| WIKI | FAQ | Tech FAQ | |
 http://csua.com/feed/ | |
| ||||||
| 11/26 |
| 2004/8/12 [Health/Skin, Health/Disease/General] UID:32872 Activity:nil |
8/12 Oh. My. God.
http://www.wftv.com/news/3643877/detail.html
\_ This is something I don't mind being purged (no pun, please god).
\_ That's vile. Someone been reading the cruel site of the day? (It
is, however, safe for work.)
\_ Longer article, w/ quotes: http://csua.org/u/8kl
\_ I guess some people wait until someone's almost dead before calling
emergency services. Reminds me of the case of that guy whose head
was rotting away and maggots were crawling on his brain and stuff.
http://www.snopes.com/photos/maggots.asp |
| 11/26 |
|
| www.wftv.com/news/3643877/detail.html CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE Gayle Laverne Grinds, 40, died Wednesday, after a failed six-hour effort to dislodge her from the couch in her home. Workers say the home was filthy, and Grinds was too large to get up from the couch to even use the bathroom. Everyone going inside the home had to wear protective gear. The stench was so powerful they had to blast in fresh air. Strange News Photos A preliminary autopsy on the the four-foot, ten-inch woman lists the cause of death as "morbid obesity." But officials want to know more about the circumstances inside the home. Check out 99 incredibly unusual photos -- from a bizarre fight to two cloned kittens and more! Investigators say Grinds lived with a man named Herman Thomas, who says he tried to take care of her the best he could. He has told them he tried repeatedly to get her up, but simply couldn't. No charges have been filed, but officials are looking into negligence issues. Emergency workers had to remove some sliding glass doors and lift the couch, with Grinds still on it, to a trailer behind a pickup truck. Removing her from the couch would be too painful, since her body was grafted to the fabric. After years of staying put, her skin had literally become one with the sofa and had to be surgically removed. She died at Martin Memorial Hospital South, still attached to the couch. Neighbors say they had no idea Grinds lived at the duplex, though they had seen Thomas and some children outside. |
| csua.org/u/8kl -> www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/martin_stlucie/epaper/2004/08/12/m1a_mcbody_0812.html Early Wednesday, still fused to the couch, Gayle Laverne Grinds died following a six-hour effort by rescue workers who struggled to lift the 480-pound woman and get her to a Martin County hospital. Unable to separate the skin of the 39-year-old woman from her sofa, 12 Martin County Fire-Rescue workers slid both onto a trailer and hauled her behind a pickup to Martin Memorial Hospital South. POPULAR PAGES Sheriff's investigators questioned how Grinds lived in such conditions without more help from family or authorities. "We're not treating her death as suspicious at this point, but we do have an investigation started because the circumstances surrounding her death are so unusual," Martin Sheriff's Sgt. The Treasure Coast medical examiner performed an autopsy of the 4-foot-10 woman and listed her cause of death as "morbid obesity," officials said. "I tried to take care of her the best I could," said 54-year-old Herman Thomas, who lived with Grinds in the duplex apartment in Golden Gate, south of Stuart. "I tried to get her to get up, but it wouldn't do no good." He said the woman that he called his wife hadn't been off the couch for six years. "I wish I could have pulled her off the couch, but she wouldn't let me," he said, covering his face and sobbing. Inside the home, the floor and walls were matted with feces, and trash was strewn across the floors, some which were bare concrete. Furniture was toppled, and pictures were knocked off walls. Atlas said sheriff's detectives will look for potential "negligence issues" related to her care and death. "We want to know what happened to her, how she ended up this way, and is she supposed to have been receiving any care," she said. Rescue workers were called to the home at 8:44 pm Tuesday by Grinds' brother and his girlfriend, who reported the woman had trouble breathing and "emphysema problems." The crew initially tried to remove her from the couch, but the pain was too excruciating. Workers wore protective clothing and installed large air handling hoses to ventilate the horrendous odor emitting from the home while trying to figure out how to get the woman and her couch to the hospital. The street in front of the row of duplex apartments turned into a makeshift construction site as rescue crews used hammers and chain saws to build a large wooden stretcher with handles cut around the perimeter so firefighters could lift the woman and the couch, Martin County Fire-Rescue District Chief Jim Loffredo said. After several failed attempts, including building one plywood plank that was too small to hold her, workers removed sliding glass patio doors at the back of the home, leaving a 6-foot opening large enough to get her out. They slid the couch with her on it onto the larger wooden plank supported by 2-by-4 boards, which were slid onto a utility trailer. Neighbors who watched the lengthy rescue effort said they had never seen Grinds out of the home. Jerry Thomas, who