Congratulations to Dave and Joan Bacall

We send greetings to the newest addition to the Bacall family: Jocelyn Calista, born Friday, April 11, 2008.



All the best to Joan, Dave, and baby Jocelyn.

Back in gear

The weather on Saturday afternoon was wonderful. Though it looked like it might rain the morning, by the late afternoon it was 70 and mostly sunny. It would have been difficult to not hop on my bike and ride for a bit.

So, even though I'm in the middle of a bathroom remodel and (slowly) packing for the big move to Allentown, I loaded the bike onto the car and made my way to the Spring Mill access to the Schuylkill River Trail.

This was my first long ride of the year. It felt great to pedal 20 miles out to Valley Forge and back. The wind seemed to be fighting me for part of the way, but I still managed an average of over 13 mph. The other logistic difficulty was swarms of black gnats, which seemed to appear from nowhere and disappear just as quickly.

There were a couple changes on the trail since I rode on it last. Since the garage at the Norristown Transportation Center went up, they reconfigured the trail to make it a straighter shot, which is appreciated. I also saw that near the end of Conshohocken Road a new railbed has been laid. It looks like a grade crossing will be build across the road. I'm curious what industry in the area is paying for the spur and crossing to be built.

Spring is really trying to arrive

Mother Nature is trying her hardest to make a spring appearance. The daffodils in our flower bed are strutting their stuff. The bleeding hearts are also starting to appear, while the hostas are a bit slower to come out of their hibernation.

A true sign that spring has arrived was an unmistakable noise heard during my first long (8-mile) bike ride of the season. It was the Mister Softee jingle. I couldn't actually see the ice cream truck from my vantage point on the Schuylkill River Trail. At first I thought it was a figment of my imagination as I ended my ride -- some sort of subconscious message telling me that I deserved a cool treat for my pedaling. The tune started softly and crescendoed as I approached Lee Street in Conshohocken. My guess is that the truck was driving down Hector Street. I just smiled and kept pedaling, knowing that spring had sprung.

Trauma Center in Chester County?

I recently got an e-mail from my US Representative, Jim Gerlach, discussing the need for a trauma center in Chester County. As an emergency medical services worker, I would applaud the creation and ongoing support of such a facility. Driving a patient 75 minutes by ground ambulance to a trauma center is a miserable experience. Spending the patient's "golden hour" in the back of an ambulance is not appropriate. However, having lived in far western Montgomery County and served with an ambulance squad that bordered Chester County, I know that even in the early 1990s we frequently used helicopter services to "MedEvac" patients to trauma centers. Our ground transport times to a major trauma center in Center City Philadelphia would have been about 40 minutes, hence the frequent use of helicopters.

Looking at a recent news article, the proposed cost of running a trauma center in Chester County is to be between $5 million and $8 million per year. From a purely economic standpoint, it's a no-brainer that this would be a money-losing proposition. The last trauma center in Chester County, Brandywine Hospital, closed its doors in 2002, citing financial reasons for its demise. So what has changed since 2002 that would cause a new trauma center to succeed where others have failed?

It's expected that 500 trauma patients per year would come to the proposed Chester County trauma center. At a cost of $8 million, that translates to $16,000 per trauma patient. That's a lot more than it costs to fly somebody to Center City trauma center. I acknowledge that helicopters aren't always available due to other commitments and weather. Furthermore, nationwide helicopter EMS have a spotty safety record. On a nearly-monthly basis somewhere around the country there is a report of a chopper going down.

Consider what Chestnut Hill Hospital, a small community hospital in Philadelphia near the border of Montgomery County is doing for heart patients with a specific cardiac condition: they are FLYING them to Presbyterian Medical Center in Center City. The same goes for any major trauma patient that ends up at Chestnut Hill, who possibly gets flown to a Center City trauma center. In the case of cardiac patients, the ground transport to Presbyterian Medical Center would normally be about 30 minutes. I'm actually having a hard time figuring out the finances behind this arrangement, but that discussion is for another time.