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Rotary
International President:
Wilfrid J. Wilkinson Rotary District 5160 Governor:
Stan
Smalley
Durham Rotary President: Daryl Polk
_____________ Rowel Editor: Phil Price |
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The Next 2008 Harvest Festival
Committee meeting will be held in February 2008 at the Italian Cottage on the
Skyway. The 2008 Harvest Festival will be held on Sunday, September 14, 2007. |
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2007 Calendar for Durham Rotary |
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| 1 | 2 | 3 | |||||
| 4 |
5 Meeting 6pm Monday Night Football at Mountain Mike’s. (Dar Meyer) |
6 No Meeting due to Monday Night Football the day before |
7 (A) Dan Davis |
8 | 9 | 10 | |
| 11 | 12 |
13 No Meeting Veterans Day |
14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | |
| 18 | 19 |
20 Meeting Butte County's illegal dumping program by Scot Johnson - Solid Waste Code Enforcement Officer (Mike Crump) |
21 (B) Jim Patterson |
22 | 23 | 24 | |
| 25 | 26 |
27 Meeting Club Assembly, Club Elections, Crab Feed planning (Daryl Polk) |
28 | 29 | 30 | ||
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D e c e m b e r |
1 | ||||||
| 2 |
3 (B) Tom Vanella |
4 Meeting No Meeting due to BCCC special event |
5 | 6 |
7 (A) Stephen Plume |
8 | |
| 9 | 10 |
11 Meeting Christmas Party |
12 (B) Roy Ellis |
13 | 14 | 15 | |
| 16 | 17 |
18 Congressman Wally Herger and Foundation Elections (Roy Ellis) |
19 (A) Jim Patterson |
20 | 21 | 22 | |
| 23 | 24 |
25 No Meeting Christmas Day |
26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | |
| 30 | 31 | ||||||
| President Daryl, and
called the meeting to order at Butte Creek Country Club. He led the members in the pledge. Jim Patterson gave the invocation. |
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FUTURE
MEETINGS: |
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December 25th:
No meeting, Christmas.
January 1st:
No meeting. New Years Day.
January 8:
Chris Hatch will have the program.
January 15th:
Joe Nock will have the program.
January 22nd:
No meeting. Travel Day for
January 26th:
CRAB
FEED
January 29th:
Dar Meyer will present
Kim Schafer,
daughter of Walt Schafer.
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VISITING
ROTARIANS & GUESTS
There
were no visiting Rotarians at this meeting.
Steve
Greenwood introduced Greg Casey, a prospective member and guest of Clint Goss.
Dar
Mayer introduced his guest and a prospective member, Dan Bequette.
The next meeting will be
January 8th, when Chris Hatch will have a program. Until then, have a Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Years.
FOUNDATION ELECTIONS
Mike Wacker
and Bill Apger had been nominated to fill Dar Meyers’
3 year term as Trustee, which expires on
REPORTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS:
CRAB FEED
Chris Hatch announced that he would distribute crab feed tickets during the meeting, and I presume that he did. As I recall, it was agreed at the last Club Assembly that each member is responsible for selling at least 4 tickets and will be charged for them. I assume there will be more information next meeting. The Crab Feed is just 4 weeks away.
CLUB
BYLAWS
K. R. Robertson asks that you review them the propose Bylaws
he passed around at the last meeting and submit your comments to him. We will eventually discuss them. We cannot find the Bylaws for the Club and
need to adopt new ones.
District 5160 Conference
A Rotary Conference, Golf Event, Poker
Tournament, a Rotary Club Hospitality Party in the theme of
the
Prospectors (think Gold Rush era, Paint Your Wagon).
The pricing is reasonable, the lodging is inexpensive. There is a 25%
discount for registering before
Lodging is limited. Call now for room reservations:
Radisson Hotel Reservations
500 Leisure Lane,
Thursday, April 24 through
Check Rates and
Availability at
www.radisson.com
Enter "D5160" into the promotional
code box for special member rates:
Single or double:
$93;
Triple:
$103;
Quad:
$113.
