via:
Michael Cooke
Toronto Star

As the wheels of the ancient Afghan Airlines flight left the ground, I sent a text back to the Star news desk: She’s out.

We couldn’t be sure until the plane, packed with Muslim pilgrims on their way to Iraq, lifted us up and away from Afghanistan.

There was so much that could have gone wrong in Kandahar. It is the heartland of the Taliban, after all.

Even the Afghan police — they’re supposed to be on our side — tried to stop us leaving at the civilian airport.

But today Roya Shams, the 17-year-old Afghan girl, is in Toronto and on her way to Ottawa’s prestigious Ashbury College, thanks in part to the generosity of Star readers.

***

The Star’s Paul Watson has been in a lot of terrible places.

He’s Canada’s only Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

He won for his work covering the Black Hawk Down disaster that forced the United States to retreat from its war against Somali warlords in 1993. You might have seen the movie.

Since then, Watson has reported on suffering and war across Africa, Asia and the Balkans.

Watson is war-weary and brutally honest. He knows why he’s on the spot. To report.

He has had, many times, to tell folks who were in bad trouble that he would not help them.

“With me, everywhere in the world where there’s trouble, I’ve always said ‘I can’t help you,’” he says. “Or if I feel terrible about their situation, I say ‘I’m so, so sorry, I can’t help you.’ Journalists don’t help directly, we report. It’s a principle — we observe, we don’t act.”

That principle was turned upside-down a year ago when Watson, the grizzled and scarred reporter, met Roya Shams.

***

Roya is a Taliban target.

Her father, Haji Sayed Gulab Shah, was a police colonel in charge of Kandahar’s District One.

Her dad was on our side and he was shot dead during a hunt for a notorious Taliban commander, Mullah Qahar.

At the time, a year ago, Roya was defying the Taliban by attending a school, supported in part by money from Star readers.

To fulfill her father’s ambitions for her, Roya is determined to become a politician.

“My father believed in girls. He taught me to read. I have four brothers and four sisters, but my father always said he had nine sons because, in his view, girls were as good as boys,” Roya said.

When the death threats increased after her father was killed, Roya was forced to quit school and stay out of sight at home.

“There will be no mercy for me,” she told Watson at the time.

Watson wrote several stories and came to admire Roya’s spirit and ambition. He decided his principle of “I’m so, so sorry, I can’t help” just didn’t cut it this time.

“I’ve never felt compelled to step out of the reporter’s role to help someone this way. This time, with this person, I did,” Watson says. “Roya is an extraordinary young woman, the daughter of a father who fought the same fight Canadians were fighting and dying for. Knowing Roya made me think helping one is better than helping none.”

If she made it to a Canadian school, Roya promised Watson, “I will show to the Canadian nation that Canadians did not die for nothing in Afghanistan.”

That’s quite a promise: 158 brave young Canadian soldiers came home in coffins.

Hundreds of others returned home injured in body and mind.

With the backing of the Star, Watson began to try to find a place for Roya in a Canadian school. After interviewing her on Skype, the headmaster and the admissions director of Ashbury College said they would help. Free tuition.

“There were many obstacles and each time the person could have said no,” Watson said. “But each time the person said yes when it was easier to say no, Roya was a step closer to freedom.”

Watson went to the Canadian embassy in Islamabad, capital of Pakistan, to personally pick up Roya’s student visa for Canada.

Once he had that, the only thing left was to deliver the visa to Roya and then get her safely out of Kandahar.

***

I sat with Watson for two days in a small, chilly guesthouse in Kandahar city. There were three or four other guests. We were the only Westerners.

Watson, who knows a thing or two about bad guys with guns, thought we would be safe without U.S. military protection if we stayed mostly inside and wore Afghan head shawls when we went out in a car.

So this was a good opportunity to sit tight and get better at Sudoku.

There is nothing but danger in Kandahar. The day before we arrived, a suicide bomber reached the door of the police chief before he botched his assignment and blew up only himself.

The next day, a suicide car bomber rammed an armoured vehicle carrying a district governor, killing him and two of his sons.

Then that video of those American marines urinating on dead Taliban hit the headlines on Al Jazeera, setting the town on edge.

And Tuesday, the Taliban assassinated a tribal elder just around the corner from our guesthouse.

We went outside that guesthouse just three times.

First, to visit Roya’s house, where we were greeted by her brother, Sayed Gulale Shams. As the eldest son, he’s now in charge of the family. We sat on the floor for the traditional Afghan hospitality — a fabulous, colourful feast prepared by Roya, which she was not allowed to attend. Men only.

Roya’s brother thanked Star readers for helping his little sister.

Second, a dash to the cemetery as Roya, dressed in a lavender burqa, knelt and wept a farewell at her father’s grave. The cemetery is smack-up against an area under Taliban control — something Watson “forgot” to tell me until we were safely sipping tea later.

Third, the risky ride to the airport. Once we left the city, we tucked ourselves in behind a U.S. military convoy — each wheeled fighting machine the size of a small bungalow.

We peeled away at the civilian airport to check in. There was a tense hour with Afghan cops. A young woman travelling without a burqa and with two Western men? That’s an outrage! Show me your papers! Leaving Afghanistan? No, you must stay!

***

For seven years, Canada has spilled blood in Kandahar.

Our goal was to help Afghanistan build a stable democracy from the failed stone-age state it had become after decades of war.

The Star wanted to continue our country’s investment in building a better future for Afghans.

That is why, for the first time in its 120-year history, the Star took this extraordinary step of leading an effort to rescue a student from a war zone: to bring one of Afghanistan’s bright young people to Canada to further her education, away from the fear and bombs and bullets so she can return one day to help make her country a better place.

With the continued generosity of our readers, we hope this gesture will help ensure our soldiers did not die in vain.

