A Message From The Creator

“Whatever relationships you have attracted in your life at this moment, are precisely the ones you need in your life at this moment. There is a hidden meaning behind all events, and this hidden meaning is serving your own evolution.” 
― Deepak Chopra

Inspirational Woman Of The Day

Emine Saner

The Guardian March 7, 2011

Article History

Paula Rego

Portuguese painter who broke boundaries at the Slade School of Art and was nominated for the Turner prize in her 50s

To look over Paula Rego‘s body of work is to look over the landscape of women’s experience: desire, abortion, rape, female circumcision, childbirth, family relationships, dominating and being dominated by men; her masculine female figures are sometimes lonely, but usually fierce and often bent on revenge. Success came relatively late in life – a graduate of the Slade School of Art at a time when female artists were taught how to support and inspire their “superior” male artist partners (“women were good either for going to bed with or making good wives – particularly if they came with their own moneyand could support the men”.)

Rego, now 75, was in her 40s before her first big solo exhibition, and in her 50s when she was nominated for the Turner prize. Although she was made a dame last year, Rego was born in Portugal and in 2009, Paula Rego – House of Stories, a gallery dedicated to housing her work, opened in Portugal. Germaine Greer, whose portrait by Rego hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, says, “No other artist has ever come close to capturing Rego’s sense of the phantasmagoria that is female reality.”

Inspiration Of A Young Woman Fighting To Live

Despite flesh-eating bacteria, young woman’s future is bright.

After falling from a homemade zipline and cutting her leg, 24-year-old Aimee Copeland contracted a rare flesh-eating bacterial infection that has claimed one of her legs. NBC’s Gabe Gutierrez reports and TODAY’s Ann Curry talks with her parents, Andy and Donna, about Aimee’s recovery.

By Rita Rubin

The parents of Aimee Copeland, the 24-year-old Georgia woman whose leg was amputated after contracting flesh-eating bacteria, told TODAY Monday they are optimistic about their daughter’s recovery. They have been communicating with her and she has begun to rely less on her respirator.

“We were able to communicate with her through lip reading, which we’re becoming quite proficient at at this point.,” her father Andy Copeland told Ann Curry Monday.

Their daughter has a breathing tube down her throat, but is looking forward to being able to eat again, especially her favorite food: ice cream, her father told TODAY.

The flesh-eating infection that led to the amputation of one of the young Georgia woman’s legs was caused by a bacteria found in freshwater lakes and rivers. Even a wound as minor as a tiny scratch or cut can serve as the starting point of the bacterial infection called necrotizing fasciitis, according to the National Necrotizing Fasciitis Foundation. On its website, the Wisconsin Division of Public Health says an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 cases occur in the United States each year, resulting in 2,000 to 3,000 deaths.

Aimee will lose her fingers on both hands but doctors hope to save the palms of her hands, which would make it easier for her to use prosthetics, according to TODAY. She may also lose her right foot. She remains in critical condition in the Joseph M. Still Burn Center at Doctors Hospital in Augusta, hospital spokeswoman Stacey Snyder said.

Dad Andy Copeland, who lives with his wife, Donna, in Spartanburg, S.C., has been sharing her roller-coaster progress on blog posts and Facebook.

Almost two weeks ago, the University of West Georgia psychology grad student was kayaking with friends in the Little Tallapoosa River when she stopped to try a homemade zip line. She fell from the line and suffered a deep gash to her left leg, which required 22 staples to close.

Story: Woman fights for life after losing leg to flesh-eating bacteria

Over the following days, her pain increased and she was given antibiotics and an MRI. On May 4, a friend carried her to the ER and she was finally was diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis, a bacterial infection that breaks down muscle and fat and can lead to organ failure. The bacteria that infected Copeland is a bug called Aeromonas hydrophila.

