One Can Make a Difference (13 page)

I didn't know I would become a thoracic surgeon then, but I returned home and took a residency and, in 1950, became one. It was so early in the game, in fact, that I was only the 139th surgeon to be so certified. I kept thinking what to do about chest wounds. I started to research different valves, because it occurred to me that it was really a valve that was needed to let the blood and air out, get the lung up and inflated, and keep it that way. I could see that the ball valve wouldn't work because if it was turned sideways it would fall open; that the spring on a flap valve closed it, but a clot of blood could hold it open. In either case, air would fill the chest and collapse the lung. Then I hit on the flutter valve; it is always closed, even when air or a clot are passing through it. Back then we had a thing kids played with called a “Bronx Cheer,” it made a raspberry sound if you blew into it. That was a flutter valve. So I bought one at the five-and-dime store, sterilized it carefully, and attached it to a chest drain tube. When a patient was admitted with a collapsed lung due to pneumothorax (air in the chest due to a burst air bubble on the lung), I put the sterile tube into his chest. I stayed with him all day, taking occasional x-ray pictures, and the lung came up and stayed up. It was a success!

I took the idea to a medical instrument company I knew, and they immediately started manufacturing the Heimlich chest drain valve. In 1964, I presented the chest drain valve at an American Medical Association Convention, and a U.S. Navy commander, from the Navy Medical Research Institute came up to me, took six of the valves and flew to Vietnam the next morning. A week later I got a telegram saying, “The Heimlich chest drain valve is a life saving device. Must have 100 immediately.” The demand increased terrifically, but the valve was being made by hand and there were complaints that they were not being made fast enough. Eventually, that valve saved hundreds of our soldiers in Vietnam. The beauty of it is that this valve is easy to understand and simple to use.You don't need a doctor; you don't need a nurse. In the end, every soldier ended up carrying the valve attached to a chest tube in a sterile envelope. If they got shot in the chest, they didn't need to see a doctor or corpsman. Their buddy inserted the tube into the chest through the bullet hole and it would do its job, getting the air and blood out and inflating the lung.

In 1993, years after the war, I was invited to Vietnam. When I got off the plane in Hanoi,Vietnam's head surgeon was introduced to me. He said, “Dr. Heimlich needs no introduction. Everyone in Vietnam knows his name.” I thought he was referring to the Heimlich maneuver. Then he said, “The Heimlich chest drain valve saved tens of thousands of our people.

Dr. Heimlich will live in the hearts of the Vietnamese people forever.” I broke down and cried outright. Every year, over 100,000 Heimlich Valves are now used throughout the world, mostly for civilians. It is most gratifying to have thought about this problem and created a solution.

DANA HORK

Change Is Healthy,
Change Is Good!

Dana Hork is a modest and understated young woman. When she was nineteen
and a student at the University of Pennsylvania, a thought came to her out
of the blue. I find the compellingly simple story of how she developed her little
gem of an idea—a sort of “add inspiration and it will grow” success story—perfect
for this book. The brilliance of it is that the fundamental thought of how to
make something so good out of so little can easily be repeated in innumerable
other scenarios. Dana shows us that all we need to do is cast about our home,
our lives, for ways to make it happen. Starting an organization never seemed
daunting to Dana; rather, it was natural. Now, from its humble beginnings, the
organization she founded, Change for Change, reaches students and young
professionals all over the country. This
Reader's Digest
's “Everyday Hero”
and
USA Today
All-American College Student explains how the whole thing
came about.

I
was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, packing up to move back to Minnesota for the summer, when I got the idea. As I looked around my emptying room, I saw the stadium cup into which I had pitched all those pennies from my pockets during the school year. It's amazing how much loose change a person can accumulate. It was too heavy to take on the plane with me, but I didn't want to just leave it behind either.That's when the light bulb came on and I had what I call an “aha!” moment. I was pretty sure I wasn't the only student facing the end-of-school-year-loose-change dilemma. Most of my friends had similar cups in their rooms. Loose change may not amount to much when it's yours, but in the collective it can amount to a big something, something really important to others. So, I thought about how meaningful an impact we could have if we put all of our change together and donated it to a charity. I started with my dorm, recruiting everyone I could to contribute their change. People loved the idea. I came up with the name “Change for Change,” and it stuck.