The Star is committed to helping Roya finish her high school education and graduate from university.

***

Breathing again at 30,000 feet, I began to read Roya’s application to Ashbury.

“Kandahar is a challenging piece of earth for women and girls to have access to education …

“I wish to be a politician … I believe every Afghan citizen, man or woman, should have the right to speak freely and live in peace.

“God bless my late father and his soul. He prepared for family members to have education despite this unbelievable and most insecure province. A girl going to school in Kandahar is somehow like a hell.”

Later, in Dubai, there was nothing I could do to get Roya to walk alongside Watson and me. She stayed several paces behind.

“I cannot,” Roya said. “That would be disrespectful.”

***

Roya got her first dose of Canadian reality on Tuesday — she went to what she called “the skating game” — and saw the Leafs lose to the Senators 2-3.

Her report: “The Leafs played very well in the beginning and then not so well in the end.”

Told you she was smart.

But, well, who is really surprised by that?

Is there a whole line of future neuro-marketers out there in universities? Minoring in medicine? It’s an odd one alright, but I guess it would probably be a pretty cool job.

* * *

It’s called neuro-marketing.

Watching parts of the brain light up in response to a television ad can provide better information than results from a focus group, says Duncan Stewart, director of research for technology, media and telecommunications for the professional services firm.

“Using an fMRI, I can see every 30 milliseconds or so what’s going on inside your brain, defined to a relatively narrow area,” he said this week. “I can see what’s happening where and when.”

In focus groups, people sometimes don’t tell the truth, Stewart said.

“Asked whether he prefers the station wagon, the minivan or the sports car, nine out of 10 guys will say, ‘I prefer the sports car,’ but it’s not true,” Steward said. “Look at the sales figures. They buy hatchbacks all over the place.”

A magnetic resonance imaging machine, or MRI, uses magnets to show the shape and structure of soft tissue in the body. A functional MRI, or fMRI, employs more powerful magnets to display activity within structures.

It can detect whether oxygen is being depleted in the blood of a certain region in the brain, indicating activity associated with certain brain functions — fear, pleasure, reasoning or physical sensation.

The brain of a person watching a car advertisement from inside an fMRI machine would light up certain parts of a monitoring screen. Sometimes other technology can be used to cross-reference the result, Stewart said.

“It’s great to know that people like my car ad but if I combine eye-tracking software with an fMRI, I can see that, yes they like my ad, but they are staring at the girl rather than at the car,” the researcher said. “I can see what’s working and what isn’t.”

Canadian advertisers already draw from fMRI research, Stewart said, but remain secretive as to whether they conduct such research themselves.

Queen’s University School of Business marketing professor Kenneth Wong disagreed that fMRI use would rise much in 2012 and added a couple of trends of his own.

“I don’t see (fMRI use) as being significant,” he said in an interview. “There is just so much more data out there that we can use.”

Marketers are focusing more and more on how to use social media well, how to read transactional data from credit cards and how distinguish behaviour among smartphone users. An iPhone user doesn’t necessarily behave the same way as a BlackBerry user, he said.

“We are just starting to figure out what devices are being used when,” Wong also said. “I might use my smartphone when I go shopping but I probably won’t take my iPad because it’s too big.

“We’re just starting to get a better grip on that and other issues,” he said, “such as what privacy people are willing to relinquish and what kinds of promotional messages people are prepared to accept.”

Aaaanyway. I wanted to share this video taken by the Toronto Star Tuesday night. The content is surprisingly aggressive considering it’s just some protesters outside City Hall who are against the 2012 budget for the City of Toronto. They try to break through a barrier. Who woulda thought? Eep. :s

VIDEO: Click photo to watch

I’ve seen it posted all over Facebook, mainly with comments saying how it brought people to tears while reading it. I include myself in that. Now that is powerful journalism.

* * *

Credit: Toronto Star

via:
Katie Daubs
Toronto Star

It is day 976.

Paul Archer explains to his 33-year-old daughter that she has a brain injury and has been in the hospital for almost three years.

Mary stares at her father through the bottom half of her glasses. Her eyebrows furrow and she whimpers. She lifts her left arm, the only arm that works, and moves her shaking hand over a laminated piece of paper with the alphabet on it.

“I have not been here that long,” she spells out, pointing to each letter.

The hundreds of other times she was told this information, she spelled out “I have?” on the board.

“It’s okay, Mare, your memory isn’t quite what it used to be,” Paul explains, holding her hand. “But we remember for you.”

With short-term memory loss, Mary Archer lives perpetually in the present tense. She thinks a family dog that died last year is still alive. She feels like she just arrived at the hospital. She constantly wants to go to the bathroom because she forgets she went already.

Mary wasn’t born like this. She was a social worker and soon-to-be mom debating baby names with her boyfriend, Bob Crocker.

It was April 8, 2009 when everything changed following a surgery at St. Michael’s Hospital. The events surrounding that moment and the years afterward are reconstructed from recollections by her family members and, where possible, hospital records the family has obtained. The hospitals involved would not comment on the specifics of the case.

Mary was 23 weeks pregnant when she began to continually vomit and suffer excruciating headaches. At first, she thought it might be flu or food poisoning, but she was sent home from St. Mike’s emergency on March 30 after she was able to keep down a bagel.

Her condition worsened, so she went to the emergency department of Toronto Western Hospital on April 1. Her parents thought the problem might be the shunt in her head. A shunt had been successfully inserted three years earlier when doctors diagnosed her with Chiari malformation, a structural defect in the lower rear of the skull that blocks the flow of cerebrospinal fluid.

She stayed at Western overnight and a CT scan showed the shunt was working.

Mary went home the next day but returned to Western by ambulance on April 4. She got worse by the hour and began to hallucinate visits from childhood friends. By Monday night another CT scan was arranged. This one, her parents say, showed a blocked shunt.

