| Legally blind student enjoying life at university
'When I was 12, I was hit in the left eye by a volleyball. It shattered the glass and the scars in the retina broke apart and my eye started haemorrhaging. Everything went blurry'
Meagan Gillmore was born two months premature with a condition that causes the blood vessels in the retina to keep growing until the retina detaches from the eye.
If caught in time, surgery can fix this, however in Meagan's case, things didn't go as well as expected. Of five stages, one being the least, five the worst, she is a stage four. Her vision is about 20 over 200 close up, and gets dimmer with distance.
Meagan is in the second semester of her first year at Brantford's Laurier University.
Sitting about three feet apart in one of the student lounges, Meagan relayed to me what it was like to attend university as a visually impaired person.
LASEK effectively treated post-LASIK myopic regression in study
Patients who experience myopic regression after undergoing LASIK can be successfully re-treated using LASEK, a small study shows. However, investigators found that attempting corrections of 2 D or more was associated with a significant rate of haze, the authors noted. Nurullah Cagil, MD, and colleagues in Ankara, Turkey, reviewed outcomes for 24 eyes of 15 patients treated with a LASEK enhancement for post-LASIK residual refractive errors. The average age of the patients was 34 years. The interval between the primary LASIK surgery and the LASEK enhancement averaged 26 months, according to the study. Before the initial LASIK procedure, spherical equivalent averaged 4.88 D and cylinder averaged 0.63 D. Using LASEK, surgeons attempted a mean spherical equivalent correction of 1.25 D, although the attempted correction was 2 D or more in six eyes.
Over 600 hospitalized as opposition appeals for medical assistance
In a sign of the deteriorating situation the opposition has sent out an appeal for urgent medical supplies and funds to help meet escalating medical costs, food and legal assistance. The appeal from the MDC comes in the wake of what the party terms a vicious crackdown on its members since the planned prayer rally in March that was crushed by the police. According to hospital figures over 500 people in Harare alone are said to have been beaten up or tortured and the country's hospitals are said to struggling to cope with the numbers. Over 600 activists countrywide are thought to have been hospitalized.
Some of the injuries include eye damage, deep lacerations, severe blunt-force trauma to the abdomen, ruptured bowels, fractured limbs and skulls, broken ribs, shattered joints, gunshot wounds and extensive damage from blows to the back, shoulders, buttocks and thighs.
St Mary's NHS Trust goes live with innovative Clinical Information ...
St Mary's NHS Trust has recently introduced a new Colposcopy Clinical Information System (CCIS) within its Gynaecology Department. The new system fully supports the care process and assists healthcare professionals deliver accurate quality care for colposcopy patients. St Mary's provides the largest colposcopy service of its kind within London.
Based on the Excelicare solution from AxSys Technology, the system, which went live in November 2006, now facilitates the completion of mandatory KC65 quarterly returns for the Department of Health (DoH) as well as the collection of the Minimum Dataset for Colposcopy Services. The system integrates with the Trust's current PAS system, and in the future it is also planned for the system to integrate with the National Care Records Service PAS.
Awake and in pain under the knife
As the cancer patient lay on the operating room table, she felt the surgeon remove her intestines and splay them over her abdomen. Terrified, she was awake but unable to provide a signal -- a wiggle of a toe, the bat of an eyelash -- to communicate the excruciating pain she was suffering. Paralyzed by drugs commonly used during surgery, the woman was trapped in a body that could feel and hear but could not move as a surgeon sliced a tumour from her cecum, a small pouch connected to the colon, deep inside her abdomen. "I couldn't breath[e] and was very scared. I can't find adequate words to describe the horror," she wrote in a letter to the Health Services Appeal and Review Board, made public for the first time today. ". . . I felt my intestines pop out of my body very quickly and they were laid on the right side of my body." Her intestines, she wrote, felt very warm.
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