valley (CA) chief medical examiner. Drs. McKee and Omalu have done some interesting autopsy work which suggests that chronic traumatic brain injury leading to dementia suffered by football players is much more common, even among high school players, than previously realized.

What’s alarming is the presence of abnormal collections of a protein known as tau, one of the proteins one sees in cases of Alzheimer disease, in brains of young ex-football players. As an example, McKee provides photomicrographs from a case of an 18-year-old high school football player and says: “He’s got all this tau. This is frontal and this is insular…. This is completely inappropriate. You don’t see tau like this in an 18-year-old. You don’t see tau like this in a fifty year old.”

You might counter that this is simply the result of a few bad-luck hits on the field, but research involving the University of North Carolina football team suggests otherwise. Players at UNC wear impact sensors in their helmets throughout the season. Results from these investigations suggests that even routine hits during practice can add up to cause concussions and, theoretically, set the stage for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. (On the first day of training camp one UNC lineman was recorded as having been hit in the head thirty-one times!)

Back in 1905, Gladwell reports, the question of whether football should be played in our nation’s schools was raised to the level of the White House, when President Theodore Roosevelt called an emergency summit to discuss the issue. At the time, a professor at the University of Chicago called football a “boy-killing, man-mutilating, money-making, education-prostituting, gladiatorial sport.” And in December of 1905, presidents of twelve prominent colleges met in New York and came within one vote of abolishing the sport at their institutions.

What does this mean for football in America? Nothing. Fans are willing to spend a lot of money to see men slam into each other’s heads on the field. But, as a parent, you can do something.

You can forbid your son from playing football.

~ Brian E. Moore, MD (via KevinMD.com)

“If u get a swine flu shot ur an idiot.”
~ Bill Maher

“Hail, Zeus. The Greek god of timely pharmaceutical research! But… Is the H1N1 vaccine a deadly poison? … and are we running out of it??!”
~ John Stewart

i decided to include a little about H1N1 here after an extensive texting conversation with my worried mother this morning. sometimes i take working in a healthcare environment for granted and forget that there are a lot of people who only know what they see on the news.

all questions are from my mom and all answers are from from the Center for Disease Control (retrieved October 20th, 2009).

wow! aren’t you worried? it’s dangerous for people your age!
yes, it does seem to be hitting my age group (25-49) pretty hard. but most of those hospital admissions and deaths are people with comorbid conditions such as heart disease, kidney disorders, asthma, weakened immune systems and pregnancy. i don’t have any of those. nope, not even the last one.

how do you know it’s H1N1 and not the flu?
last week, 2,505 out of 2,520 flu viruses were tested and found to be 2009 H1N1 influenza A. that’s 99.4%. it’s everywhere. i like to think i’m one in a million, but i doubt i’m in that 0.6% bracket. i’m pretty sure i have the same ol’ flu everyone else does.

where did you catch it?
we saw a TON of people with flu-like illness at the clinic over the last couple of weeks.

how can i tell if i have it?
it looks just like the “regular” flu: fever, nausea, aches, etc. it sorta sucks, but doesn’t seem to last as long as regular seasonal flu.

i don’t think i want to get the shot. it’s not here till November.
it’s true that many places will get the vaccine too late. and working from home in Canada probably lowers my mom’s risk, but there isn’t much risk to just getting the vaccine. the shot (different than the nasal spray) is a killed viral particle that can’t actually give you the flu. please check out the CDC website for more information on who should get the H1N1 vaccine and how safe it is.

i hope this post either answers a few of your questions or empowers you to use trustworthy resources like the CDC website to find out information that your local news coverage may be missing. thousands of old people and young kids die from the flu every year. H1N1 is no different. arm yourself with reliable and scientific information.

“Our hopes are high. Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong. And our dreams for this beautiful country will never die.”
~ Pierre Elliott Trudeau

in honour (whoops! almost spelled it “honor”!) of the upcoming nuptials that promise to unite our merry North American border once and for all, we are flying both flags with pride.

here are a few other bits of Canadian trivia:
- where did our name come from?
- what’s with the maple leaf?
- why red & white?
- how old are we?

and for the record, the terrorists did not come from Canada.

nope. no, wedblog or wlog or wog here. cross my heart.

but to those of you in Brandon’s small hometown and my westcoast surrogate city: keep an eye out for the engagement announcement section of the classifieds tomorrow, May 3rd…

announcements will hit the Saskatoon Star Phoenix and Moose Jaw Times Herald next Sunday.

from The Sydney Morning Herald on Feb 16th:

Hotels on an upmarket Caribbean island have decided to offer potential customers a rebate on the cost of their flight in a bid to keep cash-strapped tourists coming.

The airline credit scheme is one of a number of quirky innovations that tourism operators across the world are introducing during a global recession.

In recent years, tiny Nevis has become a luxury hotspot, with Hollywood stars and moneyed-up CEOs choosing it as an ideal spot to get away from it all.

But with the global economy having taken a turn for a worst, the island’s hoteliers are taking steps to keep business coming in. A group of Nevis top hotels have got together with the island’s tourism authority to launch an airline credit scheme.

Any visitors staying for four or more nights in a participating hotel will be given a $US200 ($A306) credit on their final bill to cover part of the cost of getting to the island.

yah, airline credit is nice and all. if you can find an airline (other than Liat) to fly in here.

i love how they call tiny Nevis a “luxury hotspot”. people pay thousands of dollars to come on holiday here. and i have another 49 sleeps!

UPDATE: apparently the woman removed her blog (thanks for the tip, Jillian). something about reaching national news was a bit too much, i guess.

awesome. just awesome.

i’ll be keeping up with this lady to look for tips and tricks to keep down my bulging student debt. rather sadly, i can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to live on only $1500 a year… can you?

this photo is my current desktop background. coming soon, Maddy.

but not quite soon enough. *sniff*

oh, and remember my aunt that was elected to Parliament just a few short weeks ago? here is her first address to the House of Commons yesterday.

yesterday in class we had an announcement to protect ourselves from mosquitoes, ensure there wasn’t any standing water near our houses and report any and all fevers to administration for monitoring. when searching for the news article reporting dengue fever in St. Kitts, i came across the following:

The Ministry of Health has sought to correct a story that appeared in the front page of the Wednesday, 5 Nov., issue of the Sun St. Kitts/Nevis.

In the story, the SUN incorrectly stated that “there could be two cases of dengue fever (better known as yellow fever) in St. Kitts.”

There have been no reported cases of yellow fever in decades, according to the Ministry of Health.

On 1 Nov., an advisory pertaining to a development in the dengue fever situation and according to the ministry, there has been an increase in the number of individuals presenting to clinicians with symptoms and signs of dengue fever. A number of confirmatory tests have been dispatched to the CAREC lab.

The ongoing rainfall and confirmed reports of dengue fever cases in neighbouring islands increase the likelihood of increased dengue activity locally, the ministry further explained.

~ from SUN St. Kitts & Nevis

UPDATE: CDC dengue outbreak warning in tropical and subtropical regions. dengue and yellow are both hemorrhagic Flavivirus fevers transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. so i guess that’s why they might be mistaken for the same thing.

here are the current CDC guidelines for travel to St. Kitts and Nevis.

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photo: taken from the point in St. Kitts where you can see the Atlantic ocean on the left and the Caribbean sea on the right.

just a lot of rain so far. in fact, tonight feels extra quiet in an eerie sort of way. there isn’t even a breeze.

calm before the storm? better for us all to be safe than sorry.

UPDATE update: power back on as of around 11am Thursday. safe. sound. except for a noisy night, it was pretty uneventful. thank goodness.