She was monitored in a critical-care unit overnight and the next day was transferred to St. Mike’s for surgery, since it had an obstetrics department to monitor the fetus during the operation.

On April 8, the surgery appeared a success. By evening, she was back in her room, talking and laughing with her parents, drinking grape juice through a straw. Finally, after a week of bedside vigils and trips to the ER, the worst seemed to be over. Her exhausted parents went home. So did Crocker.

A few hours later, Mary forgot she had a catheter and tried to walk to the bathroom. She fell and hit her head. Doctors did a CT scan and everything looked fine.

At their home in Scarborough, Heather MacDonald-Archer had a feeling something wasn’t right. Her husband, Paul, called the hospital and was told about Mary’s fall but was reassured that everything was fine. They went back to bed.

What happened is unclear, but contentious. The family says they have never been given the “full story.”

According to Mary’s clinical history on a hospital record, “Following the successful revision (surgery), she fell and had a cardiac arrest leading to anoxic brain injury.” The family says they were told that sometime after her fall, Mary had vomited and aspirated into her lungs and suffered complete respiratory arrest, that she was found on her side, her skin a deep purple hue.

At 1 a.m. the hospital called Crocker.

Minutes later, the hysterical boyfriend called the Archers.

In the ICU, Mary had tubes in her throat and was hooked up to a ventilator. She did not respond to a battery of tests. Her body twitched with each breath. A few days later, the family was told she had extensive brain damage and was unlikely to breathe on her own again. “She will be kept alive four more weeks to give baby chance to grow in womb,” Paul scrawled in his day planner on April 15.

Mary awoke from the coma after about five weeks, but nearly three years later there is no happy ending. That single event has changed the lives of Mary and her family forever. Her parents have been decimated by grief. Her twin brother, Alastair, is missing his champion. Her daughter, Isabella, delivered by C-section on June 25, has grown up in a world where her mother lives in hospital. And her boyfriend is a tired single parent, who visits the hospital every day.

Mary Archer , the social worker with dozens of friends, is now dependent on hospital staff to paint her nails pink. She used to love to travel. Instead of Thailand, she now journeys daily to the sixth floor cafeteria at St. Mike’s, where extended family members pop in.

A few friends still come to visit, but many have stopped. Mary doesn’t notice. She always feels like she just arrived in hospital. To her parents, it is a bittersweet benefit of the brain damage that has destroyed her life.

A St. Mike’s hospital record from May 2010 calls Mary’s history “long and unfortunate.”

Since the incident, “she has required significant care due to her overall limited neurological function,” her clinical history states.

Anoxic brain damage occurs when the brain is deprived of oxygen. The parts of the brain furthest from the three main arteries are most vulnerable to damage, says Dr. Mark Bayley, director of the Neuro Rehabilitation Program at Toronto Rehab.

The prefrontal cortex, important for planning movements, the temporal lobe, important for storing memory, and the basal ganglia and cerebellum, both key in co-ordination and balance, are some of the areas typically affected, he explains. At a microscopic level cells are stunned and, in some cases, die.

Mary’s anoxic brain damage affects her motor skills, short-term memory, vision, speech, problem-solving skills and balance.

Every day, the Archers drive in from Scarborough to visit their daughter, parking in a by-the-hour lot on Queen St. E.

Heather MacDonald-Archer, 59, styles her hair in a short blond bob and always looks smartly dressed. Underneath, she is tired from the trials of this new life. She wonders why the hospital wasn’t watching Mary more closely that night. Their daughter had been ill for days, was pregnant and had fallen after surgery. She feels that a watcher could have run out and alerted a nurse or physician that something was wrong.

“There was nobody there,” she says.

The hospital declined to comment on the events of that night.

The Archers blame themselves for going home. They were exhausted. They had been with their daughter for days and finally thought she was okay.

“If we’d known it was going to happen we would have sat there all night,” Paul says.

Mary is hiding somewhere inside herself. Some days, the family sees flashes of the old Mary; other days she is not there.

She was receiving physiotherapy at St. Mike’s nearly every day until this past summer, when she had physio once a week. Now, she receives only occupational therapy at St. Mike’s, the family says. The hospital did not comment on the frequency of rehab.

Because she hasn’t been accepted into a more intensive, publicly funded rehab program and the Archers can’t afford to pay for a private option, they worry the old Mary Archer will be locked inside her body forever.

“We miss her,” says Heather.

Paul and Heather Archer met at a town council meeting when they were young reporters in Gravenhurst and Orillia. They married in the winter of 1976, and guests had to dig their cars out of snowdrifts at the reception. The twins were born two months prematurely, in 1978. Mary came out crying. Alastair’s birth was silent. The umbilical cord had cut off his oxygen supply. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a baby.

The family eventually moved to Scarborough, where the kids grew up. Paul and Heather both worked at the Toronto Star (they are no longer on staff), saving up money for their retirement and renovating a vacation home in St. Andrews, N.B. That house is now for sale.

At her home in the Upper Beach, 91-year-old Patricia Archer looks through an old photo album of her grandchildren that is falling apart at the seam. As she flips the pages, the premature twins grow into busy toddlers. Mary’s hair gets curlier and longer as the years pass, the shoulder pads grow larger as the ’80s march on.

“They were great friends,” Archer says of her grandchildren. “She was (Alastair’s) guardian angel. He was happy — he really needed her help.”

When Mary applied to Ryerson’s social work program, she wrote about her brother and how important it was to help people who needed it. She worked at group homes, volunteered at a crisis line and, most recently, was intake co-ordinator at Project Work, where people with intellectual disabilities are taught job skills and find entry-level work.

Now, she is the one who needs help. She can’t walk on her own, has especially poor motor skills on the right side of her body and can’t see very well. She struggles to speak.

