My father, the wonderful and caring person whom my students can blame for much of my sense of humor, is in the hospital. (He’s doing well and should be released in a few days.) While my fourteen-year-old daughter Margaret didn’t technically save his life, she did figure out a key piece of information that enabled doctors to make sense of a key data point that was baffling them, enabling them to come up with a diagnosis that makes sense and fits all of the data.
To give a little background, my dad is a type 2 diabetic who has had a stroke, quadruple bypass surgery and has arthritis. Needless to say, he doesn’t move very well these days. However, he gets around with a walker for short distances and a powered wheelchair for longer ones.
He has loved trains all his life, and after a two-year hiatus, decided to take a cross-country train trip to visit my sister in San Diego. I helped him plan the trip, requesting wheelchair assistance at each station and he purchased a hemi walker that he could use in the aisles on the train. He had a bedroom for the entire trip, and the car attendants knew to bring meals from the dining car to his room.
He had fallen a couple of times before the trip, so I talked with him about being careful and not overbalancing, and I asked his car attendant to check in on him periodically during the trip. Unfortunately, the falls were becoming more frequent and he fell several times on the train. Eventually, for his own safety, they had to take him off the train in Albuquerque and I had to fly out to meet him and fly back with him.
He was in very bad shape when I arrived in Albuquerque. He could barely stand even for a few seconds, so I had to help him do everything, using a wheelchair to get him into his seat on the airplane. We got him home that night, and a friend stayed with him so he could get into bed and could get to the bathroom during the night. He fell again during the night, and when the EMTs from his building came to assist, they found that his blood sugar was dangerously high, so they took him to the hospital.
In the hospital, the doctors discovered that his electrolytes were out of balance, and in particular, his calcium levels were very high (which would account for the muscle weakness). However, they were unable to figure out the cause of the high calcium levels.
Enter Margaret, my fourteen-year-old daughter, who will be a freshman in high school this fall. When she heard this, she whispered to me, “Dad! Grandpa is always taking TUMS (antacids), sometimes as many as four at a time. TUMS are calcium carbonate. Could that be where the calcium is coming from?” I thought about it and realized that she was right about the antacids. He had asked me for quite a few of them during the 18-hour trip from Albuquerque back to Boston, despite the fact that he had hardly eaten anything. I told Margaret to tell the doctor what she told me. After some explanation (he was probably taking at least 15-20 antacids a day), the doctor realized that this was indeed a plausible explanation for his high calcium levels. By the next morning, the medical team all agreed that the TUMS were likely to blame for the calcium, and shifted their investigation to finding out why he needed to take so many of them.
They discovered that his esophagus was inflamed, which likely felt like acid reflux to him. However, because the antacids didn’t cure the problem, he assumed that he had worse-than-usual heartburn and took more of them, causing the calcium overdose. Today, the doctors will look at his esophagus and stomach with an endoscope, attempt to determine the extent of the problem, and decide on a treatment plan. When he goes home (probably in a few days, assuming he has his strength back), he knows that he needs to monitor his antacid intake, stopping before he reaches the maximum safe dose.
Margaret’s ability to connect the chemistry (the active ingredient in TUMS is calcium carbonate) to the biology (Dad’s calcium levels were very high, causing the muscle weakness that we saw) is exactly the kind of high-level thinking that I try to teach my students. I want them to use their brains as if someone’s life depends on it!
Wow! The more I watch the children, the more I realize that we are going to be left in the dust by them! Okay, none of the parents are particularly stupid, but the children put things together so much more quickly than we ever did. Thank God your daughter took the evidence and put things together to come to a reasonable hypothesis. Thank God you aren’t the sort of parent who says, “Yes dear, that’s nice” and toss the idea out the window. Thank God you are teaching other young people to think clearly and use the facts at hand to formulate a hypothesis to test. Thank God for teachers like you. (And for the record, I *DO* in fact thank God for teachers and my very very clever friends every day.)