Patrick Swayze has not suffered a heart attack, despite a report to the contrary featured in this week’s edition of The National Enquirer.
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A rep says the actor — who is battling pancreatic cancer — has been feeling better in recent months and even put on a few pounds
“He’s well,†the rep said. “He’s continuing [...]
TMZ has confirmed former UFC superstar Kimo Leopoldo is dead. He was 41.
Several MMA websites are reporting Leopoldo died from a heart attack … we’re still trying to confirm that fact.
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A critically ill teenage girl who refused to have a heart transplant against doctors’ advice has changed her mind and now wants to have the life-saving operation.
Hannah Jones, 14, from Marden, Herefordshire, who has been in and out of hospital since the age of four, said in November she did not want to go through the “trauma” of any more operations.
But she has now been asked to be placed on the waiting for a heart transplant, after doctors found she had grown stronger and said that the operation would be less risky than previously thought.
“I know I decided I definitely didn’t want this, but everyone’s entitled to change their mind,” Hannah said.
Her decision is likely to focus attention once again on a number of medical and ethical questions. Last year it was reported that health officials applied to remove her from her home because they believed her parents were preventing her treatment.
Her parents, Andrew and Kirsty Jones, said it was Hannah’s decision to refuse the treatment and that she was mature enough to understand the consequences. At the time Hannah, who was then thought to be terminally ill, convinced a child protection officer to argue for the abandonment of the court action.
Doctors had warned her that the operation was risky and that even if it succeeded, she would need another heart within 10 years. Now doctors believe she could make a full recovery.
“The right side of my heart isn’t beating at all and, after lots of tests, I realised there were more benefits to having a new heart to staying like I was,” she said.
“If I had a new heart, I’d be on less tablets than I am at the moment.”
She made her decision to go on the waiting list having suffered kidney failure after her 14th birthday party. Speaking from Hereford hospital, Hannah added: “I fell ill last Sunday but I just thought I’d overdone it on my birthday. Actually, it turned out it was my kidneys.” She could not go on dialysis because her heart was too weak.
A spokesman for NHS Herefordshire said: “Our paediatricians work closely with Hannah and her family to ensure she has the care and support she needs.”
“In our discussions with Hannah we are convinced she has the maturity and experience to make decisions for herself about her treatment and truly understands the implications.”
The trust denied it had tried to make her a ward of court last year in a bid to force her to undergo a heart transplant.
“No one can be or would ever be forced to undergo an operation if they do not wish it,” the spokesman said.
Lindsay Lohan is pouring her heart out about her troubled relationship with on-again/off-again girlfriend Samantha Ronson.
The Mean Girls star and the pro DJ have had a turbulent relationship and split on numerous occasions since first getting together in 2007.
Despite their constant arguing, Lindsay says she is still very much in love with Sam.
She tells [...]
Chris Hipp, “the father of blade technology” and a founder of RLX Technologies, apparently died of a heart attack July 14. Hipp was an executive with RLX when the company unveiled the first blade servers in 2001, a move that at first got little attention from the major OEMs but has since transformed the hardware industry. Hipp, an avid competitive bicycle racer, had left RLX by the time HP bought the company in 2005, and had been working with the Blade System Alliance and various startups at the time of his death.
– Chris Hipp, one of the founders of RLX Technologies and a pioneer in blade
system technology, died of an apparent heart attack July 14 at the age of 49.
Details of Hipps death are sketchy, though the Blade System Alliance, of
which he was a technology chair and an adviser, had this brief note on …
LONDON — British doctors designed a radical solution to save a girl with major heart problems in 1995: they implanted a donor heart directly onto her own failing heart.
After 10 years with two blood pumping organs, Hannah Clark’s faulty…
Never have I wanted more to throw a brick through the screen of my television. Watching Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor sit stoically through a…
• Ten years with two hearts, then her own recovers
• 16-year-old leads full life after cancer and transplant
Her life used to consist of endless rounds of medicines, long stays in hospital and uncertainty about how much longer she would live for. Now 16-year-old Hannah Clark – the first person in Britain to receive someone else’s heart but later have it removed, only for her own to unexpectedly recover – relishes typical teenage pursuits such as running, shopping and walking her dog.
Born with a rare heart condition that could easily have killed her, Hannah, from Mountain Ash near Cardiff, was two when she joined an exclusive club by having a five-month-old girl’s heart grafted on to her own.
For 10 and a half years she had two hearts – “piggybacking”, doctors call it – although it was the donated heart that kept Hannah alive while her original organ took a long rest.
Complications meant the second heart had to be taken out when she was 12, and doctors were unsure what would happen. No one had survived such a procedure.