But quality of life is subjective. Mary smiles and laughs as daughter Isabella sings “The Wheels on the Bus.” She does the crossword with her dad. She can remember facts from childhood and nearly everything leading up to the surgery. When she has moments of clarity, she apologizes to her parents for being the way she is. She thanks them every time they bring her a coffee. She breaks their hearts.

Every day, Crocker arrives after work with a big yellow stroller, their daughter tucked inside sleeping. “Bob has stood by you forever,” Paul tells his daughter in the hospital cafeteria one day before Christmas. “You chose a good guy.”

When Mary was in a coma, Crocker read his own poetry to her. Friends marvelled that he was sticking around, with an apparently brain-dead wife and unborn child.

“If I were you, I’d commit suicide,” one person told him.

Crocker feels he owes it to Mary not to abandon her, and he wants their daughter to know who Mommy is.

When he talks about the situation, he sighs often but never complains. He survives by thinking only of the present: making sure his daughter grows up healthy and happy, bringing Mary back to life, and work.

“Outside that, I’m a zombie,” he says.

Crocker, 46, used to brag that he never cried. He had been through deathbeds and eulogies. Crying was a wasteful, unproductive, useless response.

He was sitting on the couch once, when Isabella was about six months, thinking about the first time he had changed her. He was happy for a few seconds before Mary’s absence bore down on him. He started bawling.

“I’ve learned crying is what you can do when there’s nothing left to do,” he says.

Crocker’s apartment is strewn with toys. Mary’s bookcase stands against the wall, untouched. A pack of diapers sits on the table.

He is wearing plaid flannel pants, nursing a glass of red wine and trying to talk about Mary, but he is distracted by his daughter, a Shirley Temple look-alike with curls and blue eyes.

“Don’t rip your book,” he says to her.

Every night after the hospital visit he makes dinner for Isabella, puts her to bed around 10 p.m. and then cooks dinner for himself. Every other Saturday night she is with Mary’s parents. Crocker’s mother stays over once a month; his father visits every few days.

He wants Mary and Isabella to have a relationship, so he rolls the stroller through the Queen St. entrance of St. Mike’s every day.

“We’re going to see Mom, make her feel better,” he tells her.

Crocker always leans in to kiss Mary, then lifts his daughter in the air and flies her in for kisses, since Mary can’t easily hold her. All the nurses on the ninth floor neurotrauma unit know the little girl. In the cafeteria, employees also know Isabella by name. She is lightness in a dreary place, waving at people through Plexiglas windows.

One grey December evening, as Isabella dozes, Crocker feeds Mary a coffee. “Take a few big breaths, the first one is always tricky,” he says before bringing the cup to Mary’s mouth.

Mary murmurs.

“You can’t talk while you’re drinking,” he tells her. “What do you want to say?”

He brings out the letter pad and Mary’s finger goes to the T.

“Don’t say thank you,” he says, as she spells exactly that.

“One time I kind of gave her hell for thanking me so much she spelled out, ‘I will thank you every time,’ ” he says.

Mary moans. It is the frustration of wanting to speak but being hobbled by a brain that knows something is wrong.

At this point Crocker recites a phrase he says every time she gets frustrated: “You have to make a big effort to calm everything down, with your lips together, breathe through your nose, calm down all the muscles and find the patterns of calmness.” Mary stops moaning and stares at him, transfixed.

“Once you start speaking from a calm position, you’ll have your voice back,” he says.

It sounds official. When asked where he learned it, Crocker laughs. He just made it up.

He talks about how they first met in 2008, at their housing co-op on Scadding Ave. Mary initially thought he was gay. Mary is listening, and smiles as the coffee dribbles down her chin.

“Remember that Mare?” he asks.

No, she intones through a little shake of her head.

“It’s okay. I’ll remember for you.”

There have been days when she mistakes him for her first husband, a marriage that ended years ago in divorce. He asks her to point to the letter of his first name. Today, she points to B, and looks annoyed.

“I know you know Mare — just checking,” he says.

Her brother, Alastair, is there too. Aside from his job at a grocery store bakery, this is where he spends most of his time. Apologetically, he tells Crocker he has to go. As he waits for the elevator, Mary moans. Crocker gets out the pad of letters and she starts to spell goodbye.

“Mary says goodbye!” Crocker shouts before Alastair gets on the elevator.

Alastair laughs. “Bye Mary,” he says before he disappears behind the closing elevator doors.

When Alastair Archer was young, people told him there was something “different” about him.

Since he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as an infant he has undergone surgeries on his foot, his brain and his eyes. At 23, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. But through it all, his best friend was his twin sister.

As a teenager with a disability, people weren’t keen on being his friend, he says. Mary took him to parties, cottages and clubs. She even oversaw his first drink, a bit of a disaster with wine, beer and peach schnapps.

“Because of her, I had friends. I had a blast.”

It was the kind of relationship that made everyone in the family proud.

Alastair now has to face the world by himself. He now comforts Mary when she cries, calls her sweetie and holds her hand when she gets too loud in the hospital cafeteria.

“Mary is still there, but her life is over,” Alastair says.

He knows his parents and Bob won’t give up and want to see her get better, but he says he is more realistic.

“I live a different side of the coin than Mom, Dad and Bob,” he says. “If a doctor came to me and said, ‘What do you want to do?’ I would let Mary have her baby, put her in a palliative care unit and let her pass on.”

He feels the hospital is giving up on her. They should be doing everything they can for her, including physiotherapy, he says.

“I have to be the big brother now because my sister doesn’t have a voice.”

Mary’s voice used to laugh: at the hilarity of her father leaving his wallet on the roof rack of the family car on a vacation, at the crazy talking toys her parents bought for the dogs. Her voice could clock up some pretty high speeds. “Mom, there’s a frog in our shower,” she once shrieked over a long distance line from Cuba. Since she awoke from the coma, the voice has broken through only sporadically.

