Salon.com > illness

When I parented my father

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 23:57:00 +0000

My father’s urologist projected the CAT scan on his computer screen, pointing out the major organs like battle sites on a Civil War map. My father’s body, my homeland. Bladder. Liver. Intestine. Spleen. “Here’s the right kidney,” he said, using his pen to mark the perimeter. “You can see its recognizable shape, a healthy shape and size.” We nodded, my mother, my father, and me. We knew pointing out normalities meant an abnormality was coming. Dr. Petroski inhaled. “And now here’s the left kidney,” he said, moving his pen to a dark area that did not mirror its right-hand counterpart. It was as large as my father’s liver, but misshapen, a bulge in the center like a football. “You see the difference in the shape? That’s a tumor. That’s the problem.”

Barbara Walters is out of the hospital

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:00:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- ABC says Barbara Walters is out of the hospital and recovering from chicken pox at home.

ABC said Tuesday that the 83-year-old host on "The View" is resting comfortably and "getting stronger." There was no indication of when she might return to work.

Walters was hospitalized after falling and cutting her head at a pre-inaugural party in Washington on Jan. 19. The news veteran later was diagnosed with chicken pox, which typically hits people when they are children.

The disease can be serious in older people because of the possibility of complications like pneumonia.

Barbara Walters hospitalized with chickenpox

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:04:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- Barbara Walters would probably like to hit the reset button on 2013.

She's got the chickenpox and remains hospitalized more than a week after going in after falling and hitting her head at a pre-inaugural party in Washington on Jan. 19. A fellow host on the "The View," Whoopi Goldberg, said Monday that Walters has been transferred to a New York hospital and hopes to go home soon.

"She's been told to rest. She's not allowed any visitors," Goldberg said. "And we're telling you, Barbara, no scratching!"

The 83-year-old news veteran, who underwent heart surgery in May 2010, apparently avoided a disease that hits most people when they are children. It can be serious in older people because of the possibility of complications like pneumonia.

Even after concern about her fall had subsided, Walters had been kept hospitalized last week because of a lingering fever, and doctors found the unexpected cause.

"We love you, we miss you," Goldberg said on "The View," in a message to the show's inventor. "We just don't want to hug you."

New strain of norovirus hits US hard

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 13:30:00 +0000

A new strain of the norovirus stomach bug that has been sweeping through Japan, Australia and Western Europe is hitting the United States, according to researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

So you aren't imagining it. Everyone you know really is sick this winter.

Norovirus, once called the Norwalk virus, is easily transmittable and causes severe diarrhea and vomiting. The bug is often spread in enclosed places like schools, offices, subways and nursing homes.

"The new strain spread rapidly across the United States from September to December 2012," Dr. Aron Hall an epidemiologist at the CDC's Division of Viral Diseases, said in a statement. "The proportion of reported outbreaks caused by this strain increased dramatically from 19 percent in September to 58 percent in December."

Dr. Eben Alexander’s so-called afterlife

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:00:00 +0000

In 2008, Dr. Eben Alexander contracted a rare form of bacterial meningitis that, according to his account, shut down his neocortex, the seat of human consciousness. The near-death odyssey that followed was, he writes, “perhaps one of the most convincing such cases in modern history.” At the end of it, he could declare, “I didn’t just believe in God; I knew God.” No mere intimation of immortality, Dr. Alexander’s memoir carries the audacious title "Proof of Heaven" and, at time of writing, it bestrides the New York Times best-seller lists like a Colossus. When he fell ill, he was a brain surgeon, but he has given that up to pursue something more worthy of his talents, namely to “break the back of the last efforts of reductive science to tell the world that the material realm is all there is.”