Awake

What would you do if you were awake during surgery? What if you were on the table completely paralyzed, but you could hear and feel everything? Every year 30,000 people suffer through this horrifying experience. Carol Weihrer, the founder of the Anesthesia Awareness Campaign, was paralyzed but awake when doctors removed her right eye. This is an especially scary story for me because I had surgery on my eyes when I was five years old. What if this had happened to me?



There is a new movie coming out starring Hayden Christensen, who plays a patient that is awake during his surgery. Weihrer thinks that doctors should be forced to watch the movie because she wants them to face the fact that it is happening, and hopes that the movie will increase public awareness and encourage doctors to start using a machine that watches brain activity during surgery. The reason that doctors have been reluctant to use this machine is because it is so expensive being anywhere between $5000 and $9000. I think that it is wrong when there is technology that exists to prevent these tragic experiences and it is not being used because of the cost. However, in the year 2000, the monitor was used in just 700 hospitals, and now it is used in almost 3,000 hospitals and 400 surgical centers. I think that the increasing use of the monitor is a very good start to a revolutionary type of procedure. But, I think that we should take a look at the world and what people think is really important. Is it more important to spend a little bit more money and keep people from having these terrible experiences? Or is it more important to save that money and not care about the patient? I know that it would make me 100% more confident and comfortable going into surgery knowing that the machine would be there. 


For Thousands, Surgery Is 'Awake' Horror

Unfair Criticism

Recently some pictures of Jennifer Love Hewitt on a Hawaiian vacation with her new fiancé have surfaced. People have been totally bashing her for being fat, and she got upset, went on her blog, and told people how she felt. She wrote that “Like all women out there should, I love my body,” and that “A size 2 is not fat! Nor will it ever be. And being a size 0 doesn’t make you beautiful.” She also said that she has “sat by in silence” for too long while women are unfairly criticized about their bodies. She added that “I’m not upset for me, but for all of the girls out there that are struggling with their body image”. She finished by saying “To all girls with butts, boobs, hips and a waist, put on a bikini – put it on and stay strong.”



I think really highly of Jennifer Hewitt for making these statements. The world today is way too focused on how much you weigh and whether or not you’re skinny enough. In addition, she is surrounded all the time by some of the skinniest people out there, but she hasn’t let that affect her. First of all, she’s tiny, and even if she’s gotten to a size 2, that’s still tiny. Yet even in the midst of all of this negativity, she still has not let it get her down, and says that she’s more upset for all the other girls out there that are struggling with their bodies. I think that this really shows what kind of person she is and how strong she is. To be able to stand up to all of this criticism is incredible, and the media should leave her alone. She finished her post by encouraging all the girls out there who might not be the skinniest to still be proud of themselves. In today’s world, it is so common for women to be insecure about themselves because the media focuses more on the size of a woman’s body and than their talent. I believe that Jennifer Love Hewitt has really made a difference in at least one person’s life because of her openness to the subject now. I hope that more people will become more sensitive to the subject because it is not fair to treat people differently or high light one’s weight regardless if they are in the public’s eye or not. We should be more focused on what people can, than how they look in a bathing suit.

Jennifer Love Hewitt Fights Back

New Boarding Passes

Continental Airlines is the first airline to get rid of paper tickets. Instead, you can now use your cell phone as your ticket and boarding pass. How it works is the airline sends you a digital two-dimensional bar code, which you put on your cell phone’s screen. The bar code is scanned and you can board. This new system is being tested in Houston for the next three months, and some of the benefits are that it saves trees, and it’s one less thing to remember to pack. Continental may be the first U.S. airline that has adopted this new system, but other airlines like U.S. Airways and Delta are already looking into acquiring the service.



In regards to this new system, some say that “the whole bar code scanning tech seems a bit quaint. Why cant we just move on to global RFID tags already?” RFID tags are what the government puts into soldiers. They are injected under the skin, so by simply scanning their skin they can know everything about the person. People are wondering why we are only moving one step up and putting bar codes on our phones when we could take two steps and just implant everyone with RFID tags. That way you just have to go and scan your arm or whatever, and they would know your name your flight and everything. I think that that is a bit extreme. While it does seem that that is the way society is heading, I would never want to have some kind of chip in me that would tell other people everything about me. It would be such an invasion of privacy, because what if part of it is GPS? Then people could always know where you are. Personally, I don’t like this idea at all, and I think that we need to be very careful with how far we are going with our technology. But, as far as the digital boarding passes go, I am a recycler so I like that it saves trees. 


Video

Thanksgiving Traveling

For Thanksgiving, the President came up with a new plan to try to improve the hectic travel situation. More people fly on the days around Thanksgiving than any other days of the year, and as a result there are usually very bad delays. The President decided to do something about it and worked together with the FAA and the airports to increase personnel and machines to try to keep things running on time. They also discovered that most of the delays were originating in airports in New York, so they focused special attention there. The last part of the plan included canceling all military flights on the east coast so that there would be less congestion for the commercial flights.