The day before the baby was born, Mary had been squirming uncomfortably with contractions. Her mother reminded her she was eight months pregnant. Mary looked at her, confused.

“I was taking the pill,” she blurted out.

There were other instances of Mary speaking. When her friend Karen Curtis came to visit, Curtis looked at Mary and said, “Do you know what this is?”

“CWW?” Mary said.

Cheap white wine, an old inside joke.

After Isabella was born, Mary asked, “Who is her mother?”

“You are, Mary,” her parents replied.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

But soon after Isabella was born, Mary lost the ability to speak in sentences. Words occasionally pop out when she is distracted or trying to make a point. This past Monday, she was doing the crossword puzzle with her father. He asked for an eight-letter word for insanity, starting with a D.

“Dementia,” Mary moaned.

With short-term memory problems, the business of retraining the brain is difficult. If Mary can’t remember what she ate an hour ago, how can she remember how to walk?

Since last March, the Archers have taken their daughter to neuro-based physiotherapy in Yorkville twice a week, paid for by their daughter’s pension.

Physiotherapist Darryl Tracy tries to connect with Mary’s nervous system at these hour-long sessions. He taps his fingertips on her unresponsive right hand to try to wake the brain up.

He puts an ankle brace on Mary’s right leg for lateral stability before they try walking. Her right foot, like her right arm, doesn’t respond to the brain’s commands. When she walks, Mary’s brain feels unsafe because her ankle rolls, Tracy says. Through repeated use of the ankle brace, Tracy hopes to correct the rolling so Mary’s brain will feel safe on her feet so she can walk more confidently.

The purpose of rehab is to see what parts of the brain are functioning and recovering. Over the long term, the brain can reorganize itself, finding new ways to accomplish tasks.

“You can get to Sudbury through Orillia, or you can go another way,” explains Toronto Rehab’s Bayley, who is not involved in Mary’s care.

Bayley says there is optimism that over time people may improve, especially with ongoing research into different kinds of nerve medication.

“We’re determined she will walk again, somehow,” Heather says as she watches Mary lean on Tracy. “Even if it’s with a walker. That’s our goal.”

“She’s not 70 years old with nothing ahead of her.”

They worry she will only get worse without daily rehab.

Since her first fall after the shunt-revision surgery, her family says she has fallen four other times, the last leading to two craniotomies in May 2010.

The family has hospital records that detail the craniotomies. The first was done to remove blood that had collected on the surface of the brain, a subdural hematoma discovered after “she fell and bumped her head,” the record states. The surgery went well, according to records, but that night her condition deteriorated, and a CT scan revealed more blood pooling, this time between the skull and the brain. The fresh staples and stitches were taken out as doctors operated again.

She requires constant supervision, something St. Mike’s has provided one-on-one since the fifth fall, according to the Archers.

Mary has been to the Toronto Rehab Institute three times but returned to St. Mike’s due to urinary tract infections. Other rehab institutions, like Bridgepoint, have turned her down. Her family says the length of time that has passed since the incident, her need for 24-hour one-on-one care, and her short-term memory all work against her.

Bridgepoint wouldn’t discuss patient specifics.

“Patients referred for admission who have problems falling outside of our scope of practice are redirected to institutions better able to address specific clinical needs,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

The family has visited nursing homes at the urging of the hospital. At one place, the youngest person was 59 and most were in their 80s and 90s with dementia. Aside from a nursing home being, as Heather says, “no place for a young woman,” the Archers would have to pay for one-on-one overnight care out of pocket, which would cost at least a thousand dollars a week. The same would be true at rehab facilities. At St. Mike’s there is no additional cost for overnight monitoring, but the Archers worry that cannot last forever.

“Presumably Mary could stay here for the rest of her life,” her father says, sitting in the hospital cafeteria with yet another coffee.

While her mother stagnates in hospital, Isabella grows. She is now 2½. Intelligent, stubborn, a lover of the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

At 12 days old, she went to work with her dad in the basement office of the downtown co-op he manages. The early days are a haze, but Crocker remembers Tony Moffat-Lynch popping in for a visit.

Moffat-Lynch, who lives in the building, saw the baby in the basement office and suggested he take care of her for a while. As chair of the building’s maintenance committee, Moffat-Lynch was a friend of Crocker and felt terrible about what had happened.

His child-care experience was not robust. Born in England, he has acted, directed and designed drama-based rehab programs. He worked with renowned stage director George Luscombe, portrayed Group of Seven artist Frank Carmichael in a two-part CBC series, and was killed off as “David,” an angry student agitator in the 1970s horror movie Dr. Frankenstein on Campus.

At first, Crocker checked in on the unlikely duo every few minutes. Now, Moffat-Lynch is known as Uncle Tony, a beloved member of the extended family, a host of birthday parties, a reader of stories.

He never had children, and never thought he would be changing diapers in his mid-60s. His apartment is beautiful, with yellow tulips resting gently in a vase, a print of a pencil sketch by pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and a framed finger painting by Isabella. His bedroom has become her playroom, with teddy bears and an easel overtaking his floor.

After Christmas, Isabella comes into the apartment in a snowsuit.

“Hello beautiful!” he says.

Crocker and Moffat-Lynch begin to take off the snowsuit as she squirms. Within minutes crayons are scattered on his hardwood floors.

Crocker goes out to get a coffee for Uncle Tony, and when he comes back, Isabella has grabbed her favourite CD, Max Raabe and the Palast Orchester’s Das Carnegie Hall Konzert and inserted it into the stereo. The jaunty, German big band music reminiscent of the 1930s fills the room as she begins piling books up on the table for Uncle Tony to read.