Copeland reportedly was recently diagnosed with lupus, an autoimmune disease, which might help explain why she became critically ill with an infection most would shrug off, says Dr. Chaim Putterman, chief of rheumatology at Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. “It’s not only the bug,” Putterman told TODAY.com, but the interaction between the bug and the host, or patient.

In 2008, he coauthored a report about eight lupus patients hospitalized with necrotizing fasciitis at his hospital. Two of them died. Putterman says both lupus itself and the treatment for it could increase patients’ risk of necrotizing fasciitis.

“Many of the medications that we use to treat lupus patients are what we call immunosuppressants,” says Putterman, who is not involved in Copeland’s case. “Increased infection is one of the known prices we pay for those medications.”

In addition, in autoimmune diseases such as lupus, “the immune system is out of whack,” Putterman says. So even without taking drugs to suppress their immune systems, people with autoimmune diseases are more susceptible to infections.

“Necrotizing fasciitis didn’t start when she fell in the water. It didn’t start with the stapling. It started later,” he says. “But in these cases, minutes and hours do make a difference. It’s a rapidly progressing infection, so minutes count.”

The fact that Copeland has survived this long and that, according to her father, her lung function is improving, are both positive signs, Putterman says.

“What definitely is very, very much in her favor is that she’s 24 years-old,” he says. “Young adults are definitely much more resilient than individuals at the extremes of ages.”

While Aimee’s condition is improving, doctors say she has a long recovery ahead of her. 

“It will be very difficult, in fact, her recovery will continue for the rest of her life,” Dr. Walter Ingram, Grady Memorial Hospital Burn Center, Atlanta, told TODAY.

Meanwhile, the Copelands told TODAY they are staying focused on her recovery, rather than how hurting her leg could have caused the life-threatening infection.

“Our focus is on trying to stay positive, look at the present and the future,” Andy told TODAY. We believe that future is going to be bright for Aimee.”

 

Inspiration Of Motherhood

 

In Mom’s Eyes, Overweight Toddler May Not Be

MONDAY, May 7 (HealthDay News) — A new study suggests that many mothers of overweighttoddlers misjudge their child’s weight and that could lead to overfeeding, researchers say.

“Mothers of overweight toddlers were more than 88 percent less likely [than the mothers of normal-weight children] to accurately perceive their child’s body size,” wrote a team led by Erin Hager of the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Part of the problem, the researchers say, is that a plump toddler “is often regarded as a sign of successful parenting, especially during the early years when parents are responsible for their child’s health, nutrition and activity opportunities.”

The study appears in the May issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine and included 281 mother-toddler pairs. The children averaged just under 2 years of age and the mothers ranged in age from 18 to 46 years. About 72 percent of the mothers were overweight/obese.

Overall, nearly 70 percent of the mothers were inaccurate in assessing their toddler’s body size and nearly 72 percent said they were “satisfied” with their toddler’s body size. According to the authors, moms of healthy-weight or overweight toddlers were more apt to say they were satisfied with their child’s size, compared to mothers of underweight toddlers.

“In conclusion, the majority of mothers were satisfied with their toddler’s body size, yet were inaccurate in their perception of their child’s actual body size,” the researchers wrote. They believe more study is needed to see if and how these misperceptions of children’s weight status affect the parents’ behaviors when it comes to feeding or encouraging exercise.

 

One expert called the study “instructive.” Writing in an accompanying editorial, Dr. Eliana M. Perrin, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said research suggests that “parents with accurate perceptions of weight have greater readiness to make weight-related behavioral changes and are more effective making them.”

“We likely need a public health campaign that allows us to visualize the range of healthy toddlers’ and older children’s weight. I am imagining posters showing photographs of children of all ages between the 5th and 85th percentiles [for weight] saying, ‘I’m at a healthy weight!’ This type of campaign may help reset our nationally normed pictures of health, helping parents appreciate healthy undulations of weight,” Perrin suggested.

More information

The Nemours Foundation has more about your child’s weight.