Correspondence
President Daryl read thank you notes from Durham Cemetery
Association and from the
NEW MEMBER POSTING
The Board has approved for
membership:
Greg Casey, sponsored by Clint Goss. His classification will be “Almond
Coop”.
John Rivera, sponsored by Dan Davis. His classification will be
Landscaping.
Dan Becket, sponsored by Dar Meyer. His classification will be Past Service”.
RECOGNITIONS
Roy Ellis announced
that he had a birthday on December 12th. He didn’t want a song, but would accept
gifts. I assume his gift was a
contribution to the club of $10.00.
Chris Hatch did say that he had 4 gifts for
Jim Patterson
volunteered that he and his wife will have an anniversary on December 19th. They have been married 30 years and he
contributed $30.00. He said he wanted a
song by Bill Apger and Roy Ellis. It turned into the whole club singing “Happy
Anniversary to You”.
PROGRAM
Wally Herger was suppose to
be the program for the night, however, Congress remained in sesson, so
Christopher Sanchez,
Field Representative from Wally Herger’s office, was
introduced by Roy Ellis. Congressman Wally is in
The President introduces a budget two years in advance. The
Budget represents the President’s priorities and moves the national agenda
forward. The House of Representatives and the Senate versions of the Budget are
different from each other and from the President’s.
The budget is to be adopted by October. If it is not
adopted then, continuing resolutions are used to allow the federal government
to continue spending at current levels.
The Senate budget bill will have money for
The 13 Appropriations Committees have input on national
policy. The Ways and Means Committee spends the revenue. When asked what
Congressman Herger’s position is on tax or other matters, Christopher responded
that could not speak for the Congressman and that he was too new on the job to
know the positions the Congressman has taken on various issues.
Christopher did state that the national debt is about nine
trillion dollars. This would be around $30,000 of debt for each
Mr. Sanchez told the Rotarians that the Veterans History
Project as recorded 50,000 interviews with soldiers and civilians about their
experiences in World War I through the current day. The interviews are archived
at the
Norm Larsen wondered when Congressmen show up in the
chamber of the House of Representatives? Chris
answered that the Majority and Minority Leaders draw up a schedule. Pages are
present in the chamber to deliver messages and documents. Members can be
special issue speakers in the evening based on a schedule set by the
leadership. The special order speakers’ remarks are printed in the official
Congressional Record. The speakers are seen also on C-SPAN. The record is
useful to follow the development of a bill. The Congressional Research Service
does studies on various topics often using information found in the
Congressional Record.
Congress members have committee meetings throughout the
week. When a member is not on the floor, he or she is likely to be in a
committee meeting. Members are given a schedule of when bills will be discussed
and what time a vote will be taken. Legislators meet with their staff and become
familiar with a given bill. The legislator decided how he or she will vote.
Mr. Sanchez will have Congressman Herger sign the book on
"American Heros" to be donated to the
Durham Intermediate School Library. He will return the book to the Library when
Wally returns from
Must Be Present To Win Drawing
I didn’t get a report on
who
was present to win the drawing. Probably
me, who wasn’t there.
Cathy Liu Report
There was a two part story about Cathy Liu published in the
Sacramento Bee on Sunday and Monday, December 16th and 17th. It was on the front page. I saw it Sunday, because we buy the Bee to
read at breakfast on Sunday mornings. On
Monday I downloaded both parts which are below, with an update on Cathy’s
condition from Jen following. Jen also
added in his email: “Despite our effort, the article still mentions
Life,
interrupted
In an instant,
an accident changes everything
By Cynthia
Hubert - chubert@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PST Sunday, December 16, 2007
In the thin light of early morning,
her running shoes pound a familiar route.