Isabella has grown very cultured in Tony’s one-bedroom apartment while her dad works downstairs to pay the bills. “When she was a baby, I said to Bob, ‘Let’s spoil her, she deserves it,’ ” he says, with a laugh.

Every day, they sing and dance. Some days, he takes her to the Royal Ontario Museum to see the dinosaurs. He delights in showing her the world. Whenever Uncle Tony gives Isabella a dress, she insists he made it himself.

“My days are hers now,” he says. “I can’t remember before.”

Everyone knows Mary would have been a terrific mother. Isabella is the only part of life since the incident that Mary doesn’t forget.

“It hurts to the core to watch her watch Isabella and see her realize she can’t be the mother she wanted to be,” Heather says.

But Isabella is loved, by an extended family of grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents and this particular maintenance committee-chairman-turned-uncle.

People tell Tony he will get his life back when she goes to school.

“This is my life,” he says.

It is Paul Archer’s 63rd birthday, another without candles, since you can’t light those in hospital. His brother and sister-in-law are visiting, and Mary’s friend Karen Curtis has stopped in to gossip and show pictures on her BlackBerry. The Archers have brought their dogs, Binnie and Hamish, to the lobby.

Isabella is wearing a pink shirt with jewels splashed on the front, the one Uncle Tony calls “Bollywood bling.”

Alastair ordered the cake, but he is working and can’t be here. Mary has a slice, forgets and asks for another 30 minutes later.

The Archers are tired. Most of the heavy-lifting of parenting seemed finished back in 2009. Now they have to feed their grown daughter and wipe her face. They love her just the same — more, if that’s possible.

On day 1,012, so many questions are still left unanswered. What happened on April 8, 2009? If she was monitored more closely after surgery, would they be celebrating Paul’s birthday at home with a healthy daughter? How will Mary be five years from now?

They say they haven’t received a prognosis and feel ignored. They say the doctor assigned to Mary’s case is a busy neurosurgeon who spends most of his time in the operating room. But they do describe the medical staff who work with their daughter as wonderful, caring people who treat Mary like a sister.

“It just never should have happened in the first place,” Paul says.

“She wasn’t drinking and driving, she wasn’t hurting anybody,” notes Heather. “This didn’t happen because she did some dreadful thing. It happened here.”

The experience has made Heather and Paul philosophical about life, and about quality of life.

Both agree that if either of them was gravely ill without hope, no extreme measures should be taken to save them.

“For Mary’s sake, a lot of times Heather and I say to each other, ‘We kind of wish she did die,’ because it’s horrible to watch her like that, but then Mary doesn’t seem to realize the extent of it in a lot of ways,” Paul says. “Kids dying before you is horrible, but your kid dying in front of you and half coming back to life, living and partly living and not really living, it just goes on endlessly, it never ends.”

When it comes to supporting Mary, there is no choice for the people who love her.

“Knowing Mary is still fighting, I gotta stick by her,” Crocker says. “Today I felt like I could see hope for rehab, other days I think, ‘What am I doing?’ ”

Outside of her family and friends, no one wants to talk about Mary Archer. Toronto Western Hospital, where the family says Mary’s condition worsened prior to the surgery, says it “cannot speak about any patient who has received care at one of our sites,” and urged the family to contact its patient relations office for a complete investigation.

The Archers signed consent forms so a doctor familiar with Mary’s case at Toronto Rehab Institute could speak about her condition, but that interview was cancelled by TRI because the doctor did “not wish to discuss the case except with the patient’s family or her care team.” A more general interview was arranged.

St. Mike’s also had signed consent forms from the Archers and a list of detailed questions from the Star, and responded with a statement:

“We are committed to providing the best possible care to Mary Archer. As part of providing that care, it is crucial to maintain a relationship of trust with Ms. Archer and her family. Therefore, we will only discuss the details of Ms. Archer’s prognosis and care with her and her family.

“Ms. Archer has been admitted to St. Michael’s Hospital four times since February 2009 and has been here continuously since February 2010. Since her last admission, St. Michael’s has consulted with a large number of health-care facilities, including rehabilitation centres. None of these contacts resulted in successful discharge.

“We will provide the best care possible as long as Ms. Archer is here and will continue to work with her and her family to find the best possible, long-term, health-care arrangement for her.”

The Archers feel there should be a probe, committee or advisory group set up to examine options for patients like Mary, who are turned down for care at rehab centres and left to stagnate in hospital unless they can afford private options.

They have written twice to Health Minister Deb Matthews, describing the case in detail and asking if there is a suitable place for their daughter where costs are taken care of.

“Is there anything at all — in this obviously un-universal health care system — that can be done to help a vulnerable and once vital young woman like Mary?”

The Archers never got a reply. Matthews said her office called a family member who had reached out, but neither Heather, Paul nor Bob received a call.

In an interview with the Star, Matthews said the ministry is working hard to provide care to patients who are turned down for complex care at OHIP-funded rehab centres and can’t afford private rehab.

“We know we have people in hospital who could be cared for in a different setting that might well be a higher quality of care. That is the highest priority of our (local health integration networks) right now, to resolve the (alternate level of care) issue, and what that means is creating appropriate places, because they don’t always exist now.”

Matthews said she couldn’t speak specifically to Mary Archer’s situation, but had read the letters and called it “a tragic, tragic case.”

“I would say to people to please work with the patient advocate at the hospital, to work with the (community care access centres). We’re all motivated to find the right care for people.”

The Archers feel the system is broken, with the most vulnerable people not getting the help they need.

They believe the right care is at the Neurologic Rehabilitation Institute of Ontario, a private option that would cost $26,000 a month for round-the-clock care and rehabilitation, with extra charges for equipment, prescriptions, meetings, special foods and therapy supplies. Doctors from NRIO have met with Mary and consider her a good candidate.

But the family doesn’t have the $30,000 a month they think it would cost with all the extras.

