Doug and Julie Ridge: Trip to Colorado

Doug and Julie spent the week Sunday June 1 to the next Sunday in Colorado where Doug attended the ASMS meeting. Julie spent the week with Mary and David LeSueur. Doug stayed with one of his former students, Hung Yu Lin, at a hotel in Denver Monday through Thursday to attend the meeting. Also at the meeting were Doug's students Jeff Spraggins and Kaitlin Papsin. Kaitlin is a first year student, but Jeff was presenting a poster. Doug, overwhelmed with end of the semester demands, mentioned to Clark that it was going to be a major project to solve the differential equations and write the software to do some of the analysis required for the poster. Clark said he thought he could do it in a couple of hours using routines he had used in his work at UCI. Grandpa Doug, thrilled and grateful, accepted Clark's offer to help. Now Clark and Doug are coauthors on a presentation at a national meeting.

Excerpts from ASMS poster showing some of Clark's data fitting. Click on image to see details.

Sudden Illness. On Sunday night Doug and Julie joined Mary and David, Amanda and Brandon, Brian and Lisa, Katie, little Brian and Marissa (little Lisa was at work) for dinner at Brian and Lisa's home. While it was a lovely time, that night Brian went to the hospital with serious GI bleeding. It was an uneasy week, waiting for a diagnosis. Brian had 7 units of blood over 24 hours before stabilizing. He was probed and imaged in at least seven different ways before a diagnosis of a rare case of bleeding from congenital diverticulitis of the small intestine. On Friday two feet of intestine were surgically removed. Brian is recovering and the prognosis is good. A long-time mystery was solved with the diagnosis. Brian was very ill for six months as an infant with what was ultimately diagnosed as amoebic dysentary. Bacterial infections of this kind are symptoms of diverticulitis. Doug is grateful that he was there when this illness occurred. He spent some time in the hospital visiting with Brian. He also got see many of Brian's friends and co-workers and learned for himself how much Brian is both respected and loved. He also got to participate in "Brian Parades" where Brian and his extensive entourage of admirers and supporters walked the hospital hallways as part of his recovery regimen.