Vitamin D: key to surgery recovery?

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Good evening, 66.1ers.

Another good week! Here’s what’s been happening:  

Had coffee with Dr. Jennifer Stevane on Wednesday. She’s a surgeon trying to make surgery better for patients. Did you know that your recovery from surgery is going to go much more smoothly if your Vitamin D levels are between 50-70 ng/mL? Or that certain surgeries are as traumatic as a car crash? Or that the most common side effect from surgery is constipation? And she’s helping patients make sense of all that stuff so they can recover more quickly and more fully when surgery needs to happen. Check out Dr. Stevane’s work at Center for Holistic Surgery. 

Been thinking a lot about time spent in Zambia, too. Not sure why, probably something to do with the fact that I’ve had a little more time for reflection lately. That and some conversations with folks being treated by rural medicine facilities got me thinking about Zambia. There was a small clinic in Mutwewankoko (village that was home for a couple years), but nothing fancy. Could treat malaria and help with delivering babies, but if the delivery got complicated, you’d want to be seen somewhere else ASAP. No cars in the village, though, so you’d call the ambulance from the village 10 kilometers up the road and (as long as they weren’t already in town) they’d drive 10 kilometers to pick you up, then 70 kilometers to town where the hospital was. Roads were rough, so a 90 minute drive. Goes without saying that outcomes weren’t always as desired…

Back to the United States, Mayo Clinic work. Talked to a patient yesterday who has a 3-inch mass growing on her sternum. Been there since October and keeps growing. Needs the doctor to test it so they can figure out what it is and send her to the right doctor to deal with it. But they need imaging before they start using their needles and blades. And the CT scan was already done a couple months ago. But the hospital that did the scan got bought out and the new place lost the records for 1,400 patients. There’s a class action lawsuit and her mass is still growing because no one will touch it without the imaging! Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? If the people responsible for these records realize that they’re taking an active role in shortening people’s lives? Why it’s so hard to get another CT scan? What this mass means for someone with a history of cancer?

Let’s end this week with one more bit about Zambia. The funny thing was, despite the lack of “fix it right now” resources, people were healthier on the average. And certainly happier (isn’t this a part of being healthier?). More active: walking to their fields, to their fishing boats, to church. Biking if it was a longer journey. 10,000 steps was easy (not that anyone was counting!). Cleaner diets: organic, naturally raised whole foods from the bush surrounding the village and from their own subsistence farms. Plus, they didn’t eat as much. Everyone seemed to wait until lunch before they ate (intermittent fasting, anyone?). 9 hours of sleep is a lot easier to come by when you’re not distracted by anything that requires electricity, too. There’s more here, certainly a whole newsletter, maybe even a whole book chapter. For this week, though, might just be worth thinking about how to implement all this stuff in your busy, Western life? Maybe a better question is, is there one thing here that you might be able to implement this week? LMK if you have a question?

Have fun out there. 

Marcus

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