The Archers have a lawyer, but pursuing legal action is a lengthy process. They are more worried about their daughter’s immediate health-care concerns.

For Paul, who doesn’t think Mary will ever come back fully, the only joy he gets is trying to find her help.

“We would like St. Mike’s to step up to the plate and say, ‘Okay look, this is a grey area, but harm came to Mary while she was in here, we’ll give you some money to send her to NRIO for a year and see what happens,” he says. “Then after a year, presumably she’d be way better and we could do something else.”

Mary is staring at her parents. She will forget this conversation soon.

They will remember for her.

In my year-and-a-bit there so far, I wish I had gotten to know Jim better. That’s one thing I’ve found — the wisdom, let alone stories of the “good old days,” from reporting veterans is so valuable. I’ve experienced this working with other reporters and photographers at various newspapers, too.

And it’s funny because I can think of some gruff, tough, knowledgeable reporters who’ve known the ropes since the 70s or 80s — who are still going strong — and they’re some of the people I loved working with the most.

So, with that in mind, good luck Jim. And here’s a look at some of his photos from over the years. (All via the Toronto Star)

1979: Actor Ed Asner hams it up at the Toronto Press Club bar during a visit to the city in his "Lou Grant" TV persona.

1988: A worker celebrates after installing the first seat at SkyDome, which opened the following year.

1990: A woman leans out the 2nd-floor window of an Adelaide St. mannequin shop, creating an interesting illusion.

1997: A Peel police constable leads a gaggle of Canada geese on a 4-kilometre trek to protect them from cars.

2005: A bullet hole in a church window still remains as people gather to hear words of comfort and rage.

2008: York University biology professor Laurence Packer examines a carpenter bee from Kenya.

SEE A FULL PHOTO GALLERY

I’ve heard mixed reviews from people about this video actually. Everyone mostly agrees that the 5-on-1 gimmick is pretty mesmerizing, but not everyone likes the song. I guess that happens. It’s a cover song anyway.

It’s definitely still worth a watch!

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via:
Raju Mudhar
Toronto Star

A Burlington-based band has captured social media lightning in a bottle with their unique video featuring five musicians performing a song on one guitar.

Walk off the Earth does write and perform original material, but it is a cover of “Somebody That I Used to Know,” originally sung by Gotye featuring Kimbra, that is racking up the hits on YouTube. The video has been viewed more than 4.5 million times since it was posted on Jan. 5.

The video features the band and singer Sarah Blackwood crowded around a single acoustic guitar, with each member strumming, or picking tones and even the percussionist knocking on the guitar to create the beat.

The video has attracted a celebrity admirer in actor Russell Crowe, who watched it and then tweeted it out to his followers: “Check out Walk off the Earth’s cover of Somebody That I Used To Know. Brilliant.”

Crowe, who is appearing on the season premiere Wednesday of the CBC’s Republic of Doyle, went on to call the band “a revelation. What a collection of voices” upon hearing some of their original work.

The group’s video for “Somebody That I Used to Know,” shows off its acoustic side, although the band plays a variety of genres. Their YouTube channel features several other covers.

The band expressed delight and surprise on its Twitter feed today to all of the attention its received since the video was posted.

They also posted this note on their Facebook page: “To all the independent musicians out there. I hope this shows that you can make a name for your band with no help from record labels and management and next to no money. Stay true to your dreams and your passions, whether they be music related or not. Don’t wait for people to help you because they never will. The only time the music industry will want to help you is when you have done all the work yourself!”

OBV!

They have a new track and I’m psyched about it. It’s pretty similar to their old stuff, but it’s been four years since they’ve released an album, so my enthusium is peaked.

New album to come! New song to listen to! <3

NEW TRACK: LISTEN TO ‘SIMPLE SONG’

The tune immediately takes me back to university in Ottawa. Reminds me so much of cranking up ‘Wincing the Night Away’ — in particular, the track ‘Australia’ — and dancing around my room. Is there a catchier song? I dare you to find one.

* * *

via:
Jeff Sonderman
Poynter

The average person looking at a smartphone screen right now is more likely to come across news from your organization through a Facebook or Twitter app than through your own news app.

Recent studies of mobile and tablet audience behaviors are telling roughly the same story: Most users spend most of their time playing games and social networking.

U.S. mobile or tablet app users spend 30 percent of their time in social networking (second only to games at 49 percent), while news apps capture only 6 percent of total time, according to new Flurry Analytics data.

Nielsen data from Android phones showed about eight of 10 people used the Facebook app in a given month — making it the most popular app except for the Android Market itself. Google found that social media, along with games and e-mail, were the most common activities for tablet users.

All this means social media is essential not only to your Web strategy, but your mobile strategy as well.

So, if most people spend most of their app time on games and social networks, does this mean news apps are a wasted investment? No, because a news app is not for most people.

An app is good for at least two things: Serving the most-loyal fraction of your established audience, and getting them to pay.

The app fulfills those readers so dedicated to your brand that they want on-demand access to a comprehensive bundle of your content. These people who value your content most also are most likely to pay for it, and the app stores make those payments and subscriptions easier.

Pew Research Center data supports this, finding people who use a news app are your “power users,” more likely get news daily, spend more time with news, and more willing to pay.

So while a revenue-generating app may be the goal and business model of your mobile strategy, it shouldn’t be your whole strategy. To reach larger mobile audiences and draw them in as new loyal readers, you need strong engagement through social media and the mobile Web.

I went to see The Devil Inside tonight. I walked into that theatre with the plan to get scared. I figured I’d have to go home and watch something funny to forget my terror.

But alas, it was probably the worst movie I’ve seen in a long, long, looong time. Or maybe it was the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Ever.