Out of her
apartment building on
Suddenly, a
sickening thump. The smashing of glass. The screeching of
brakes.
She lies silent and bleeding,
crumpled near a dark Saturn with a shattered windshield.
She is in her 20s, slightly built,
her long, dark hair tied in a ponytail. An orange and white Sony Walkman is
attached to her left arm. Her shiny right shoe is marked with a scuff and a
small hole.
The driver of the Saturn leaps from
his car, and other people spill out to the street. The owner of
She opens her eyes for a moment;
struggles to stand; slumps down again. Strangers crouch beside her, talking
softly and rubbing her back.
Minutes pass, and sirens slice
through the din of traffic. Paramedics swarm.
It is Friday, July 6,
In the back of an ambulance, an
"unidentified Asian female" is on her way to the UC Davis Medical
Center.
Surely, someone will be looking for
her soon.
Where is she?
Brian Gallucci
is texting Cathy, again. And getting no answer, again.
They are planning to celebrate his
birthday tonight with dinner at a downtown restaurant, and she is supposed to
get off work early.
But it's past 5, and he's been trying
to reach her for more than two hours. She's not responding.
She has a new job. Maybe her schedule
changed, he thinks. Maybe she got busy or distracted. But still. Why no call?
Brian, a soft-spoken civil engineer,
knows Cathy better than perhaps anyone other than her relatives. They went to
high school in
This is so unlike her, he says to
himself.
Still, it's too soon to panic.
At around
I'm getting worried, he says, talking
into her cell phone. Are you all right?
By 10, he has heard nothing, and he
and his friend decide to head over to her apartment on
The building, painted white with
green trim, is quiet. Cathy's gold
Her car keys are on the table, along
with her cell phone, loaded with messages she never answered. Her pager and
identification badge are lying on a chair. Her wallet is in the kitchen.
Brian notices only one thing missing
besides Cathy herself: her running shoes.
His first thought is that someone has
snatched her while she was out on her daily jog. He picks up the phone and,
with all the calmness he can muster, talks into an answering machine at the
home of Cathy's parents in
It is around
Cathy's father plays the message over
and over before waking his wife, Pam. They phone Brian back, and Brian calls
the
Within 20 minutes, a patrol car pulls
up to Cathy's apartment. The officer scribbles down information about her and
tells Brian he will check the local jail and hospitals. In the meantime, Brian
starts calling Cathy's friends, but reaches only voice mail greetings.
At just past 1 in the morning, a
second officer arrives at the apartment.
A young Asian woman was hit by a car
while jogging the previous morning, he tells Brian. In a few hours, a small
story soliciting information about her will appear in the morning newspaper.
The officer asks Brian if his
girlfriend has a mole on her forehead.
She does. Brian reaches for the phone
again.
"It's got to be Cathy," he
tells her parents back in
Within minutes, all three of them are
on their way to UC Davis Medical Center, where a young woman known only as Jane
Doe lies in the intensive care unit.
Dr. Kia Shahlaie's patient is spiraling downward.
She is lying on a gurney in the CT scan
room, eyes closed, a breathing tube in her throat, an
angry incision scissoring across the back of her head and curling around her
left ear.
Shahlaie stares at the colorful images of his patient's
head that have just appeared on the computer. To the young neurosurgeon, they
look ominous. The bright splotches on the left side of her brain show that she
is bleeding again.
It's yet another disheartening
development for a woman who, after dodging death this morning, endured two
major brain surgeries.
Can she survive a third one? Shahlaie wonders. Is it even prudent to take her to the
operating room one more time?
Shahlaie, the senior neurosurgery resident at UC Davis
Medical Center, knows very little about his patient beyond her injuries. After
she arrived in the emergency room, scooped from the street without
identification, he barely had time to save her life.
Her first head scan, taken minutes
after her arrival, showed a large bruise over the left side of her skull. This
"subdural hematoma" was creating pressure so intense that it was
pushing the patient's brain to the right. She needed surgery right away, or she
had no chance.
