San Diego Baby Born at 11 Ounces Prepares to Head Home

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Photo Credit: NBC San Diego An infant who weighed just 11 ounces and was smaller than a soda can at birth is expected to head home from the hospital after six months of intensive care in San Diego.

Now six-months-old, Alexis Clarke – born at just over 25 weeks on April 19 – holds the record for the smallest baby ever delivered at UCSD Medical Center.

“She was 11 ounces. So, she was 340-grams,” mother Laurie Clarke said, holding up the palm of her hand to describe just how small her little girl was at birth. “[She was] smaller than a can of soda. But when I got to see her, she was just our baby angel.”

Alexis was born three-and-a-half months early. According to her mother, doctors had to deliver Alexis early due to complications stemming from an under-developed placenta.

At Alexis’ small size, Clarke said her baby’s odds of survival were low – less than 25 percent. Given survival, doctors told Alexis’ family that her odds of significant and permanent complications were high.

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Don’t Pull that Plug: New Technology Shows that Many in Vegetative State are NOT Brain Dead

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Photo Credit: theverge.comFor a patient who sustains devastating brain damage, the outcome is often exceedingly grim: if they don’t show signs of improvement within a few weeks, they’ll be diagnosed as vegetative — unaware of themselves or their environment, and unlikely to ever be again. To their loved ones, these patients are essentially lost, as is the prospect of ever communicating with them again.

Unless, that is, the diagnosis is wrong.

That’s the startling possibility raised by a series of recent studies, which used neuroimaging techniques to evaluate awareness levels among patients diagnosed as being in persistent vegetative states (VS) or in minimally conscious states (wherein patients exhibit fleeting, inconsistent awareness). A small number of patients, these studies found, exhibited brain activity that indicates they were able to focus on a given word, answer a question, or complete a task. “We don’t yet have a full picture of the abilities of these patients,” says Srivas Chennu, PhD, an expert in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Cambridge. “And what this research suggests is that there’s much more nuance here than anybody thought.”

Patients in vegetative states can often breathe autonomously, open their eyes, and blink. But despite those abilities, they tend to suffer brain damage so severe that they won’t respond to cues, acknowledge a family member, or react to their own name. For decades, those attributes (combined with extensive bedside tests) led doctors to conclude that the inner workings of these patient’s brains lacked any and all higher function. Patients were awake, in other words, but they weren’t aware.

Several studies in the past decade have questioned that line of reasoning. In 2009, a study on 103 patients found that some of those diagnosed as VS were, in fact, minimally conscious. The research also concluded that some patients diagnosed as minimally conscious actually showed signs of emerging from that state. Other studies, using both EEG and fMRI brain scans, noted that the brains of some vegetative patients engaged with commands similarly to those of healthy control participants.

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Wyoming Rancher Becomes Guardian Angel For Lost, Snowbound Wisconsin Couple (+video)

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By Penny Preston – KULR 8

Troy Barnett is a rancher and outfitter in northwest Wyoming. He had just returned from a hunting trip Sunday when his wife told him about a Wisconsin couple who were lost. The Sheriff’s Office had issued an alert that Mark and Kristine Wathke were missing after leaving Yellowstone’s northeast entrance Tuesday afternoon.

“Kind of knew right off, there’s pretty much one place they could be being gone that long,” said Troy Barnett, K Bar Z Ranch owner. Barnett says he couldn’t sleep that night, “just thinking about it.”

Monday morning, he drove north to the Beartooth Highway, which is not plowed this time of year. Hunters still drive up the road, but two signs alert motorists the road is closed ahead. The Wisconsin couple drove past the signs. But as they went up the road, the snow got deeper. They got stuck about 16 miles from here. When Barnett found them, they had been stranded six days.

Barnett hauled his snowmobile up on his pickup twelve miles, then drove another four on the sled. He says when he first saw the car, he feared the worst.

KULR-8 Television, Billings, MT

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Wisconsin couple ‘happy to be alive’ after Yellowstone rescue

by Associated Press

By the end, they had just eight pieces of bread and half a tank of gas left.

It was Sunday night, and Wisconsinites Mark and Kristine Wathke, missing since Oct. 28, were sitting in their Kia Forte trapped in a foot of snow above 10,000 feet on the Beartooth Highway. They had come to the realization that probably they weren’t going to be found, that this was likely the end.

It had dropped to 7 degrees below zero that night; Mark’s water bottle, sitting in the back window, froze solid in a matter of hours.

The night before, on Nov. 2, when the idea first truly set in that they might not make it off the mountain, they decided to write goodbye notes to their loved ones and make a recording giving their farewells.

Up until that point, they’d been pretty sure someone would come looking for them.

The couple, from Cornell in Chippewa County, had just finished a weeklong vacation touring national parks in South Dakota, Idaho and Wyoming. The grand finale was Yellowstone, and by Monday afternoon, Oct. 28, they were headed out of the park, bound for home.

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Powers: Fox News’ Highly Reluctant Jesus Follower

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Photo Credit – Scott SuchmanJust seven years ago, if someone had told me that I’d be writing for Christianity Today magazine about how I came to believe in God, I would have laughed out loud. If there was one thing in which I was completely secure, it was that I would never adhere to any religion—especially to evangelical Christianity, which I held in particular contempt.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church in Alaska, but my belief was superficial and flimsy. It was borrowed from my archaeologist father, who was so brilliant he taught himself to speak and read Russian. When I encountered doubt, I would fall back on the fact that he believed.

