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I had a series of medical problems in 1996, which cascaded into a full-blown crisis that ended with me sacrificing a few of my inner organs in order to stay alive. Thankfully, it all worked out fine and I’m still here today.

The one thing that may have been the most important reason I’m still around to talk about this was something called TPN – (Total Parenteral Nutrition.) It’s a way of getting nutrition without using your digestive system. I still have a cool scar on my jugular that I can show you sometime.

I was on TPN until after my surgery, about 4 or 5 weeks in total, I think. It was literally a life-saver, but I never bothered to find out much more about it.

Today, I ran across this interesting post, about the story of TPN and the woman who was the human test subject of it. It’s called “Lifeliner: The Judy Taylor Story.” Judy Taylor lived for 20 years without eating, thanks to TPN. The book is written by Shireen Jeejeebhoy.

Here’s the blurb about it:

Thirty-four-year-old Judy Ellis Taylor relished her simple, happy life. She had a loving husband, three young daughters, and a beautiful home. But Judy’s life changed dramatically in 1970 when intestinal blood clots annihilated her digestive system, leaving her with the certainty of starving to death in a cold Toronto hospital.

Back in 1970, most doctors still considered long-term intravenous feeding, then called alimentation or hyperalimentation, to be science fiction. A radical young immigrant doctor sought to change that through his groundbreaking research on what is now known as TPN (Total Parenteral Nutrition). Judy’s surgeons heard of Dr. Khursheed Jeejeebhoy’s work and sent her to him; together Judy and Jeejeebhoy agreed that Judy’s only hope was to become a human test subject for TPN, and even more radically Home TPN.

Judy became the first lifeliner, the first person to live without ever eating one morsel of food. And Jeejeebhoy was the Canadian physician who made it happen. Like Banting and Best before them, this pioneering duo made medical history. For the next twenty years, Judy and Jeejeebhoy, or “Jeej” as Judy called him, worked to develop and hone TPN.

Judy willingly lived with the possibility of death every day, learned to love her TPN lifeline, learned medical terms, and endured medical tests and strange symptoms in spite of her fears so that she could live. But she didn’t just live on TPN, she served as a guinea pig for nutritional research and inspired others to accept TPN into their lives. Fellow lifeliners relied on Judy to give them the courage to live on TPN, to show them that normal life was possible on TPN. Her neighbours and community enjoyed her zest for life, her baking, her singing, and her willingness to help out wherever needed. She did that while raising three girls, cooking dinner for her family nightly, even though she could not touch a bite.

It looks interesting, especially for someone like me, who has a personal connection to the story.

Link to a video about the book
Link to info about the book

Wired magazine ran a cover story in September about disappearing in the digital age, which profiled a guy who tried to fake his own death. It also went through a lot of the ins and outs of trying to erase your past – and how the people trying to find you do that.

But an interesting postscript to the story was a $5,000 reward to anyone who could track down Evan Ratliff, the author of the story. He had agreed to try to disappear after the article appeared. If he could stay hidden for 30 days, he’d earn an extra $3,000. The recap of the hunt for him is here.

Ratliff was eventually found but the story of how that happened is a worthy article itself. And that’s what Wired will be publishing in their December issue. Ratliff is talking to everyone involved in hunting him down and it should make for interesting reading.

Who hasn’t imagined just disappearing for good at times? It may be for romantic reasons, or just the urge to chuck it all and start over. But it appears that doing so is not as easy as it once was. As Google and other social media sites catalogue more and more of our digital lives, it’s just going to get harder and harder to disappear.

Not that I was considering it of course…but still.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Columnist and conservative speechwriter William Safire died yesterday at age 79. Here is the speech he drafted for president Nixon to read in the event that Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong found themselves stranded to die on the moon. I am happy to note that Messrs. Aldrin and Armstrong are all still alive (as is Michael Collins, who orbited the moon while his colleagues walked on her surface). William Safire’s Finest Speech. (Gawker, via Scott Beale)

I don’t know what to say about this – except to call it magic. I can see that Kseniya Simonova is creating the images on the stage but I can hardly believe it. It’s hard to imagine but it might be even more powerful if I could understand the language. It’s a very powerful piece of performance art.