lives across the street for six years, said he has seen young girls at the home on occasion but never knew Grinds was inside. It's a difficult position," Martin County Fire-Rescue specialist Chris Wisniewski said. Clifford Grinds, who is believed to be Gayle Grinds' brother, refused comment and slammed a door when contacted by a reporter at his Hobe Sound home Wednesday afternoon. Court records show Gayle Grinds cared for a young niece and nephew after the death of her sister in 1992. Those children are now 19 and 15, but their whereabouts were unclear Wednesday. "We are used to going to people's houses when things are at their worst... Atlas said a community policing deputy who worked the neighborhood a few years ago knew of Grinds but never had any dealings with her, and no deputy had ever been called inside the home. In June 2003, 911 dispatchers received a call from the home for medical assistance, but Martin County Fire Chief Tom Billington said he could not reveal the nature of that call, citing federal medical privacy laws and the ongoing investigation. The Department of Children and Families can intervene to help adults who are unable to care for themselves, but DCF officials said Wednesday they did not know about Grinds. Christine Demetriades, agency spokeswoman for the Treasure Coast, said DCF has no record of calls to the abuse hot line or reports before she died. |
| www.snopes.com/photos/maggots.asp Ought to go to the doc and get it lanced, but he doesn't. Bone, once infected, presents little barrier to spread of infection to contiguous bone, and so it spreads within his skull. Ought to spend a good long time in the hospital, but he doesn't. At some point, the smell attracts flies, which begin to lay eggs in his festering wound, and maggots take hold. The infection breaches the inner layer of his skull, and reaches the meninges. Though their tensile strength is impressive, the meninges are quite thin, and the infection breaches them. Your brain just isn't supposed to be on your outside, and presents almost no barrier to anything when exposed. This makes him feel a little wobbly on his feet, and so, what do you know, he decides to see the doctor. He walks in to the Stanford ER, where these photos were taken, just as you see him here. This is a true case of a japanese man from GifuPrefecture who complains incessantly about a persistent headache. Mr Shota Fujiwara loves his sashimi and sushi very much to the extent of trying to get them as "alive and fresh" as can be for his insatiable appetite. He developes a severe headache for the past 3 years and has put it off as migraine and stress from work. It was only when he started losing his psycomotor skills that he seeks medical help. But upon closer inspection by a specialist on his scalp, the doctor noticed small movements beneath his skin. It was then that the doctor did a local anaesthetic to his scalp and discovered the cause when tiny worms crawled out. A major surgery was thus immediately called for and the extent of the infestation was horrific. See the attached pictures to the scene that one thought only a movie could produced: Remember, tapeworms and roundworms and their eggs which abounds in all fishes from fresh or saltwater can only be killed by thorough cooking and/or freezing the fish to between 4 degC - 0 degsC. The eggs of these parasites can only be killed if it is cooked or frozen to the said temperatures for a week or more. Origins: The two disparate explanations for these photographs given above are a good indicator of a common Internet phenomenon: Someone makes pictures available on-line, they begin to circulate through e-mail forwards, the original attribution is lost along the way, people begin to make up stories to explain the origins of the now-sourceless photographs, and those fabricated explanations become attached to the pictures as they continue to circulate. Asking a dozen different medical experts about the photographs shown above produced a dozen different answers -- everything from a skeptical "It's possible" to a flat-out assertion that the pictures had "obviously been faked" (either at the photographic level using a prosthetic device, or at the digital level with image editing software). However, too often people get caught in the trap of assuming that because photographs don't match the explanations accompanying them, the pictures must have been fabricated or manipulated, and one conclusion doesn't necessarily follow from the other. Although the explanations quoted above are erroneous, these images are in fact real and undoctored, and they are indeed photographs taken of a patient whose brain surface was exposed and crawling with insects. The pictures date from October 2002, and they are photographs of a man in his 70s who was suffering from an unusual form of cancer which had eaten away at the upper portion of his skull and scalp but who had not sought any medical treatment because the condition was not causing him pain. The man was brought to the trauma center at Stanford University Hospital (where the photographs shown here were taken) by San Mateo County paramedics who had been summoned to the scene after the man was involved in a minor automobile accident and who found him in his car in the condition pictured. |