What happened to kids with ADHD in the old days

Some people wonder about the explosion of children diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and other problems. My answer to that is some of them could let out all that energy on the farm, but some were probably injured as a result of their risk-taking behavior. Others were beaten by frustrated parents and eventually ran away from home.

I'm not trying to be provocative, it's just something I've thought about.

In 1960, a woman who couldn't abide the annoying habits of her 12-year-old step-son sought the services of psychiatrist Walter Freeman. Most people, aside from his step-mother, saw Howard Dully as a normal, rambunctious child. Of course, they didn't have to live with him. He ate like a pig and enjoyed destroying the building-block structures his little brother carefully built.

The psychiatrist thought the boy would benefit from a procedure he'd developed: the transorbital "ice-pick" lobotomy.

I ran across Dully's book, "My Lobotomy," last night at Half Price Books and sat on a bench and read it entirely. Which led me to this amazing 2005 NPR production of Dully's story, narrated by the extraordinary Dully himself. Listen here.

Ian McEwan slept here. So did Peter Carey and W.S. Merwin

When UT's Michener Center for Writers hosts brilliant guests, do you think the university puts them up at the Omni? No way. Instead, they stay at Verde Camp, a little compound of exquisite, vintage cottages just off S. Congress.

I met owner B.J. Heinley, a designer, at my coffee shop "office" after I overheard him on the phone confirming a reservation with a hard-of-hearing customer. B.J., a big bear of a guy, and his wife Carrie moved to Austin five years ago to raise little kids and be closer to family.

I was blown away when I visited Verde Camp, so I'm pimping it here. B.J. is an art-school grad, a designer by trade and former Yahoo! employee, and this collection of six 1930s guesthouses is surely his masterpiece.

The houses, all painted green, sit beneath a canopy of huge oaks (preserved from oak wilt to the tune of $50,00o!). Inside, you find wit and sophistication: an awesome Blue Dot sleeper sofa, a battered sign from a ranch and B.J.'s childhood dining table. Out back, around the firepit, are Eames-inspired chairs made from oil drums. The kitchens are farmhouse white, with porcelain sinks and white counters.

The street is nearly traffic-free, even though it's "within stumbling distance", as one guest put it, of the Continental Club.

If you've dreamed of writing a novel, you imagine it could happen here. Guests stay for a night, or for several months. Bring a bike, and you won't need a car until it's time to leave. Live on the pizza at Home Slice, tacos from Guero's, swim laps at Big Stacy Pool (always free and heated in winter), maybe even get some groceries (or fresh sushi) from HEB.

A one-bedroom that can sleep four is $140 for the night, $800-plus for the week. B.J. says the old-timers on the street like Verde Camp because they're happy to see the longtime rental property restored to its rightful glory.

(photos courtesy of B.J. Heinley)

There but for the grace of God ...

A guy I know in Houston, Scott Corron, is one of my peers. By that I mean we are similar demographically in age, health, intelligence, achievement, etc. He's an avid cyclist, a photojournalist, and a big-time sales leader in cardiac diagnostic equipment.

In January, he was riding his bike around Memorial Park with a couple of friends. He started feeling nauseated. He left his friends and began pedaling toward a restroom.

While riding my bicycle at a little more than 20mph, I suffered a cardiac arrest. My heart stopped. A medical student, a 4th year at the time, Eilean Myer who is now a resident at The Mayo Clinic saw me. She ran to me and began CPR. There were no defibrillators close by. Eilean was joined by Ross Mattern, a former paramedic who was also running in the area. They both tag teamed CPR and were then joined and observed by a Memorial Hermann Cardiologist Dr. Lalitha Sunder. Houston Fire Department arrived several minutes later and eventually shocked me several times in the park on the street.

At the hospital, his heard stopped several more times. At one point, a physician wanted to give up but a nurse urged him to keep trying.

He lived. He's on a mission now to put defibrillators throughout Memorial Park.

Godspeed, Scott.

(photo by Scott Corron)

Lice haiku

In Fall's bright light, lice
Hysteria among us
The smell of tea tree

-- John Snyder

The oddball that was Michael Jackson's doc

From the New York Times article about Conrad Murray, MD:

By all accounts, Dr. Murray has always had a charitable streak, a soft spot for poor people like the ones he grew up with. In June 2006, he founded a cardiology clinic in the impoverished neighborhood of Houston where his father, whom he did not know as a child, had been a doctor for years.

If he is charitable, however, he is also less than reliable in his personal affairs. Dr. Murray has been plagued with unpaid debts, delinquent taxes and lawsuits from creditors, legal records show.

He has fathered at least seven children with six women over the years, most of them out of wedlock, according to a deposition he gave in a 1998 paternity suit ...

This story humanizes Murray, but it's also baffling ...

Color of prehistoric birds discovered

In kids' books about dinosaurs, the creatures come in all sorts of colors. But that's all just made up; nobody knows for sure what their hides -- or feathers -- really looked like.

Until now.

Scientists, including Julia Clarke from the University of Texas, recently discovered evidence for the first time of iridescence in fossil feathers more than 40 million years old.

"The feathers produced a black background with a metallic greenish, bluish or coppery color at certain angles--much like the colors we see in starlings and grackles today," said Richard Prum, a scientist at Yale and one of the paper's authors.

Cool!

The discovery of a "color-producing nanostructure" in a fossil feather opens up the possibility that we'll someday be able to determine more colors in fossil birds, as well as in feathered dinosaurs, sez National Science Foundation paleontologist H. Richard Lane.

Found via EurekAlert! Read Carl Zimmer's article about it here.

The hidden life of Igloos: Reporter tale #3

If this had been a radio story, the opening sound would have been the scooping of ice into a 16-quart Igloo cooler. That's right, an ordinary Igloo cooler with the push-button handle and tent-shaped lid. This humble container would fly by private jet through starry skies to West Texas and return to Austin, a human heart within.

I had been wearing a pager for three months, waiting for this moment. I wanted to watch a heart transplant, from beginning to end.

I'll never forget the sight of the donor, a man who'd died suddenly and virtually painlessly from a brain aneurysm. He lay in the middle of a large, empty, all-white operating room. He was all in white, including the top of his head, only his brown face exposed. A machine breathed for him, so he didn't look dead. The scene looked like something out of Cocoon, or maybe ... Bethlehem.

It was holy.

In the hall outside the OR, the surgeon (who'd brought his own saw and other instruments), the transplant nurse, myself and a photographer, lined up with other teams who had their own Igloos filled with ice -- to carry back kidneys, the liver, the lungs. The organs had to be removed in a certain order, starting perhaps with the most fragile? I don't recall exactly. I think our group went first.

A nurse discovered me and the photographer and indignantly shooed us out into the waiting room. We weren't there long. The surgeon did his work quickly and we were out of there, leaving the others to collect the organs they'd come for.

Back on the plane, in the darkness, the surgeon suddenly jolted as if he'd forgotten something. He put his hand on the cooler and relaxed again, in relief.

In Austin, the transplant recipient's heart was removed. It was flabby and gray, like a chunk of pork tenderloin. The donor heart, red and firm as a fist, was sewn in. Later that day, the patient was sitting up, soon to take his first post-op steps.

"I can feel it," he told his wife. "It feels really strong."