Sue Katz: Consenting Adult

Book Review: “American Sirens” by Kevin Hazzard

American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America's First Paramedics (2022) by Kevin Hazzard is the inspirational story of the invention of street medicine, of medically-equipped ambulances, and of the profession of EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians). What made this history especially resonant for me is that this medicine-changing first initiative took place in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, home of playwright August Wilson, the jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams, the Negro League’s Pittsburgh Crawfords baseball team, and me in my early years.

The idea of creating an ambulance service in an area of town where the police and fire departments’ makeshift “ambulances” wouldn’t go to because of racism, was the brain-child of an acclaimed white Austrian immigrant, a Holocaust survivor, Dr. Peter Safar, an anesthesiologist. He was opposed by the other first responders, who had at most six hours of first-aid training and basically just gave a rough ride but no life-saving care to those in need, and by the local Pittsburgh government, particularly the white mayor Peter Flaherty, a nasty, racist piece of work.

Dr. Safar connected with the local activist non-profit Freedom House and they scraped together a way forward, recruited often uneducated, unemployed, sometimes unmotivated, but ultimately brilliant Black men from the community, and put them through the most rigorous medical and social training imaginable. Twenty-four men graduated. From their first calls during the uprising after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Freedom House service was a huge success from every point of view – except financially.

Their initial funding came from President Johnson’s job creation funds, but once Nixon came into office, that all dried up. A young white doctor, Nancy Caroline, took over the training of the medics and the running of the service with a fierce determination that kept them afloat until their betrayal by Pittsburgh’s politicians and police. She ended up writing the EMT textbook that would be used for many generations of students.

The author, a former paramedic himself, has researched this slice of progress and its roadblocks with remarkable detail, following certain of the players from start to end. It reads more like an action script, with valiant medics performing beyond their own expectations and the imaginations of all who were offended that Black people were spearheading an amazing new service.

For those with a connection to Pittsburgh, most especially the Hill District, you may feel, as I did, a special thrill to read of the familiar streets and institutions, to learn of yet another amazing moment in Pittsburgh’s hidden – or repressed - history. This non-fiction book has it all: challenges overcome, fascinating characters, heroes and villains, and adrenaline-fueled action from start to finish.

Postscript: In researching photographs, I discovered this 2023 Pittsburgh PBS program on the Freedom House ambulance service.

My Student the Math Genius

Imagine this. My friend Tanya Khovanova won the International Math Olympics. Twice. She is also a comedic math writer and an evangelic promoter of Recreational Math – something which combines a giggle with a Prime Number. She works at MIT.

She won those Gold Medals back when she was representing her home country of Russia, but she has long been here in the States. She was in a writing group I was running when she decided to start a math blog and asked me to work on it with her as her editor. We have an unusual set-up. We sit side-by-side reading through her pieces and I correct them with the editing software Track Changes.

Since math is a language I know nothing about, we are forced to work until her complicated high-level concepts are sufficiently comprehensible to me that I can edit them. As a result, her genius posts, meant for other mathematicians and students of math, have unusual clarity. Two changes have happened. First, she has absorbed all of my editing advice so that she needs me less and less. Second, I’m now steeped in the world of coin problems, integrals, finite groups, sequences, and, most of all, math jokes.

Tanya is a hoot. Here are a few of her jokes.

Twelve different world statisticians studied Russian roulette. Ten of them proved that it is perfectly safe. The other two scientists were unfortunately unable to join the final discussion.
* * *
Do you know a statistics joke?
Probably, but it's mean!
* * *
A traffic policeman stops a car:
—You’re going 70 in a 35 miles-per-hour zone.
—But there are two of us!
* * *
The most popular tweet, "Live your life so that you do not have time for social networks."
* * *

Recently Tanya’s writing was included in The Best Writing on Mathematics 2014. This is truly an achievement, considering that English is not her first language. In announcing this honor, she wrote an interesting short piece about her long reluctance to write (“Writing in English is easier for me than writing in Russian because when I make a mistake, I have an excuse.”). She generously mentions our work together. I recommend you check this out – and check out her blog altogether.

Osteoporosis: Do All the Miracles Turn into Assaults?

For years now there seems to be a consensus among those who take a professional interest that I have osteoporosis. This despite the unfortunate fact that there has been such a plethora of errors in the taking and reading of my bone density tests that no one can figure out anything quantitative.

One year, vertebrae were compared with unlike vertebrae because a machine or technician lined up the previous year’s x-rays incorrectly. Those errors, however, have never been excised from my record, which therefore is in a state of chaos, with subsequent comparisons showing a variety of conflicting and unreliable results.

A couple weeks ago I took a bone density test which caused my physician to write me an email that started with, “Now this isn’t really an emergency, but go get all your dental work done right away so that we can talk about starting you on Fosamax.” Many post-menopausal women in this country are on Fosamax, some of them a long time, even though the data on this powerful drug is contradictory: Some doctors say one needs to take Fosomax for five years consecutively, but that’s all. Some say that the effects (both direct and side) of Fosomax persist whether the woman continues use of the drug or not.

Anyway, my doctor then wrote to my rather cool endocrinologist to report on the situation, a fact I learned when the endocrinologist’s office called to make an appointment with me, suggesting a day less than a week away. “When are you generally booking for?” I asked her assistant. And as I suspected, she said about 4 or 5 months ahead.

This non-emergency faster-than-a-speeding-bullet arrangement was a bit stressful. Not the least because I don’t want to take Fosomax. They admitted ages ago that it can cause serious gastrointestinal ulceration, but now it turns out that in old women it is causing spontaneous thigh bone breaks. But most off-putting, in a small percentage of people (admittedly mostly but not exclusively in people getting the drug intravenously as a cancer treatment) it causes necrosis of the jaw – i.e. the jaw bone disintegrates after you’ve had dental work and part of the jaw needs to be amputated. I have crap teeth and they will be requiring all sorts of expensive and therefore delayed attentions in the coming decades. I’m never going to be able to “finish” my dental work – I’m in a continuous state of buying some dentist or other a nice summer home.

So here you have a drug meant to prevent fractures that (sometimes) causes the jaw bone to liquefy when provoked and the thigh bone to splinter without provocation. No thank you. I’ll take calcium.

While my own physician can’t quite understand my reluctance to ingest Fosomax, the endocrinologist was with me 100%. First, she said, she was going to get a colleague of hers who she considers the best in the business to read the x-rays correctly so we actually know what’s going on.

Second, I should start drinking milk and eating cheese and looking up “calcium-rich foods” on the internet and stuffing them in my mouth. That seems a small price to pay to avoid what sounds to me like another one of those drugs which, while purporting to do something or other for women, ends up doing something worse. From thalidomide to hormone replacement therapy, all the miracles turn into assaults.

I know that milk products are fattening and should generally be avoided – or so they’ve been saying for years – but now I’m no longer going to feel guilty about my sharp cheddar and the price of Jarlsburg. It is, after all, medicine for a condition I may or may not have to one degree or perhaps to another.

PS: I only got such a swift appointment because there happened to be a cancellation that minute.