Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

Heh, if we're counting on the cheeks, I'm in the hundreds, perhaps even thousands.

Probably thousands. I've seen how big your family is.

You guys! I'm working in the ER for the first time tonight and I am both excited and terrified. !!!!!!

Good luck!

Thank you!!

Good luck, NerdGirl! In other medicine-y related news, I just learned about the case of the "Berlin patient" Timothy Brown, who was HIV positive but now is not because he got a bone marrow transplant from a matching donor who was homozygous CCR5-Δ32, a variant that some people have that makes them virtually immune to HIV. Neat stuff.

Yeah, that is a really cool case. Not practical (or safe) for wide usage, but it was cool that the doctors took advantage of a rather unusual set of circumstances to do something for him.

I wonder how much at risk the (assumed healthy) donor of bone marrow ever is, and how the medical ethicists determine that it's OK for them to put themselves at risk, even if they say they want to. Obviously, the dying recipient has no dilemmas and the risk of problems during the transplant is OK compared to the prospects if nothing is done, but for the healthy donor, you have either risking something very dangerous happening to them if they do it, or nothing happening to them if they don't.

Well, it's theoretically possible to donate like a kidney or something to a perfect stranger, or so TV dramas would have me believe. I assume bone marrow transplant is less risky, and the same sort of ethics would probably apply.

Donating bone marrow isn't too risky. It's usually done under general anesthetic (or with an epidural) because it basically involves sticking a needle into your pelvic bones repeatedly, which is pretty painful, so there are always minor risks of complications from the anesthesia. And of course there's a very small risk of infection anytime you're sticking any kind of needle into anyone - but you have that same risk when you donate blood. But there aren't really any risks from the fact that they've removed some of your bone marrow, like there would be with removing one of your kidneys or part of your liver. Other than the anesthesia, the risk is about the same as it is with donating blood.

The really interesting thing about bone marrow donation is that national donor registries share their information with each other, so if you ever get a bone marrow donation from an unrelated donor, they could be from pretty much anywhere in the world. It's more likely that they're from somewhere with a high population of people with your same ethnicity, but still I think that's pretty cool.

Ok, so the impracticality arises not from the risk but from the combined unlikelihood of finding a willing donor (rare enough) who is a match (rare enough) who is homozygous CCR5 Delta 32 (very rare). Finding one donor who is the intersection of all three of those sets for each person who needs it being the extreme impracticality.

Not from risk to the donor, but risk to the recipient. That is an extremely risky and painful process. While AIDS is admittedly a "terminal" disease, many people who have it and receive treatment live for many years. As I remember it, the person who received this treatment got it not because of his having AIDS, but because of a different condition, leukemia, and was receiving this particular treatment for this disease. The doctors simply figured that since he had to risk it anyway they might as well take advantage of a unique opportunity.

But for most people people infected with HIV it would actually increase their chances of an early death, in addition to the difficulties that you have already mentioned.

However, while the case has provided scientists with ample pathways for research on future gene therapies, the process that appears to have cured Brown carries a high risk of death and toxicity.

"Unfortunately this type of intervention is so complex and risky it would not be applicable on a large scale," he said.

Okay, so I totally loved emergency and think that's what I want to do when I grow up. The cab driver who spent the whole drive home whining about how stupid it is that the ER won't give him antibiotics and opiates on demand, didn't so much love that. He wouldn't even stop talking after I paid him so I just said sorry I have to get up in 6 hours and got out of the car and left.

Ever since a globster washed up on shore when I was at the beach a few years ago, I have been fascinated and disgusted by them. My globster looked like a turkey-pig, and pretty similar to an ROUS. Nasty.

I swear, if I ever have to read another HP fic where an eleven-year-old gets a Hogwarts letter on their birthday I'm going to have to ... I dunno. Bust a Stupefy or something.

haha I think that happened in my fic (I wrote when I was like 13). I was also part of the secret unicorn house.

LOL.

By the way, I really enjoyed the "A Little More Time" fic you recommended. I wasn't the one that asked the question, but I liked the advice.

Also, when the Potterhead said werf liked "Peggy Sue" fanfics, I first thought of "Mary Sue" and thought "ugh, really? How awful!"

TheAnswerIs42 wrote:Also, when the Potterhead said werf liked "Peggy Sue" fanfics, I first thought of "Mary Sue" and thought "ugh, really? How awful!"

As per TV Tropes:

TV Tropes wrote:[T]his is not a sister trope to Mary Sue, despite the name[...] In the hands of a poor writer, the character can gain Mary Sue-like traits (knowing exactly how everything will happen and thus managing to get a "perfect" result from every scenario, etc) but generally the two do not intersect — if anything the experience is often unpleasant for the character in question.

Oh, I know they are very different things, they just have very similar names. So I forgot which was which for a second.