Simonova’s performance won her the Ukraine’s version of “Britain’s Got Talent” last June. The YouTube video has racked up 2.5 million views so far. Her winning performance was a moving recounting of Germany conquering Ukraine during World War II. From an article in the Guardian:

She brings calm, then conflict. A couple on a bench become a woman’s face; a peaceful walkway becomes a conflagration; a weeping widow morphs into an obelisk for an unknown soldier. Simonova looks like some vengeful Old Testament deity as she destroys then recreates her scenes – with deft strokes, sprinkles and sweeps she keeps the narrative going. She moves the judges to tears as she subtitles the final scene “you are always near”.

Watch it for yourself.

Link to YouTube

Roz Savage is a British rower who is on her way to becoming the first woman to row solo across the Pacific. I thought I’d linked to her blog her previously, but I can’t find any previous posts. I may have posted about it on Twitter but not here. Anyway, I thought I’d close the loop by letting you know that she’s finished stage 2 of her epic adventure by rowing from Hawaii to Tarawa. You’ll have to use Google Earth to find that place.

Right now, Roz is back in New York, getting ready for a five-day ride through the countryside to raise awareness about global warming (some people just never quit impressing me) but she’s posted some very nice retrospectives of her latest journey on her new web page.

Here’s the link to one of them.

If you’ve got the time, I’d recommend going back and reading some of those posts made from the middle of the Pacific. It was a fascinating journey and fun to see how she’s made such great use of new communication technology, like sat/phones that let her blog every day from the ocean. And Twitter, which she is active on. And a bunch of other social media tools. It is a great case study of how to build a community.

It’s all on her website at www.rozsavage.com

I found this gem on the Signal vs Noise blog from 37Signals.If true, it’s another illustration of the value of not measuring up to preconceived ideas of how things are supposed to be done.

“I recently heard about Warren Buffet’s approach to scheduling meetings. I can’t confirm this is true (I’ve never met him), but I hear from a reputable source that he usually doesn’t set up meetings more than a day in advance.

If someone wants to see him, they are told to call and set up the meeting when they can see him tomorrow. So if you want to meet with him next Friday, you call on Thursday and say ‘Can I see Mr. Buffet tomorrow?’

I love the simplicity of the rule: I can see you today if you asked me yesterday, but I can’t fill up my schedule any further in advance. This way he can determine how he wants to spend his time within the context of the next 24 hours instead of booking things weeks or months in the future. Now his schedule is relevant instead of prescient.

(Via Signal vs. Noise.)

This is an inspiring story about a long-ago wrong finally being made right. It’s also a wonderful modern-day tale about a single person’s efforts to make sure the right thing gets done. And it’s a great story about just how valuable and powerful a tool social media can be for making change happen.

I tweeted a link to this story earlier this morning but I thought that it deserved a blog post too, especially for those of you that aren’t using Twitter.

Alan Turing is a legend in the programming community, especially among cryptographers. But he was also gay and he paid a steep price for it, as the story notes:

Alan Turing did three amazing things in his working life: he laid the foundations of computer science by thinking up a theoretical computer called the Turing Machine, he worked through the Second World War breaking Nazi German codes, and after the war he worked on artificial intelligence and defined the Turing Test. His life was cut short at 41 when he had begun to work on morphogenesis in plants.

Alan Turing was also gay and he was prosecuted for “gross indecency” (essentially being gay) in 1952. To avoid prison he agreed to be injected with female hormones as a sort of ‘cure’ for homosexuality. Two years after his prosecution he was dead: he killed himself by eating an apple dipped in potassium cyanide.

In this post, John Graham-Cumming tells the story of how he used the British Government’s online petition tool to generate enough public interest to end up with a formal apology from the Prime Minister.

It’s a great story. Here’s the link.