Now, three and a half years later, one of the most dramatic success stories in recent medical history has just done her GCSEs, started her first part-time job at a kennels and is preparing for a family holiday by the seaside – all powered by a heart which, for her first 12 years, doctors thought could not keep her alive.
Confirmation of Hannah’s highly unusual success in recovering from cardiomyopathy, which affects the heart’s muscle, comes today in the form of a long article in the Lancet medical journal.
In complicated medicalese, it tells an amazing story of survival. The authors, who include renowned heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub, testify to the teenager’s feat.
Yesterday the girl who used to have two hearts negotiated another obstacle: a press conference to tell her story.
At times the constant whirring of cameras, barrage of questions and sheer number of people left her lost for words, or in tears.
How specially does she treasure life now, someone asked? “I can’t say,” replied Hannah. It took her mother, Liz, to answer: “She just loves life. She doesn’t think about tomorrow; she thinks about today, and lives life to the full. She gets up every morning smiling, and it’s very, very rare to see Hannah upset.
“She doesn’t go to bed until three o’clock in the morning sometimes … that’s how much energy she’s got. She couldn’t have done that before.”
Yacoub, of the Harefield hospital in west London, said her recovery had given the many doctors involved in her care insights into many things, such as transplant surgery and the use of immunosuppressant drugs, which must be taken to minimise the chances of a patient’s body rejecting a new organ.
Before Hannah, no one’s own heart had ever recovered enough to keep them alive, although doctors did think it was a theoretical possibility that a weak heart could somehow become strong.
Among the lessons learned from Hannah, Yacoub said, was that “the possibility of recovery of the heart is just like magic. A heart that was not contracting at all, after a time we put the new heart to pump next to it, and do its work. Now it is functioning normally. That is going to be very fundamental in helping people in the future.”
Born in 1993, Hannah underwent what surgeons call heterotopic cardiac transplantation, or “piggybacking”, two years later. However, the immunosuppressant drugs led to her developing an incurable, rare cancer that kept returning despite repeated bouts of chemotherapy.
But the doctors’ strategy, to reduce the doses of immunosuppressants, led to Hannah’s second heart failing. In February 2006, they decided they had no choice but to take it out, or risk Hannah’s death. Three and a half years of constant improvement, and Hannah’s gloriously normal life, have proved enough for them to pronounce the reversal of her transplant an unqualified, if unexpected, success.
Her father, Paul, recalled how when she was being treated at London’s Great Ormond Street hospital the family was told that Hannah was about to die.
“They called us in and said that a tumour had affected her spinal cord and was putting pressure on her brain, and was going to kill her. A nurse told us that she only had 12 hours to live. I said, ‘Well, you believe what you believe and I’ll believe what I believe’. For some reason, the next day she was OK.”
Their experience has made the Clark family advocates of presumed consent, a policy – supported by Gordon Brown and chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson – that would see everyone in the UK presumed to be in favour of donating their organs after death. Supporters believe that, with 1,000 people dying every year due to shortages, the move would greatly increase the supply of organs. Yacoub said that, having previously been opposed to presumed consent, he now backed it.
1 May 1993 Hannah Clark born in Wales.
July 1995 Aged two, Hannah undergoes “piggybacking”, in which a donor heart is joined with her own. She improves for four and a half years.
August 2001 Hannah is found to have a rare form of cancer caused by immunosuppressant drugs that stop her body rejecting the new organ.
2001-2006 Her cancer keeps recurring. Doctors deem it incurable.
February 2006 Doctors decide to remove the donor heart.
14 July 2009 Hannah’s story reported in the Lancet.
What is it about Rocio Martinez that makes kids on the edge of the abyss trust her? Well, for one thing, they know that Rosi, as they call her, can relate — she used to be one of them.
After his comeback to performing and Hallelujah’s unlikely chart domination, Leonard Cohen has had a remarkable year. He talks to Jian Ghomeshi about love, death and taking risks
What have you learned from being back on stage?
Leonard Cohen: I learned that it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. I’ve been grateful that it’s going well. You can’t ever guarantee that it’s going to continue doing well, because there’s a component that you really don’t command.
What component is that?
LC: Some sort of grace, some sort of luck. It’s hard to put your finger on it – you don’t really want to put your finger on it. But there is that mysterious component that makes for a memorable evening. You never really know whether you’re going to be able to be the person you want to be or that the audience is going to be hospitable to the person that they perceive. So there’s so many unknowns and so many mysteries connected – even when you’ve brought the show to a certain degree of excellence.
In 2001, you said to the Observer that you were at a stage of your life you refer to as the third act. You quoted Tennessee Williams saying: “Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act.” You were 67 when you said that, you’re 74 now – does that ring more or less true for you still?
