Ten days ago, Johns Hopkins Hospital exec Pamela Paulk had two kidneys. Today, she has one -- and a co-worker she barely knew three years ago also has one, thanks to Paulk's decision to donate one of hers. Just because she could. 

She has been blogging the entire experience. She is even tweeting it.

Her story begins about 10 years ago after she observed a transplant surgery and started thinking about becoming a kidney donor herself. About five years ago, she decided she was ready to give, but she wanted her kidney to go to someone she was connected to in some way. Then, a few years later, she ran into Robert Imes. A painter and mechanic at the hospital who Paulk knew well enough to say "Hello" to, Imes had been out sick for 10 months with kidney disease.

"I said, 'Robert, I really missed you. Is there anything I can do for you?' He said, 'I need a kidney.' And I said, 'You can have mine,'" Paulk recalled. ...

As odd as it sounds, she meant those words. Today, both she and Imes are recovering from their surgeries and doing well.

"I felt like my life wouldn't be complete until I did this," she said. And giving is the great joy she knew it would be (even if her belly does hurt a little).

At first, Paulk was reluctant to write about her medical journey. The 55-year-old Canton resident remembered what her mother used to say: If you give a gift and then brag about it, it isn't much of a gift. But she knew she might be able to turn her tale into a bigger gift, by drawing attention to the need for kidney donors.

Maybe someone else would even decide to follow her lead.

Things are already starting to happen. Her brother went to the MVA just the other day. He made himself an organ donor.

"The wheel has begun to spin," she said.

 So officials are saying an immunization campaign to protect against the swine flu pandemic could involve as many as 600 million doses of vaccine.

Fortunately, the government has been counting its chickens.

The traditional way of making flu vaccine involves using eggs. Lots of eggs. Tens of millions of eggs. The virus is injected into the eggs and is grown inside for three days to produce large quantities to be used in vaccine production.

But these are not just any eggs and government scientists have long known that. These are eggs laid by special breeds of hens, eggs carefully guarded to be kept free of pathogens, eggs chosen to be more oval than round to fit properly in the machines at the Sanofi-Aventis production plant in Swiftwater, Penn.

"The chicken eggs you find on your grocery shelf won't work," Dr. Robin Robinson, director of the Biomedical Advanced Research Development Authority at HHS, told me last month.

When the avian flu outbreak started hitting Asia nearly six years ago, officials in the U.S. took notice. Sure they had enough eggs to produce seasonal flu. But would they have enough if there was an emergency and they needed to manufacture more vaccine? The answer was no. ...

With a 5-year, $44 million contract with more than 30 farms less than a day's drive from Swiftwater, HHS quietly got into the egg business.

Robinson told me he would try to arrange for me to visit one of the farms, but I still haven't gotten permission. I am being told officials have "security concerns" about giving me a tour. Robinson called the chickens part of the United States' "national critical infrastructure."

"If we don't have the birds, we don't have the eggs," he said. "If we don't have the eggs, we don't have the vaccine. We consider them enlisted in Uncle Sam's Army, so to speak."

No final decision has been made about whether a swine flu vaccine will be manufactured on a massive scale. To do that, not only will they need all of BARDA's eggs (475,000 a day) but also eggs from contingency farms under contract. If the eggs aren't needed, they can always be sold to be used in livestock feed. For pigs, actually.

Says Robinson: "We're so much better prepared than we would have been before."

Conventional wisdom says teenagers do crazy things because they think they’re invincible. But a new study finds that while many teens think they’ll live forever, a sizable minority is downright fatalistic about their future.

Some 15 percent of adolescents aren’t sure they’ll live past 35, and these teens are more likely to engage in risky behaviors such as doing drugs and having unsafe sex, according to a study by University of Minnesota researchers appearing in today’s Pediatrics.

The figures are even more startling among minorities and teens living in poverty. Among whites, some 10 percent said they thought they might die young. Meanwhile, that figure was 26 percent for blacks, 21 percent for Latinos, 15 percent for Asians and a staggering 29 percent for Native Americans, the study found. Among black youth on public assistance, 1 in 3 youth shared these negative views.

