Celebration of Life: Become a bone marrow donor

By Jonathan Tamayo

Missing Call Letters

 

Bone marrow receipents dancing to 'I Will Survive.'

A couple of weeks ago I went to the 33rd annual Celebration of Life at the City f Hope Hospital for bone marrow recipients and donors. I’ve gone the last five years since my dad received a bone marrow transplant there.

The event always has good food, good music, and a bounce house and games for kids. I enjoy going every year becasue it’s always humbling to talk to people who have stared death in the face and gave him their right hook…really helps put things in perspective.   There is usually a great speaker too, and the program closes with a group picture of all the survivors. Inside the hospital, you can see all the group pictures starting from 1976 and can literally see the number of survivors grow and grow each year.

None of these survivors, including my dad, would be here today if it weren’t for all the doctors and donors who have saved countless lives. My dad was fortunate enough to have a match through his sister, but others aren’t so lucky.

Brown widow spiders are taking over!

By Jonathan Tamayo

Missing Call Letters

Ever since I was a kid I was told to run away from or kill any black widows I saw. That’s not so much the case anymore, because there’s a new spider is town that’s taking the crown.

The brown widow spider — a tropical species unknown in the region just a few years ago — is suddenly all over Orange County. The brown widow has gone from being extremely rare to common in Coastal California. Arachnologist Lenny Vincent of Fullerton College goes as far as calling Orange County the epicenter for these spiders in a paper he published this month.

But don’t fret just yet. Although brown widows have more powerful venom, they release less of their deadly ooze when they bite as opposed to black widows. Becasue of this, effects of their bites are more mild and include soreness and redness as opposed to muscle rigidity from black widows.

5.0 quake hits Southland

By Jonathan Tamayo

Missing Call Letters

Just felt another earthquake. According to USGS it was a 5.0 at Lennox, CA at 8:39 pm. Check out my previous blog post on earthquake safety tips and how some scientists believe the ‘big one’ may come from small earthquakes like tonight’s.

3/24/2009

There’s been a slew of minor earthquakes the last couple of months and this morning there was a whopping 24 quakes recorded near the Salton Sea with a magnitude of 4.8, including one that could have caused moderate damage. 

The scary part isn’t that there were 24 earthquakes within a 15 minute period, but that it comes at a time when scientists are watching to see if small faults are transferring energy to the more dangerous San Andreas Fault,  inevitably causing the Big One.

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