And so, at around
In less than half an hour, the
patient was in the second-floor operating room.
After the jogger was deep in the fog
of anesthesia, Shahlaie, working under the watchful
eyes of attending physicians, clipped the hair from the left side of her head
and painted her scalp with betadine, a topical
antiseptic. The doctor scrubbed his hands and arms, donned a blue gown and
telescopic lenses, and surgery No. 1 began.
Hovering above his patient along with
five other specialists, Shahlaie cut out a small
portion of the patient's skull to expose the left side of her brain. It looked
swollen and dark, nothing like the beautiful, shimmery surface of a healthy
one. Shahlaie suctioned out the clot, temporarily
covered the opening in her head with a sterile film and skin from her scalp and
took her to the recovery room.
About two hours later, he was called
into action again. Tests showed that the pressure inside the injured jogger's
head was shooting up again. This time, the problem was on the right side. So
the surgical team cut into her skull again, and suctioned out yet another clot.
Surgery No. 2 was a success.
Now it is late afternoon, less than
an hour after the last operation finished, and the patient is in trouble again.
Shahlaie is torn. What would be riskier, he asks
himself – taking her back into surgery for the third time in 10 hours, or
trying to manage the situation with medication and careful monitoring?
Shahlaie pages James Boggan, a
senior doctor on the neurosurgery staff. Together, after much discussion, they
decide that they cannot afford to watch and wait. So once again, Shahlaie calls for an operating room. When he learns that
all of the rooms are taken up by other trauma cases, he peels back the
patient's scalp at her bedside. He installs a small tube to drain blood from
the left side of her brain, relieving pressure, then
takes her to the first available operating room.
Surgery No. 3 is particularly tricky.
The woman's brain is grossly swollen. Shahlaie
decides that he must remove a small portion of the severely damaged left frontal
lobe.
It's a risky move that may save her
but could affect her life forever. He must carefully avoid certain areas of the
brain, or she could lose her vision, or her ability to speak or walk.
It's
Shahlaie suctions the clots on the left side, and carves
out a damaged, golf ball-sized section of her brain. His marathon day of
surgery ends at around
Something about this patient has
deeply affected Shahlaie. Maybe it's her age. She's
probably just a few years younger than he is, he thinks. Maybe it's the way she
was hurt, doing such an ordinary, everyday thing. Maybe it's the fact that she
has survived so far, against the odds. He's not sure why he feels such a
personal bond with this woman, whose name he does not even know.
The next morning he learns that the
patient is one of the hospital's own.
According to her parents, who arrived
in the wee hours after her third surgery, her name is Cathy Liu. She is 25
years old, a first-year internal medicine resident at UC Davis, a woman who since the age of 8 has talked about being a
doctor.
In the days to come, the details of
her life trickle out. Cathy, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who live and
work in
Shahlaie is fascinated and touched.
Cathy Liu, M.D., has just begun her
medical career, and now the doctor is a patient.
Her physicians and nurses have worked
hard to save her, but Shahlaie knows well the
unpredictability of head injuries.
Will Cathy Liu ever wake up, he
wonders?
Will she be able to use the right
side of her body again?
Will she be able to speak and read
and think clearly?
What about her budding medical
career?
What will become of Dr. Liu?
Pam Liu is standing beside her
daughter's hospital bed one August day when she hears a familiar voice.
"Mom," Cathy whispers. It
is the first clear word that she has spoken in weeks.
Jen Liu, who is massaging his
daughter's right foot, looks up. "Mom," Cathy says again, and she
reaches out with her left hand.
Cathy's parents have been keeping
vigil here, at UC Davis Medical Center, since the accident a month earlier that
sent their older daughter's head crashing through a car windshield.