LC: Well, it’s well written, the beginning of the third act seems to be very well written. But the end of the third act, of course, is when the hero dies. My friend Irving Layton said about death: it’s not death that he’s worried about, it’s the preliminaries.
Are you worried about the preliminaries?
LC: Sure, every person ought to be.
Let me come back to the beginning of the first act. This was a brand new career for you that started in your 30s. How fearful were you of starting a second career?
LC: I’ve been generally fearful about everything, so this just fits in with the general sense of anxiety that I always experienced in my early life. When you say I had a career as a writer or a poet, that hardly begins to describe the modesty of the enterprise in Canada at that time – an edition of 200 was considered a bestseller in poems. At a certain point I realised that I’m going to have to buckle down and make a living. I’d written a couple of novels, and they’d been well received, but they’d sold about 3,000 copies. So I really had to do something, and the other thing I knew how to do was play guitar. So I was on my way down to Nashville – I thought maybe I could get a job. I love country music, maybe I’d get a job playing guitar. When I hit New York, I bumped into what later was called the folk-song renaissance. There were people like Dylan and Judy Collins and Joan Baez. And I hadn’t heard their work. So that touched me very much. I’d always been writing little songs myself, too, but I never thought there was any marketplace for them.
Some people would think it’s ironic to go into music to make money, given that it’s not necessarily the most lucrative of professions for most artists.
LC: Yeah, I know. In hindsight it seems to be the height of folly. You had to resolve your economic crisis by becoming a folk singer. And I had not much of a voice. I didn’t play that great guitar either. I don’t know how these things happen in life – luck has so much to do with success and failure.
People talk about the fact that you’ve written songs that you’ve almost grown into as you get older. How did starting a career in your 30s inform what you were writing?
LC: I always had a notion that I had a tiny garden to cultivate. I never thought I was really one of the big guys. And so the work that was in front of me was just to cultivate this tiny corner of the field that I thought I knew something about, which was something to do with self-investigation without self-indulgence. Just pure confession I never felt was really interesting. But confession filtered through a tradition of skill and hard work is interesting to me. So that was my tiny corner, and I just started writing about the things that I thought I knew about or wanted to find out about. That was how it began. I wanted the songs to sound like everybody else’s songs.
You say you’ve always been fearful of everything. When did you give yourself permission to think of yourself as, and call yourself, a legitimate singer and musician?
LC: You cycle through these feelings of anxiety and confidence. If something goes well in one’s life, one feels the benefits of the success. When something doesn’t go well, one feels remorse. So those activities persist in one’s life right to this moment.
Have the women in your life been a source of your strength or weakness?
LC: Good question. It’s not a level playing ground for either of us, for either the man or the woman. This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can’t live without love. That life has very little meaning without love. So we’re invited into this arena which is a very dangerous arena, where the possibilities of humiliation and failure are ample. So there’s no fixed lesson that one can learn, because the heart is always opening and closing, it’s always softening and hardening. We’re always experiencing joy or sadness. But there are lots of people who’ve closed down. And there are times in one’s life when one has to close down just to regroup.
Are there times when you’ve lamented the power that women have had over you?
LC: I never looked at it that way. There’s times when I’ve lamented, there’s times when I’ve rejoiced, there’s times when I’ve been deeply indifferent. You run through the whole gamut of experience. And most people have a woman in their heart, most men have a woman in their heart and most women have a man in their heart. There are people that don’t. But most of us cherish some sort of dream of surrender. But these are dreams and sometimes they’re defeated and sometimes they’re manifested.
Do you think love is empowering?
LC: It’s a ferocious activity, where you experience defeat and you experience acceptance and you experience exultation. And the affixed idea about it will definitely cause you a great deal of suffering. If you have the feeling that it’s going to be an easy ride, you’re going to be disappointed. If you have a feeling that it’s going to be hell all the way, you may be surprised.
Do you regret not having a lifelong partner?
LC: Non, je ne regrette rien. I’m blessed with a certain amount of amnesia and I really don’t remember what went down. I don’t review my life that way.
Even in the face of a very successful record that you made in 1992, The Future, do you think dealing with depression was an important part of your creative process?
LC: Well, it was a part of every process. The central activity of my days and nights was dealing with a prevailing sense of anxiety, anguish, distress. A background of anguish that prevailed.
How important was writing to your survival?
LC: It had a number of benefits. One was economic. It was not a luxury for me to write – it was a necessity. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans are really jamming the airwaves – it’s something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It’s a kind of tyranny of posture. Those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it’s difficult for the writer to determine what he really thinks about things. So in my own case I have to write the verse, and then see if it’s a slogan or not and then toss it. But I can’t toss it until I’ve worked on it and seen what it really is.