From rounding up the change out of people's containers and couches, I then held door-to-door collections in the dorms, partnered with student groups to ask for their support in our collection drives, and even worked with local businesses. I remember the first time we held an official collection, two friends and I ended up with all these coins in a big plastic bag that was almost breaking at the seams. We dragged it down to Commerce Bank to their coin sorter, trying to guess how much we'd raised. We dumped all of those coins into the sorter, and sure enough, the machine spat out what it didn't want. It was right after spring break and there were pesos and other foreign coins flying back out of the machine: you could get a sense of where the students had been for their vacation. We collected about $1,000 in our first major effort and were thrilled.

Nowadays, we have lots of college campuses participating and have recently founded a chapter for young professionals in New York City. Each chapter raises funds how and when they choose. For instance, Amherst College hosts collections four times a year, with student athletes going door-to-door to collect change. Their efforts have certainly paid off, as they raised $4,000 last year. Our New York City chapter for young professionals donated $30,000 in its first year. It's still very important to me that our chapters support local charities while also rotating the causes they support, educating people about how many different charities there are. That way, Change for Change isn't about supporting just one good cause, but letting those who give learn about a multitude of good causes.

Since our first drive, we've built up a tool kit of additional support, everything from document templates, to an online homepage, to giving small grants to chapters to help with overhead expenses, to simply providing ongoing advice. Having a model and building up Change for Change's infrastructure is vital. You have to pick the right people—people who are excited to be involved, enthusiastic, who will have fun with it. I love what I'm doing, and the fun is in the challenge—building a Web site, incorporating, finding wonderful volunteers, developing materials, and coming up with fresh projects. Continuing to keep the organization creative has been one of the most intellectually stimulating parts about my work. And the stadium cup—in which I first collected my loose change— has remained a central component of our program. We provide customizable cups to all of our chapters, and they serve to remind young people not only to support causes they care about, but also of the good they can achieve when working with others. Sometimes people think young people don't care or can't make a difference. Change for Change shows that they can and they do. When young people get together and pool their efforts, small change can cause big changes.

REBECCA HOSKING

Helping Bag the Plastic Plague

Getting Rebecca Hosking to contribute to this book took some doing. She lives
behind the camera, shooting wildlife films for the BBC's Natural History Unit,
and has no desire to be the one standing in front of it or, for that matter, giving
interviews. But when the riveting documentary she made,
Hawaii: Message in the Waves
, came out, she found herself in high demand from both the public
and the press. Word had gotten out that she used what she learned on the
islands to benefit first her entire Devonshire town of Modbury, and now, towns
all over the world. She discovered how the plastic objects we use for almost
everything end up in the oceans and on the shores of the world's most beautiful
beaches, where they are killing wildlife. Rebecca's message is that we might just
surprise ourselves by achieving important changes without much more than a
belief that they need to happen and a willingness to collect the facts and make
the case. I think you will be buoyed by her story.

I
was born and brought up in Modbury, a town—well, a village really—in Devon. My father runs an environmental farm: it's organic, the whole works. He farmed around wildlife, meaning that unlike many other farmers he never killed off badgers and foxes or birds of prey. Because of him, I pretty much had nature bludgeoned into me as a child! I was so immersed in plant and animal goings-on that, in school, my hand was always the one that shot up when the teacher asked a question about biology. She started ignoring me and told my mother, “We have to give the other children a chance.”

At fourteen, I picked up a camera and became absorbed in photographing the countryside. I learned everything I could about photography and decided that was how I wanted to spend my life. One day, when I was in my early twenties, the BBC arrived to film a documentary about my father's farm. I was between jobs and these men's lives—spent traveling the world—sounded so fantastically exotic to me that I made myself indispensable. I knew where all the animals were, all about the local landscape, and I knew cameras inside and out. I was the perfect assistant, from looking after their lenses to showing them around. They ended up agreeing to take me on permanently.

