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Midwest

CREOLE FOR THE SOUL

Creole For The Soul My father became sick with an autoimmune condition last April, 2020 in the first wave of the pandemic hitting our Black community in the MidWest. As the ambulance drivers took him away, little did I know that would be the last time I would see him as his Caregiver/daughter for over a month. Later that afternoon in calling the hospital I found I was refused visitation. Everyone was refused visitation due to raging Covid-19 hospitalizations in our community. I was stunned. Me, a retired medical social worker has always been at my father's side for the last 15 years. Image-2.jpg As time went on, I didn't hear from a doctor for 12 days, nurse contact was sporadic. I heard from a nurse that my father had contracted Covid-19 at the hospital 3 days after he went in. I badgered, cajoled the hospital social worker to see him to no avail. My father was too weak to handle a phone, but I did have 1 conversation after 15 days. He was despondent worried about me and why I wasn't there. I had to tell him about the hospital's no visitation policy. No one had told him! He was relieved I was okay. All I could do was cry. Dad got placed in a nursing home briefly that had a Covid-19 unit to help with patients who were too weak to go home. (No visitation of course). Then back to the hospital again to go into hospice. I got a call after a week in hospice that they were planning to move my father back to the nursing home because he hadn't died. The nurse persuaded me to come in as visitation was available because the unit had extra PPE's for family to wear. My boyfriend and I grabbed the chance. We spent 1 1/2 hour with Dad, talking, saying prayers. My father upon hearing my boyfriend's voice, in a slightly morphine drugged stupor looked at me then him, and spoke for the first time in 2 weeks. It was garbled, but it seemed important to him. After about a minute, my father relaxed and slept. He died the next day. The city lost his body for 3 torturous weeks later. I thought I would lose my mind. Thankfully my boyfriend and friends kept me from being a stark raving lunatic then. Once I got his body identified and cremated (funeral homes were Leary if Covid 19 victims and way overcrowded then) I relaxed. The owner of the city facility noticed my French last name - being Creole. He was from Louisiana and missed good gumbo recipes. I offered to text him a couple of family recipes. Delighted, he put 3 people to work to find Dad's body. It worked! I think my father, a master gumbo maker, who have chuckled over the Where's Waldo search for his body - and that gumbo recipes got him found! I miss his dry, sardonic humor and smile. The guilt over not bring able to visit him during his hospitalization haunts me a year later. My art got me through all of this - drawing everyday my feelings of loss that I could not express to my father. Author and writer name :- priyanshu Chicago Priyanshu
Chotu_Sagar · 1.5K Views

Dragon Rebirth

The dragons have come and gone since the Pliocene epoch when Wooly Mammoths roamed with humans during the ice age. For many of the I and E generation in the Americas and parts of Europe, it was something to avoid being taken by them to their world. But many knew the stories they told, the things they saw and missed, and in this world of social media, the child coming home, reborn as a shifter. For 16-year-old Nathan that was his reality. For 11 years he's not only avoided getting grabbed but helped others avoid a similar fate. But a black dragon was watching him grabbing him only to lay low in the nearby woods, something they did to pick out who'd they take. It did that for 10 years, more than 3 times longer than usual. His actions and the amount of time he had avoided them made him a sort of celebrity in his town in the midwest. But one day that black dragon made its decision, he was to be her hatchling. When they're usually marked the child could turn to protective mode, running from home to prevent drawing attention to other children for the picking, and that's what he did, right to where they last landed. Luck, choice, a possible spell in those claws, whatever you may think doesn't matter. A black dragon never misses its mark. With agility unsurpassed by the other types they're almost impossible to avoid. But these dragons didn't breathe fire, were a threat, nor in any way the size of a 747 max. All they had that was unique from other creatures was a highly evolved brain with the intelligence of a human and a heart of platinum.
nathan_sasser · 31.1K Views

Einstein’s Brain Was Stolen And Went Missing For Decades

It might sound like the plot of a sci-fi B-movie, but Einstein's brain really was stolen shortly after his passing. In the 19th century, the brains of geniuses were often preserved so that scientists could try to determine the origins of that person's intelligence. For example, half of the brain of Charles Babbage, inventor of the first computing machine, is still on display at the Hunterian Museum at London's Royal College of Surgeons. Einstein was aware that scientists might want to study his brain after his passing and explicitly forbade it, knowing that such studies rarely produce useful information. Nevertheless, when Einstein passed at Princeton Hospital in the early morning of April 18, 1955, the pathologist who examined him, Dr. Thomas Harvey, decided to remove the brain on his own initiative for future study. Dr. Harvey took Einstein's brain home, divided it into 240 pieces and stored it in two mason jars filled with celloidin. Shortly after Einstein's cremation, his son Hans Albert found out about the theft and was furious. But Dr. Harvey convinced him to let him keep the brain.  Taking the brain of the world's most famous physicist without permission did have professional consequences for Dr. Harvey. He soon lost both his job at Princeton Hospital and his marriage, then moved to the Midwest where he took a series of jobs either practicing medicine or running research labs. He kept Einstein's brain for the next several decades - at one point storing it in a cider box underneath a beer cooler - hoping to unlock the secrets of Einstein's intelligence. The fate of Einstein's brain was mostly unknown until 1978, when a reporter tracked Harvey down in Wichita, Kansas. The magazine article about Harvey brought a flood of requests for samples of the brain to study, and starting in 1985, scientists began publishing their findings. Many of these studies did claim to find some differences between Einstein's brain and that of a "normal" person, but they also lacked representative control groups, making their findings suspect. And even if these studies had been conducted more effectively, neurology still hasn't determined whether the physical structures of the brain actually affect a person's intelligence.  Today, what remains of Einstein's brain resides at the Penn Medicine Princeton Medical Center in Plainsboro, New Jersey. Almost nobody is allowed to see it, not even researchers. But many more pieces of Einstein's brain can possibly still be found across America, thanks to Dr. Harvey's habit of giving away pieces of it to curious friends. 
Hassan_Mehmood_1068 · 2.1K Views
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