By Susan Tweit
November 2009
It’s official: my husband, Richard, is missing a marble. Or at least a marble-sized tumor.
A week and a half ago, his neurosurgery team removed a purple tumor the size of a large marble from the right temporal lobe of his brain. They reported that they’d gotten the whole thing, it stayed intact, and that it was small and well-defined.
Brief by Allen Best
Health – February 2009 – Colorado Central Magazine
A 37-year-old man from Pleasanton, Texas, died the weekend before Christmas at a lodge in Mt. Crested Butte, the slope-side town at the base of the Crested Butte ski area. The man had suffered from high-altitude pulmonary edema, in which the lungs fill with fluid.
Column by Hal Walter
Health – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE WORDS SEEMED completely out of context: “Amy had a stroke last night.”
The information, through received in a local coffee shop, came from a reliable source, so I had to believe it was true. The details were sketchy, but from what I gathered, she had fallen out of bed, her partner Gary Ziegler had recognized that she was having a stroke, and called 911. An ambulance had come to Bear Basin Ranch and taken Amy to Parkview Medical Center in Pueblo.
Brief by Allen Best
Health – October 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Does climbing 14,000-foot peaks cause you to lose brain cells, because of hypoxia? A study done in Spain concluded that time spent at high elevations resulted in a significant loss of brain cells, even leading to permanent damage.
Brief by Allen Best
Health – October 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
Although adults typically get accustomed to the thinner air found at higher elevations, it’s sometimes a problem with babies
Essay by Gregg Mitman
Health – September 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
“Mom, would you really have shipped me off to Denver?” I asked my mother recently. “Absolutely,” she said.
“But imagine,” I said, “what it would have been like for a 5-year-old living in an institution, surrounded by doctors and a bunch of asthmatic kids?”
Brief by Allen Best
Health – February 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
One consolation for aging is that people over 50 are less susceptible to altitude sickness.
Why is that? The Telluride Watch explains that as people age, their brains shrink, requiring less oxygen.
But, for those who do get the severe and often fatal forms of altitude sickness, cerebral and pulmonary edema, there is a curious remedy: Viagra The drug that is prescribed for impotency can also promote oxygenation through increased blood flow.
Brief by Central Staff
Health – January 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
Fresh fruits and vegetables are supposed to be good for you. But they are becoming a leading source of food-based illness, thanks to changes in the ways they’re marketed in the U.S.
The federal Centers for Disease Control recently reported that produce now accounts for 12% of all food-borne illnesses and 6% of outbreaks, up from 1% of illnesses and 0.7% of outbreaks in the 1970s. Some of that is because veggies are more popular — per-capita consumption rose from 287 pounds in 1992 to 332 pounds in 1994.
Brief by Allen Best
Health – September 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
You know you should never, never drink water from streams in the backcountry. For 30 years we’ve heard warnings that you can get Giardia lamblia cysts and other microscopic miscreants that can cause diarrhea and other great unpleasantness.
Letter from Slim Wolfe
Health – May 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action…”
So much has changed in the 2400 years since Thucydides wrote these words that he would probably see today’s humans as malevolent godlings hurling thunderbolts of depleted uranium and riding on fearsome chariots, but his assessment of humans seems to hold true.
Brief by Central Staff
Health – March 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
If you travel out of Colorado and the people look more chubby than the folks back home, your eyes aren’t deceiving you. According to the federal government, Colorado is the thinnest state in the Union, and the West is the thinnest region of the country.
The National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health reported that only 16.5% of Colorado adults were obese in 2002, lowest in the nation.