A few months later, I was employed to assist a BBC producer named Andrew Murray, a terrific man whom I've worked with ever since, and he suggested that I apply for the prestigious BBC Bursary. That was a two-year training scholarship that anyone wanting to break into the business would absolutely die for. He nagged me incessantly to try out for it, although I thought there was absolutely no chance I'd get it. I did apply, along with 7,000 other applicants, and when it got down to the final twenty, apart from me they were all boys! My joke, after I was chosen, was that the BBC must have decided to check the politically correct box, so that if I'd been a one-legged, lesbian, black, working-class single mother, they'd have picked me, too. But being the only “girl” was enough.

On that training course, I worked on Sir David Attenborough's world-renowned wildlife series, and I had the use of the most expensive equipment imaginable.When the two years were up and I graduated, I had to buy my own equipment and went into debt. My nickname for my camera today is “My House,” because that's about what it cost me. It has taken years to pay it off. But I need it. I'm now one of only three women wildlife photographers in Britain, and one of only six in the world.

Out on the job, I began to be bothered by what we do. For example, we always show how beautiful nature is, and it is beautiful, but things aren't as perfect as they seem. There aren't that many real virgin areas left. Civilization is usually a lot closer, and the wilderness areas are usually far smaller than they appear on television. If you moved the camera a little to the right or left, for instance, you would see a lamppost, a road, sludge. I wanted to make something that addressed this disparity more honestly. With this in mind, our crew shot
Message
in the Waves
in Hawaii. I'd become aware of the tremendous amount of plastic pollution worldwide. Every piece of plastic ever manufactured is still on our planet in some form. It doesn't break down for 500–1,000 years, no one exactly knows how long. In Hawaii, the pollution is particularly pronounced. The North Pacific currents work like a toilet bowl that never flushes; the water keeps going around and around because it's in the center and it acts like a vortex for the rubbish and debris from all the countries along the Pacific Rim and from America, Asia, and Russia. The whole lot just comes to rest there. We could have filmed in the Azores or along the North Cornish coast; there are countless places where this is an issue, but a larger audience would tune in if they imagined palm trees and paradise, and it was important to reach as many people as possible. At heart, it's a global film with the Hawaiian Islands representing a microcosm of the whole planet. In some areas of the oceans, for instance, the ratio of plastic to plankton is thirty to one, depending on the currents.

Tourists visit Hawaii and have no idea that the popular beaches are cleaned twice a week or twice a month. But, go to the beaches that are harder to reach and you're in for the shock of your life. On the south side of the big island of Hawaii, for instance, the plastic is four to six feet deep because the beach is only cleaned once a year. You're tromping over everything from brushes to ointment tubes to microwaves to CD players to cups to ink jet cartridges, children's toys, dummies, even alarm clocks. It may be solid or it may be particles, but it's all there. I'll never, ever buy a plastic coat hanger again; I saw so many of them. After the second day, the crew and I were so depressed, we had to walk away, sit down and think. Imagine: it isn't sand that you're walking on, it's particle plastic in colors of blues, greens, and reds.We all started recycling like mad.

The Midway Atoll, one of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, was horrifying, although it's a protected wildlife reserve, the biggest marine reserve in the world. Here we found the biggest breeding ground in the world for the Laysan albatross. They're devoted parents that mate for life and groom each other so tenderly that you can't help relate to them. We watched them fly and were awed by how majestic they are in flight, but on the ground, they're pretty useless and have a very silly walk. These birds mistake colorful plastic bits floating on the sea as squid—their main food.They fly 1,000 miles out on an average hunting trip, swoop down, intake this plastic, and fly back to their chicks to unwittingly feed them this deadly meal. A turtle choked to death in front of us, plastic stuck all down his throat. We saw monk seals, called “dog that runs in rough water” by the Hawaiians, with their heads jammed into plastic tubs and plastic binding that was washing about.These endangered seals have such bad scarring from plastic that wildlife officials now identify each individual by their scars! Watching spinner dolphins play in the surf with plastic bags, thinking they were seaweed, was like watching a small child playing with a plastic bag and realizing how dangerous it was for them. Sometimes they get the bag wrapped around their blowhole and can't breathe, or they swallow it.