This is really an amazing story, but 15-year-old Jeanna Giese from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, may be the first person (that we have records of, anyway) who has survived rabies.

FYI, rabies is preventable, and it isn’t. There is a rabies vaccine which is available to people who will be working with wild animals, or in nations where rabies in rampant in local communities (like among stray dogs). There is another vaccine, which if administered soon after being bitten by an infected animal, can ward off the disease. Once symptoms develop, however, the chances of survival are really poor. According to reports, only about five people have actually survived after showing very very early symptoms of the disease, and all received the vaccine. But rabies is invariably fatal, about 100% of the time, if no treatment is given or it is given late.

Back in the mid-80s, when I was working in the pediatric intensive care unit at Miami Children’s Hospital, I had a patient with an unknown neurological problem. He was in a coma, on a ventilator, and not doing well. It was only after about two hours into the shift that one of the docs was nice enough to let me know that they suspected rabies. This was at the height of the AIDS hysteria, but you know, a patient with rabies was far more frightening to me than one with AIDS. I was wearing gloves when I went near him, but still, I would have been extra-extra-cautious had I been aware that they suspected rabies. Once I knew, I put on three pairs of gloves before suctioning his endotracheal tube, lest any of his saliva (rabies is spread though spit) touch my skin. Fortunately, he did not have rabies and eventually recovered.

Anyway, the doctors in Jeanna’s case knew it was too late to give the vaccine, so they tried something new. Nothing to lose, since the girl was doomed otherwise. They put her in a drug-induced coma and then gave her a mix of anti-viral drugs. The physicians are being coy about what the drug mix consisted of, and the combination will be revealed when this story appears in a medical journal.

Come on, guys, I can’t stand the suspense. What did you give her????

PS: Her family is convinced that the power of prayer certainly helped. The girl was bitten by a bat while at church, strangely enough. But a lot of people were praying for her, so who’s to say? And at this point, while optimistic, it is too early to tell if Jeanna has suffered any permanent neurological damage.

Like anyone who has ever worked as a nurse doesn’t know this? Even the martyr-angel types know this deep down, although they try their best to hide it. The San Francisco Examiner has given us some “breaking news” about the nursing shortage and how to fix it.

But while hospital administrators are calling for more nurses to be trained, the California Nurses Association, or CNA, has emphasized improving work conditions as the best way to attract more nurses.

Stress-related burnout and wages that lagged during the 1990s are two of the factors blamed for nurses’ dissatisfaction and, in many cases, departure from hospital wards altogether, according to CNA. The state Board of Registered Nursing reports that 15 percent of the 311,000 nurses who have earned licenses no longer keep them active.

Now isn’t that breaking news. Imagine that for a notion. Improving working conditions might keep people at their jobs as well as attracting new ones. But if you look around at all of the endless media babble, day in and day out, about the nursing shortage, all it keeps screaming for is TRAIN MORE NURSES! Train ‘em and then throw as many as possible into a broken system.

And then what? Do we just pray that they’ll stay and put up? Put up and shut up? Tie them into place? Of course, bringing in foreign nurses does offer that sort of guarantee, that you have your indentured servant for three years.

Anyway, I just thought that this article was interesting, however short it is, because it is one of the first that actually dares mention the unmentionable–that there’s more to this so-called nursing shortage than just hunting down warm bodies. That is, if anyone really wants to solve it.

I meant to post this yesterday, but got involved in my article about the true meaning of Thanksgiving, and the sugar spun fantansy which has evolved over the years.

Just a tidbit of medical history–yesterday, November 24, 1884 marks the first time that an operation was performed to remove a brain tumor. Just the thing you want to read about, as you’re still trying to digest the turkey and stuffing. But it is a landmark in the history of neurosurgery. Rickman Godlee, coincidentally the nephew of the famous 19th century British surgeon Joseph Lister (think Listerine, antisepesis), removed a 2-inch tumor from a patient’s brain. The the patient ultimately died of meningitis about a month after surgery, but the procedure itself was successful. And unfortunately, even though we’ve come a long way since Godlee’s landmark surgery, neurosurgery is still very risky business and carries a high degree of complications and even mortality.