There was terrible acting, the plot went nowhere, there was basically no ending, and all the “scary” parts ended before they could actually get scary. And the only part that made me jump was when a dog barked on-screen. Brutal, now that’s the sign of an awful horror movie.

It truly deserves the 1/2 star the Toronto Star gave it in a review. Plus, after seeing such a terrible movie, reading this review after the fact was hilarious.

In case you, too, wish you could get your money back after watching this monstrosity, enjoy this review.

* * *

Review: The devil didn’t do it

via
Peter Howell
Toronto Star

Here it is just the first week of January, and already we have a strong candidate for the worst movie of 2012.

The Devil Inside is presented as a rogue documentary of a real exorcism, beginning with a disclaimer that the Vatican had nothing to do with it.

For once, those Vatican censors made a smart call. This farcical work of fiction plays like an instructional video on how not to get the devil out, unless the embarrassment of dealing with idiots would be enough to send Satan packing.

The only thing possessed about The Devil Inside is the horrifically shaky camera work, which may also have been done by a drunken chimp.

It begins in 1989 in the U.S., after suburban mom Maria Rossi (Suzan Crowley) dials 911 to report she’s just killed two priests and a nun. The cops note that she keeps a very messy house and swings a big blade.

Stunned local journos report that Maria and the clerics were “holding a church meeting.” In reality — da-dum! — it was a failed exorcism. Maria is shipped off to a nuthouse in Italy, for reasons that undoubtedly have more to do with filmmaking tax incentives than what passes for a plot.

“She just had a huge heart,” says Maria’s daughter Isabella (Fernanda Andrade), not yet fully grasping the devilish details. Yes, dear, and mom also had a really huge axe, too.

Isabella wants to know what really went down, partially for selfish reasons: “Am I gonna flip out some day?”

She travels to Rome and enlists the support of two rookie exorcists, Catholic priests Ben (Simon Quarterman) and David (Evan Helmuth). They’re enrolled at the Vatican’s exorcism school, even though the Church is highly reluctant to do any exorcisms.

Maybe that’s because they’re awfully messy, don’t really get the job done and can also lead to the transference of demons from one sucker to the next.

And there — da-dum! — is your next big plot twist, as The Devil Inside turns into a satanic version of Where’s Waldo?, minus the fun.

There’s no shortage of unintentional laughs, however, as we watch Isabella, Ben and David clownishly try to take down Mama Maria, who is possessed by no fewer than four different demons.

I’m no exorcism expert, but when your possessed subject has superhuman strength, it seems like a good idea to use restraints that are stronger than a strand of dental floss.

Oh, and perhaps we shouldn’t put someone who is in the full throes of the satanic shakes unrestrained in the back seat of a speeding car?

I’m just trying to be helpful.

Even at 87 minutes, this scare-free and talent-deprived waste of film drags. No mean feat to be this dull in this short of time.

Perhaps this isn’t entirely surprising, if you note that director William Brent Bell’s previous film and TV endeavours have gone by such memorable titles as Aliens for Breakfast, A Bucket of Blood and Pinocchio’s Revenge.

We’re not dealing with a master here, and that goes for the flaming red dude with the pitchfork, too. You can blame Satan for a lot of bad things, but not The Devil Inside.

BUT. There’s a but. If ever there was a reason not to drink and drive, it’s this. No matter if you’re a good or bad person, there are always consequences.

* * *

via:
Peter Small
Toronto Star

A Cuban cigar executive with an “exemplary” background has been sentenced to two years in federal prison for a drunk-driving accident that left a cyclist permanently disabled.

Dressed in a neat blue blazer and tan slacks, Jose Lugo-Alonso, 61, hugged his weeping wife of 41 years and waved at well-wishers before he was led away in handcuffs Friday.

“Mr. Lugo-Alonso has no criminal record and this offence stands out as a complete aberration in an otherwise exemplary life,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Harriet Sachs said in her ruling.

William Crawford, the 57-year-old cyclist who Lugo-Alonso hit, was left partially deaf and with only 35 per cent of his vision, forcing him to give up his civil service job. He was not in court Friday.

Lugo-Alonso admitted to drinking at least four ounces of rum before getting into his van and driving south on Jarvis St. on the night of July 21, 2008.

An expert said he would have had 145 to 205 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood, well above the legal limit.

He struck Crawford as the experienced cyclist was waiting on Jarvis to make a left turn onto The Esplanade. The impact caused his bicycle to go flying into Lugo-Alonso’s windshield.

Crawford, who doesn’t remember the accident, spent three months in hospital. He still has vertigo and permanent ringing in his ears, and suffers from depression because of his much altered life.

As he told the judge, his life is “slower, harder and considerably less interesting than it used to be.”

The judge noted that Lugo-Alonso’s pre-sentence report and positive letters from family and friends reveal the father of two grown children to be a caring family man with high moral values.

Previously only a social drinker, he has since given up alcohol, the judge said.

He moved to Canada from Cuba in 2003 and is president of Havana House Cigars and Tobacco Merchants Ltd., with an office in Toronto. He will be deported to Cuba once he serves his sentence.

He has expressed genuine remorse for the accident. “He wishes it had been him who had been injured in that accident, not Mr. Crawford,” Sachs said.

Defence lawyer Martin Kerbel asked for a jail term of between 18 and 30 months and a driving prohibition of five years.

Crown prosecutor Karen Erlick argued for a five to 10 year driving prohibition and a prison sentence of five years.

But the judge noted that where judges have previously imposed sentences of four to five years, deaths were involved.

For instance, Sachs noted, former Toronto Maple Leafs captain Rob Ramage got four years for a drunk driving crash that claimed the life of his passenger, close friend and fellow NHL retiree Keith Magnuson.

She said sentencing Lugo-Alonso to two years – the length of time that triggers an automatic trip to federal prison – will reflect the seriousness of the offence.