There’s no doubt that adolescence is a crazy, confusing time. But even researchers were troubled and surprised at the magnitude of the findings.

“Adolescence is such a time of opportunity,” said Dr. Iris Borowsky, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. “It’s very disturbing to me that there is this sizable minority of youth who do not think they have a long life in front of them.”

Researchers aimed to test the “I’m going to live forever” theory, looking at about 20,000 teens grades 7 to 12 over three years -- 1995, 1996 and 2001 -- and asked them if they had a 50/50 chance or less of living to 35.

Some of the views are driven by reality, particularly for youth in poor neighborhoods, said Freya Sonenstein, director of the Center for Adolescent Health Promotion and Disease Prevention at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Kids are smart, they can see there are realistic barriers to obtaining some of these objectives,” she said. But parents, teachers and doctors need to encourage children to realize their lives hold promise, she said.

In fact, some youth eventually become more optimistic. More than half of teens with negative views became more positive over time, researchers found.

That nugget of encouraging news should be a sign to pediatricians to screen their patients about their outlook on the future, Borowsky.

It can be as simple as asking “What do you want to do when you grow up? Do you want to go to college?” and using the answers to alert others if the child is doing something risky that could endanger their health, she said.

Meanwhile, parents, teachers and anyone close to a teen should work to drive home a sense of hope, she said.

 

 

Recently I trekked out to far western Maryland -- more than 3 hours from here -- to see how Dr. Ken Buczynski practices medicine (see story here). He and I had spoken over the winter for a story I was writing about the state's physician shortage. This 35-year-old doc is the one-stop shop for health care -- delivering babies, treating their moms and dads, their grandparents, even their great-grandparents. He performs epidurals for pregnant women because Garrett County's lone anesthesiologist doesn't have the time -- or inclination -- to do them. He does spinal taps when necessary. He is even trained to do colonoscopies. I had to meet this guy.

He's only been out there for 5 years, but he has 10,000 patients. He'll see them all each year, maybe not in his office, but when he is buying paint at the Lowe's or toilet paper at the Wal-Mart, or when he is in church and they are sitting in the pew across from him and his growing family (three kids under 6 and another due in September). There is no anonymity to this kind of doctoring. Even when he isn't on call, he is on display. He is always recognized as the doctor in the house.

It takes a special kind of person to put down roots like he has in a place so small and needy. ...

He talks a lot about how this is a calling. It would have to be. The job doesn't pay all that well anymore. Reimbursements in Maryland are low and when he says that Medicare and Medicaid are his best payers, you know it is a struggle to get every last dollar he is owed. Add to that the high price of medical malpractice insurance and the schedule of 168 hours on call at a time and it would be enough to scare any doctor away from this type of practice. And it has. The shortage of doctors in the state's western panhandle is acute. Just four deliver babies in the entire county and none of them is an obstetrician.

No one has an easy answer to the physician shortage, in the rural areas or the ones looming in primary care in the cities and suburbs. Impressed as he was with the tale of Dr. B, one researcher told me: "You can't build a healthcare system on the extraordinary people."

We know living healthy isn’t easy. And these days it can be downright confusing amid the dizzying array of dense medical studies, endless health tips and fly-by-night Web sites offering cyber diagnoses.

Allow us to be your guides through this maze. We’ll do the hard work for you by sifting through the studies and the latest health crazes to zero in on the big stories and most interesting nuggets to help you live healthier. We’ll round up the fascinating, the alarming, the quirky and most of all, the helpful.

We recognize there are limits to our expertise -- we’ve got no MD or PhD after our names (although we like to joke that we are "medical professionals" and have been known to casually diagnose a sick newsroom colleague). So, from time to time, we’ll have medical professionals from the nation’s leading institutions here in our Baltimore backyard to answer your health questions.

Along the way, we’ll share what we’ve learned off the beat too -- personal triumphs and fears alike -- as we ride the twists and turns on this journey toward healthy living right along with you. And since we’re all in this together, we hope you'll share your stories too.

Got a great health tip? A concern you need help with? A personal story that you think will help someone else on this journey? Let us know!