They believe that her very survival
is something of a miracle. After three surgeries on her brain, doctors were
cautious in their predictions about her recovery. But on her seventh day in the
hospital, Cathy turned a corner, thanks to the perseverance of her
neurosurgeons and the innovative use of technology.
Right after her first major
operation, Shahlaie had inserted a probe into the
interior of Cathy's brain to monitor whether it was getting enough oxygen. If
the oxygen level dropped to a dangerous level, her doctors could immediately
take steps to restore it, such as manipulating the ventilator in her throat.
On Day 7, Shahlaie
checked the oxygen monitor and became alarmed. Suddenly, it was dangerously
low, and none of the standard ways of treating the condition was working. If
the brain is deprived of oxygen, it dies, and so does the patient.
Shahlaie had a hunch that the blood vessels in her brain
might be in spasm, choking off the oxygen supply. He ordered a test that
confirmed it. After consulting with the UC Davis neurosurgery chairman, Dr. J.
Paul Muizelaar, Shahlaie
decided to try giving intravenous medications that would put his patient in a
deep coma. The idea was to essentially shut down her body and quiet her brain,
reducing its demand for oxygen.
It was an aggressive and unusual
approach to the problem, but it worked. After the vessels relaxed and the
brain's oxygen level restored, Cathy's prospects were much better. The doctors
slowly brought her out of her induced coma, and she began to flutter her eyes.
Since then, Cathy has hit a few
milestones.
Toward the end of July, after doctors
removed her breathing tube, she mumbled something. No one understood her, but
it was clear Cathy was trying to speak.
A few days later, one of her doctors
asked Cathy to hold up two fingers on her left hand. She did it.
On another occasion, Cathy seemed to
pore over the words on a greeting card sent by a friend. Was it possible, her mother
wondered, that she was reading? Was it possible that she understood everything
that had happened to her?
No one knew.
But for awhile now, Cathy has been
making eye contact. She clearly recognizes her mother and father, her boyfriend
and other familiar faces, and she manages a crooked smile now and then. Her
right side, which before the accident was the dominant side of her body, is
weak but showing some movement.
And now, Cathy has spoken.
"Mom."
It is just one word. But it has given
Jen and Pam Liu great joy, and one other thing that has been so elusive during
this difficult saga.
Hope.
This article is
protected by copyright and should not be printed or distributed for anything
except personal use.
The
Phone: (916) 321-1000
Copyright © The Sacramento Bee
Life,
interrupted
Accident victim
making slow but steady recovery
By Cynthia
Hubert - chubert@sacbee.com
Published 12:02 am PST Monday, December 17, 2007
It is a shimmering autumn morning,
and Cathy Liu is venturing out into the world.
Obstacles surround her.
Just outside the door of her
apartment, two concrete steps loom between her and the driveway.
A couple of yards ahead, a tree
branch stops her in her tracks. In front of her, a car
roars menacingly down the street.
Cathy takes careful, quiet steps in
her neighborhood in the shadow of the bustling UC Davis Medical Center complex,
where a few months ago she was a newly minted doctor in training. A thick
plastic and metal brace cradles her right leg, and her right arm hangs limply
at her side. Her bright yellow rain jacket threatens to swallow her small
frame. Her dark, bottlebrush hair is starting to grow over the scar that curls
across the left side of her head.
Her physical
therapist, Susan Matthews, walks beside her, keeping watch as a tigress might
eye her cub. Cathy's mother,
Pam, walks a few paces behind them. At her therapist's request, Cathy pauses
now and then to identify everyday things. "Do...you...see...the...water?"
Cathy asks haltingly, pointing to a
puddle.
"Do...you...see...the...pumpkin?"
"Do...you...see...the...truck?"
"Great job,
Cathy!" Matthews says.
Cathy smiles.
Pam Liu smiles, too, but it is a
smile tinged with pain.
She and her husband, Jen, are
thrilled that Cathy has come so far since the July morning when, while she was
out jogging, she was hit by a car on
But at the same time, they are
devastated.