Some democrats said that this plan was better than nothing, but that it was too little too late and that we needed to redo the entire system. I think that it was a very good idea, and I think that it will definitely help over the holidays. The thing that I don’t understand is why the President would announce that there will not be any military flights over the entire east coast for almost a week. I know that if something bad happens they can always get ready and take off, and this announcement was made right before it happened so there wasn’t time for anyone to do anything bad, but what about next year? I think that the public deserves to know the truth, but for things like this I don’t think it’s necessary. As long as their flights are on time, I don’t think people really care how it happens. While I do think that it might be a good idea to remove the military flights to gives the airlines more room, I think that the government should have just done it and not said anything. This brings up the issue of the honesty policy the government holds. There are many things being withheld and I honestly believe that something like this has enough reason to be withheld.

President's Speech

Acccents

I think that this subject is very interesting because I just came to Texas from California, and I think that Southern accents are really different. Personally, I do not believe that the Southern drawl is spreading, because you definitely don’t hear it at home. Also, my roommate is from Dallas and there are girls in my hall from Nashville and Atlanta, and none of them have accents at all. I think that this shows that Southern accents are actually disappearing. I thought that it was also interesting to learn exactly what makes up a Southern accent and how “mobile professionals” will change their accent depending on where they are.


When my friends and cousins found out that I was going to be coming to college in Texas, they all made fun of me and said that I would come back saying “y’all”, but the article said that when a couple moves south it is much more likely that the man will acquire a Southern accent. And if a couple moves north it is much more likely that the woman will change her accent. From personal experience this is totally true because a few years ago my aunt, uncle, and their daughter moved to Texas from California. After only a few years, my uncle had a completely southern accent while my aunt and cousin still speak exactly the same as they had before moving. I think that it's really interesting that even gender can affect the way that you speak. I never had really thought about accents before coming here either. It made me think about whether people who I believe had accents believed that I had an accent. Whichever way one looks at it, I’m beginning to think everyone has some sort of accent even they think they don’t.

The Southern Drawl: Is It Spreading?

Missing Daughter

A British couple, Kate and Gerry McCann, were named suspects on September 7th for their three-year-old daughter’s disappearance on May 3rd in Portugal. A $2 million fund has already been set up to help find Madeline, and the family decided not to use the money from the Find Madeline fund to pay their legal bills. As a result, the McCanns were thinking of selling their home, as were some of the other members of the family in order to help the parents. When Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, heard about this he decided that something needed to be done. The billionaire donated $200,000 to help the couple clear their names, and had already donated money to the Find Madeline fund. Branson is also trying to get other wealthy people to donate money to help the couple. 


I’m a little bit divided on how I feel about this. On the one hand, I think that what Branson is doing is incredibly kind and generous, and I am very happy that he is doing what he can to help these parents. While on the other, I know that the parents are, unfortunately, often the ones to blame, and there must be some kind of evidence for them to be suspects in the case. However, if this ever happened to me, I would want someone to help out my parents. I don’t exactly know how I feel about this, or whether I think that what he is doing is right or not. Personally, I have always tried placing myself in other’s people’s shoes during a crisis such as this, but it is so hard to imagine losing a child. I know that I would want everything possible to be done in order to find a resolution. Therefore, I do recognize the fact that Branson is trying to help people and I think that that’s a good thing. These stories are always so sad, and I really hope that it turns out that the parents weren’t involved.

Arctic Ice

I just read a news story about how the ice coverage in the arctic has receded to record lows. The ice has withdrawn to 1 million square miles, with the previous low being 1.5 million square miles in 2005. As a result, ships now have the ability to sail trough the Northwest passage which has always been blocked by ice. This route could shorten the trip for boats from Europe to Asia by thousands of miles, and it is a route that “explorers and traders have long dreamt could open fully”. This passage is also potentially oil-rich, and with its opening, many country are trying to claim it. I believe that this is totally the wrong reaction. Many experts believe that global warming is the cause for the melting ice, and I agree. I think that instead of focusing on how this path will help them, these governments should be looking at why this area is opening up. It seems like they are only concerned about being in control of it rather than trying to fix a very real problem.

How to Be Good

While the book How to Be Good may not have been my favorite, I do think that it is relevant to everyone, especially those of us who are freshman this year. The book illustrates that fact that everyone has a different interpretation of what is good and what is bad, and that is very true.
At home, all of my friends, and to some extent most of the kids at my school, had pretty similar viewpoints on what was “good” and what was “bad”. If a story went around that a girl had had sex with some random guy she met at a party, most people would see that as a bad thing, and that’s what I am used to. Here, however, some of the people I have met have had very different ideas of what is good and bad. I have already heard quite a few stories like that, and to them it seem to be perfectly normal.
At SMU there are people from all over the country and all over the world, so it’s totally understandable that people will have different beliefs as to what is acceptable or not. I think that this book was chosen to help us realize that just because someone does something we consider “bad” does not mean that they are a bad person, just like Katie. I think the purpose of this reading was to teach us to keep our minds open to the people we meet, and to base our feeling about them on who they are rather than what they do.