SECTION TWO
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25, 1990
Brown checks emergency supplies used on ambulance calls.
Rustv Brown, assistant supervisor of the Douglas County Ambulance Service, cuts open the roof of a car
Gretchen Piggenger/KANSAN
Medic knows a special life in the fast lane
By Buck Taylor
Kansan staff writer
At 5:33 p.m., Douglas County Ambulance Service paramedic Ruby Brown almost was finished taking a shower when a dispatcher's voice announced that a man was choking in the kitchen of a Lawrence hotel.
Brown hurriedly dressed and slid into the driver's seat of unit 821, still tucking in his white uniform shirt. His partner was en route to the call. It was 5:56 p.m.
The air horn blasted through the wall of the siren as Brown slowed to clear traffic at an intersection two blocks from the hotel. He a shot menacing look at one driver who casually pulled out in front of the ambulance.
The sirens were cut as the ambulance pulled into the hotel driveway less than a block away.
A concerned hotel guest quickly moved aside as Brown and his partner, both laden with equipment, were led to a small room where they nursed an elderly man sat clutching a glass of water.
A police officer informed the medics that a waiter had performed the Heilmus maneuver successfully on the man, who had choked on a piece of meat minutes
The patient was breathing normally and declined the paramedics' recommendation.
The man apologized for "all the trouble he had caused" and recounted stories about his father's participation in Quantum Dot experiments, then promised to take it easy for the night.
This was the seventh run Brown made that day. He considered it a busy day for his unit, stationed at 225 Maine St., one of three units on duty daily in the county
While returning the medication box to its cabinet in the truck, Brown commented on how lucky the man had been that night.
"Prompt intervention and another life saved," he said. "That's the way it should
However, Brown knew that this call, one of an average 11 that DCAS responds to any given day, was uncommon. On a job that can bring much sadness, happy endings often are not possible — but always are welcome.
"One of the things that keeps you doing this job is the thanks you get from the people you help," he said. "When you can tell you made a difference and eased someone's suffering, even for a short period of time, that's one of the biggest rewards."
A Helping Hand
Although his original career aspirations
included wanting to be a cardiovascular surgeon, Brown, 35, joined DCA in 1983 after toying with a variety of occupations that included nursing home administrator.
"Ive always been interested in the helping-type professions," he said. "In this field there is a potential to make a big difference in somebody's life."
Love Rector, Brown's partner, said one of Brown's strengths was establishing a safe space for her.
"He's very knowledgeable," Rector said. "He relates good to the younger college age as far as drug overdoses and other things, I think it helped going to school around the drug scene. He gives them honest answers."
Perhaps Brown's background in psychology gives him an edge. He planned to pursue counseling but left KU a few hours after graduation, for reasons he preferred not to discuss.
To help console his youngest patients, Brown was known to keep a stash of balloons handy, co-workers said. He has tied balloon animals for day-care center children as well as for his six-year-old daughter's friends' birthday parties.
Although Brown enjoys working with children, he said emergencies involving infants and small children were the most difficult to deal with. He said seeing the lifeless, helpless face of a baby was the worst possible scenario.
"I ran a call on a seven-month-old not breathing that happened not too long after I'd lost a baby of my own," he said. "So having that personal tragedy happen just made that seem all that much more severe."
With one child and another on the way,
Brown said he liked the amount of time his
See MEDIC, p. 6
Internships provide career insights
The Associated Press
College students may discover that the best way to find a job after graduation is to find a job during college through internships.
"An internship is the often answer to more questions than most students even realize they have," said Barbara Yanowski, faculty member and adviser to the internship program at Columbia College in Chicago.
She said that virtually every department in the liberal arts school at Columbia had a formal internship program and that more than 160 Chicago-area employers participated.
Working with professionals in the field helps students focus on their career goals and objectives, Yanowski said.
"It's hard to know what you want to do if you've never done it before. Students not only learn from co-
"Of course, the most important question is, 'Will I get a job after college?' But there are other questions as well," she said. "'What do I want to do? Where do I want to work? Am I taking the right classes?' An internship program helps students gain a perspective on who they are and what they want in school and out."
See INTERN, p. 6
Program offers overseas employment
By Chris Siron
Kansan staff writer
Students interested in international careers can get a boost from a KU program that matches U.S. students with overseas businesses for internships.
Audrey Luster, AIESEC Kansas vice president of public relations, said AIESEC, a program active in 67 countries, worked to find internships for AIESEC members.
AIESEC is the French acronym for the International Association of Students in Economics and Business Management.
To be considered for an internship, students must be active in an AIESEC branch and pay club dues, she said. The KU branch office is 345B Summerfield Hall. Dues are $2 a semester. Dues are divided between the AIESEC international office, in Brussels, Belgium, and the KU chapter.
The KU program has about 30 members. Most of them are in the School of Business, but others come from fields such as engineering and art and design. They also teach competitive basis. Not all members earn internships.
For each U.S. student sent overseas, a foreign student comes to the United States to work as a
U. S. students generally complete their internships during the summer, and foreign students often serve theirs during different times of the year.