What do you consider your darkest hour?
LC: Well I wouldn’t tell you about it if I knew. Even to talk about oneself in a time like this is a kind of unwholesome luxury. I don’t think I’ve had a darkest hour compared to the dark hours that so many people are involved in right now. Large numbers of people are dodging bombs, having their nails pulled out in dungeons, facing starvation, disease. I mean large numbers of people. So I think that we’ve really got to be circumspect about how seriously we take our own anxieties today.
How much do you reflect upon your own mortality?
LC: You get a sense of it, you know – the body sends a number of messages to you as you get older. So I don’t know if it’s a matter of reflection, I don’t know that implies a kind of peaceful recognition of the situation.
Is there a way to prepare for death?
LC: Like with anything else, there’s a certain degree of free will. You put in your best efforts to prepare for anything. There are whole religious and spiritual methodologies that invite you to prepare for death. And you can embark upon them and embrace them and give themselves to you. But I don’t think there’s any guarantee this could work, because nobody knows what’s going to happen in the next moment.
Are you fearful of death?
LC: Everyone has to have a certain amount of anxiety about the conditions of one’s death. The actual circumstances, the pain involved, the affect on your heirs. But there’s so little that you can do about it. It’s best to relegate those concerns to the appropriate compartments of the mind and not let them inform all your activities. We’ve got to live our lives as if they’re not going to end immediately. So we have to live under those – some people might call them illusions.
Let me ask you about Hallelujah, because it’s been an interesting year for Hallelujah – it took on a new energy. A song that you wrote in 1984, and it appeared at No 1 and No 2 on the UK charts, and your version was also in the top 40. What did you make of that?
LC: I was happy that the song was being used, of course. There were certain ironic and amusing sidebars, because the record that it came from which was called Various Positions – [a] record Sony wouldn’t put out. They didn’t think it was good enough. It had songs like Dancing to the End of Love, Hallelujah, If It Be Your Will. So there was a mild sense of revenge that arose in my heart. But I was just reading a review of a movie called Watchmen that uses it, and the reviewer said “Can we please have a moratorium on Hallelujah in movies and television shows?” And I kind of feel the same way. I think it’s a good song, but I think too many people sing it.
• This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted for the Canadian broadcaster CBC. Leonard Cohen plays Mercedes Benz World in Weybridge, Surrey, tomorrow, and the Liverpool Arena on Tuesday. Leonard Cohen Live in London is out now on CD and DVD (Sony).
By: Dennis Cook
“I’m gonna take you home and have my way with you/ This will be a memory that’s gonna stay with you.”
Seduction can rarely be consciously manufactured. The real deal fills our senses and inspires unreasonable, perhaps even unwise reactions, but lordy it feels good. Sometymes Why‘s new album, Your Heart Is A Glorious Machine (released March 10 on Signature Sounds), opens with the above line and then seeps, pheromone-like, into the listener – unrushed, warm to the touch, prickly in captivating ways, expertly executed throughout. Trust me, you’re pretty much done for when this trio – Kristin Andreassen (Uncle Earl), Aoife O’Donovan (Crooked Still) and Ruth Ungar Merenda (The Mammals) – starts working their wiles on you.
There’s a gorgeous, subtle overlap to this collaboration that suggests nothing less than an estrogen rich answer to early Crosby, Stills & Nash, where each primary is so strong they’d handily hold the spotlight alone but taken together they’re harmoniously lethal, serving consistently excellent material and keeping the arrangements and production airy, their fantastic, character rich voices never overshadowed by any other element. That said, their instrument switching instincts are spot-on, knowing just when to add a shimmer of tambourine, bell toned glockenspiel or heartbeat drum to the largely acoustic settings. Early Joni Mitchell is the easy reference point, but Sometymes Why is tougher, less man-handled, more aware of their power and more willing to use it than that legendary waif of the canyon.
I’d hate to oversell Your Heart Is A Glorious Machine but if you vibe with any of the listed touchstones then you’re going to find lots to love here. Each pass reveals a new silken thread to pull, a great turn-of-phrase that wanders off with you into the night or a melody you can’t shake and don’t really want to. The sheer ‘why’ of this group is well worth pondering, and like the best lovers, they don’t spread out their secrets all at once, drawing us near for pillow talk and low dawn conversations that get at real things with a few tears and gentle kisses.
JamBase | Harmonized
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Someone posted a false report that Steve Jobs had heart attack to CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport. The fallout (which could include an SEC investigation) lead to the inevitable question of whether this is a failure of citizen journalism.
It’s not. It’s a failure of open systems.
As Sarah Perez points out at ReadWriteWeb, ANYONE can become [...]