Leaning on my father’s faith got me through high school. But by college it wasn’t enough, especially because as I grew older he began to confide in me his own doubts. What little faith I had couldn’t withstand this revelation. From my early 20s on, I would waver between atheism and agnosticism, never coming close to considering that God could be real.

After college I worked as an appointee in the Clinton administration from 1992 to 1998. The White House surrounded me with intellectual people who, if they had any deep faith in God, never expressed it. Later, when I moved to New York, where I worked in Democratic politics, my world became aggressively secular. Everyone I knew was politically left-leaning, and my group of friends was overwhelmingly atheist.

I sometimes hear Christians talk about how terrible life must be for atheists. But our lives were not terrible. Life actually seemed pretty wonderful, filled with opportunity and good conversation and privilege. I know now that it was not as wonderful as it could have been. But you don’t know what you don’t know. How could I have missed something I didn’t think existed?

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Parents Jailed After Allegedly Confronting Bus Full of Children After Son Reported Bullying

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Photo Credit: MYFOXPHILLY.COMTwo parents were arrested and charged after police say they unlawfully entered a school bus and threatened children when their son told them he was being bullied.

Christina and Christopher Gring allegedly got on their bus after their son came to them crying, and began yelling and cursing at the other children, MyFoxPhilly.com.

“I was crying because I was worried and I was like I don’t know what happened. I didn’t do anything,” an 8-year-old student told MyFoxPhilly.com.

“They started yelling curse words at us and yelling to tell them what happened,” the student said.

A spokesperson for the North Penn School District said an investigation found no reports of bullying involving the accused couple’s child.

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Appeals Court Strikes Down Obamacare Contraception Mandate

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Photo Credit: APA federal appeals court struck down Obamacare’s controversial birth control mandate, declaring that requiring contraception coverage in employee health plans is unduly burdensome for business owners who oppose birth control on religious grounds.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2-1 Friday in favor of Francis and Philip Gilardi, the Roman Catholic owners of Ohio-based Freshway Foods and Freshway Logistics, who argued that the provision in the new healthcare law would violate their religious freedom, The Hill reports.

“The burden on religious exercise does not occur at the point of contraceptive purchase; instead, it occurs when a company’s owners fill the basket of goods and services that constitute a healthcare plan,” wrote Judge Janice Rogers Brown in the court’s decision.

Had the plaintiffs refused to comply with the law, they would have faced a $14 million fine.

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High School Car Wash Shut Down Due to “Environmental Laws”

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Photo Credit: benswann.comThe cheerleading squad at Lincoln High School in San Jose wanted to attend a national competition in April. In order to finance the trip, the squad decided to host a car wash.

This plan never materialized, however. The San Jose Environmental Services Department shut down the group’s car wash to “protect the environment.”

According to the environmental officials, the cheerleaders violated city water discharge laws.

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Maryland 20-Year-Old Dies Never Having Aged (+video)

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Photo Credit: Times Online/GDA Photo Service/NewscomBrooke Greenberg, who baffled scientists because she never aged, has died at the age of 20, never having developed beyond the physical size of an infant or the mental capacity of a 2-year-old.

The daughter of Howard and Melanie Greenberg from Reisterstown, Md., Brooke is one of about a dozen children in the world who have what some call syndrome X — a kind of Benjamin Button disorder that prevents them from aging.

Her funeral was Sunday at a synagogue outside Baltimore, family friends confirmed.

“The family is doing as well as can be expected,” Chris Cole, a colleague of Brooke’s father, told ABCNews.com today. “They are going through their traditions this week — the shiva.”

Brooke has been pushed around in a stroller all her life. In 2009, when her family was interviewed on ABC’s “20/20,” Brook weighed 16 pounds and was 30 inches tall. She didn’t speak, but she laughed when she was happy, and clearly recognized her three sisters: Emily, now 26; Caitlin, now 23; and Carly, now 17.

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Woman Buys Thief Groceries After He Steals Her Wallet

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Photo Credit: Fox News An Oklahoma woman is being credited for a novel approach to retrieving her stolen wallet.

Jessica Eaves told Yahoo! Shine she was at her local grocery when, “I saw this gentleman down the aisle from me. He walked behind me, and when I got a couple of aisles over, I realized my wallet was gone.”

Rather than summon police, the Guthrie mother-of-four reportedly says she, “spotted him in a crowded aisle and approached . . . I said to him, ‘I think you have something of mine. I’m gonna give you a choice:

“You can either give me my wallet and I’ll forgive you right now, and I’ll even take you to the front and pay for your groceries.”

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Fort Hood Soldiers say Army Warned them Off Tea Party, Christian Groups

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Photo Credit: AP/Jack PlunkettDon’t donate to the tea party or to evangelical Christian groups — that was the message soldiers at a pre-deployment briefing at Fort Hood said they received from a counter-intelligence agent who headed up the meeting.

If you do, you could face punishment — that was the other half of the message, as reported by Fox News.

The briefing was Oct. 17, and about a half-hour of it was devoted to discussion about how perceived radical groups — like tea party organizations and the Christian-based American Family Association — were “tearing the country apart,” one unnamed soldier said, to Fox News.

Among the remarks the agent allegedly made: Military members who donate to these groups would be subject to discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the soldier reported.

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