My first impressions of the spider: It was big and it was smart. The brownish spider was nearly two inches long. It had constructed a thick, complicated web in the corner of my kitchen window’s frame, outside of the house. On the wall inside, right next to the web, is a light fixture that almost always […]
Guest Post
I spent about seven hours in the operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital being worked on by a highly skilled surgical team, followed by a day in intensive care and five days in regular care. I also had a battery of pre-op and post-op tests and consultations to investigate the aortic aneurysm that put me […]
In early February this year, a few days after a magnetic resonance image confirmed that an aneurysm at the root of my aorta had reached a worrisome size, I received a phone call from the office of my primary care physician. The MRI had picked up an “incidental” finding, unrelated to the aneurysm; could I […]
As with the four previous, we kicked off the week with Colin Norman’s tale of undergoing heart surgery. He’s feeling good but has turned his thoughts to the genetic nature of heart disease. He perused his family album in his mind and fretted for his daughters’ future. Then Erik made several connections between the institutional capacity […]
Six weeks after intricate surgery to replace an aneurysm at the juncture of my heart and aorta with a polyester graft, I’m almost back to normal. I’m walking a lot, about to start biking again, and I’m well on my way to a complete recovery. But there is still a nagging question: Does my family […]
This is a tough post to read, tougher to look at. Some background might help. In 1993 Chris Arnade got a PhD in physics and then went to work on Wall Street. Starting in 2007, Chris started taking long walks with his camera through New York City, where he found a lot of ambiguity and unsolvable […]
My wife Anne and I arrived at Johns Hopkins’s gleaming new Sheikh Zayed Tower at 5:15 AM on September 8. I knew I would soon be on an operating table with my breastbone split and my ribcage cranked open, exposing my heart and the aortic aneurysm that had brought me here. A heart-lung machine would […]
October 14, 2014: At a heady, expert-packed Ebola forum assembled at Johns Hopkins University, a Liberian man said more in a minute and half than everyone else said in five hours. He summed up the United States tainted history with Liberia and begged for respect, this time around. The expert forum was the best, yet. […]