Luster said she expected three or four KU students
to participate in internships next year.
One internship was awarded to a KU student last year. Tim Damewood, Lawrence graduate student, worked in Finland on the AIESEC internship last summer. He did accounting and computer programming work in a Finnish factory.
"The selection process was competitive, but it's particularly a matter of matching what the company is looking for," Damewood said. "I really just went for the experience. It was a very positive summer work environment."
Michele Samuels, vice president of AIESEC programming in Washington, D.C., said most of the program's expenses were paid for with feet from participating companies. The program also receives money from corporate sponsors, like Xerox Corp. and AT&T.
The program is not for profit, and participants do not earn academic credit. Salaries are only intended to pay room-and-board expenses. The amount is based on the destination country's cost of living.
Damewood said he did not plan to return to the factory or work overseas in the near future.
Luster said that after students graduated, they sometimes returned to the business they had an internship with for a permanent job.
AIESEC has been in the United States since 1989. The KU program is two years old. About 350 U.S. students go overseas through AIESEC internships each year.
Future looks bright for infant who got twin brother's heart
The Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS — The parents of a newborn who received the heart of his brain-dead twin brother may be in danger from their daughter within weeks.
Alison Paige Whisman, believed to be the first recipient of a heart from an infant twin, wrigled on her hospital bed in pink box clothing. The Whisman watched a sonogram of their dead son's heart beating inside her.
"She acts normal and is quite well," said Dr. Randall L. Caldwell. "I'd say her prognosis is good, but the heart disease that they have baked her heart transplant."
The baby, called Peige by her parents, may be able to leave the Bley Hospital for Children in 10 days to two weeks, Caldwell said.
Their daughter's progress is uplifting to the parents, whose ordeal after their twins' birth April 10 "was a roller coaster ride and it was all downhill for about four days," Whisman said.
Four weeks premature, Paige was
born a minute before her brother,
Tyler Joseph, and appeared normal.
Tyler asphyxiated in the womb just
before birth for unknown reasons.
The next morning, Paige's coloring changed, tipping off doctors that she had a fatal heart defect. While one child lay ill and the other brain dead on a life-support system, Paula Whisman wondered whether Tyler's heart could be transplanted into Paige.
Because the twins were not identical, the chances of an organ match were uncertain. The Whimsies, who are Roman Catholics, had their babies baptized during Easter week as they waited for test results on their children.
On Good Friday, Whisman remembered, he drove 20 miles home to Cicero to work on the couple's tax return and called back to the hospital to talk to his wife. "Honey, honey, Tyler's heart is compatible," he recalled her saying.
The next day, Tyler's heart was transplanted into Paige.
Argument continues among scientists concerning the tracing of man's roots
The Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS — Did we all descend from Eve, an African woman whose offspring literally conquered the world?
Though of course no one knows her name, some biologists and anthropologists believe that all human tracies its roots to just one woman. This idea, known as the Eve hypothesis, or the Garden of Eden theory, is intriguingly simple:
Lived in sub-Saharan Africa 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. As the ancestors of modern humans, her children and grandchildren spread throughout Africa and eventually across the world, triggering the extinction of other primitive peoples.
Or so some scientists believe.
Others ridicule the idea. The theory, based on a comparison of the genes of people around the world, is one of the most hotly controversies in the field of human Origins.
At a meeting earlier this year of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, both sides argued their cases with facts, speculation and sarcasm.
Allan C. Wilson of the University of California at Berkeley, one of the architects of the Eve hypothesis, said the evidence was so clear that argument is done, clinched, finished. "It's over," he says.
Not quite, countered the other side
"There are serious and obvious flaws in the Eve hypothesis," said Geoffrey G. Pope of the University of Illinois.
Most agree that small-brained, human-like creatures arose in Africa 1.5 million to 2 million years ago. They spread throughout Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia and flourished for hundreds of thousands of years.
But what became of them? The theory favored by Pope and many fossil experts says that those creatures, known as homo erectus, are the true ancestors of us all.
If they are right, these early hominids parted company in Africa but went on to evolve in unison. Useful genetic changes that
However, Garden of Eden theorists believe those early settlers disappeared, leaving no trace in humanity's genes. Instead, they say they have evidence that a new kind of people arose in Africa much more recently. Their kin also spread throughout the prehistoric era, perhaps through migration to the European Neanderthalth and other descendants of the first wave out of Africa.
arose in small pockets of population slowly spread throughout the world as neighboring tribes mingled. After thousands of centuries, these people developed a differ only in superficial racial features.
The difference between the scenarios is so stark that there seems to be no middle
ground or room for compromise.
The debate began about three years ago with the use of new scientific techniques to look for signs of the family tree inside the genes of modern humans. This intrusion of modern humans into the forest was always been accepted graciously by the traditional fossil hunters.
David W. Frayer, a Neanderthal expert from the University of Kansas, said the quick acceptance of Eve reflected a preference for sensational catastrophe in favor of mundane gradual change, as well as a "willingness of some to accept without criticism, or even suspicion, the results of molecular biology."