Unos Dos of Trace is supported in part by SkillShare.
Hey, there, day trippers, I am back,
and this is not going to be a super educational video
about the world around us like normal, but more an update
into my world, and an educational bit about where
I've been at over the last month.
I just wanted to drop this video into your regular feed
and let you know what's been going on.
Because I've done some Community tab stuff,
and I've been tweeting, and Instagraming,
and all sorts of stuff, but I just
wanted to give you an update because you might not
have seen those things.
I haven't made a video in a while,
because I was going on vacation.
I was going to learn all about the ancient Greeks,
you know, their creation of democracy and medicine.
I went to the town of Epidaurus, it was super cool,
and I saw science, and of course their architecture is amazing--
and, you know, just a relaxing vacation like normal.
I love traveling and learning about the world.
And when I'm abroad, I love to use the internet
to find local and strange places to explore and meet.
I love trying new foods and exploring cultures.
And for the first couple of days,
that's exactly what I did while I was in Greece.
We were mainly in Athens, and I went
to the ancient Agora, the meeting place
of the city-state of Athens.
There, citizens of Athens could come and literally
vote on city business.
I saw the reconstruction of the wall
where the statues of the tribes of Athens would stand,
and they would put little placards underneath the statues
of city business, and the citizens
could discuss and vote on it-- the first recorded democracy,
so cool.
And it's a little bit of a trope.
I learned a lot about Greek words,
"demos," meaning "the people," and "kratia" meaning power.
That's how we got democracy.
And I went to the Acropolis and learned
that "acro" means "top" and "polis" mean "city,"
so Acropolis is a city on a hill,
and a necropolis is a city of the dead.
Construction on the plateau that we call the Acropolis
dates to the Bronze Age.
The Mycenaeans used it to house their ruler
and built a giant complex.
And in the 6th century BCE, a temple was built up there,
using only Doric columns, whatever, boring,
you know what I mean?
Ancient tech, not fancy, just functional.
You don't know Doric columns?
I didn't, either.
Let's learn about them.
There are three types of columns in Greco Roman canon.
Doric, which are smooth, round capitals, the top.
They're simple and plain.
They're ancient.
They've been around forever.
Then, there's ionic, which are large, paired spiral scrolls.
They're volute.
So you can see these around Washington DC.
They're from the 5th century BCE.
Then there's Corinthian, which you
would think would be from the city-state of Corinth, right?
But whatever, gaslighting in history,
it's actually not at all.
It probably was invented by Callimachus,
who is likely an Athenian.
Callimachus drew acanthus leaves growing around a votive basket
and put it on top of a column, and that's
how he got Corinthian columns.
They're super fancy.
You see them in the US Capitol building and the Supreme
Court in the US today, but they were invented
in the 5th century BCE.
And the reason we have them here is
because of a Greco-Roman revival architecture set in the,
you know, 18th century.
It doesn't matter.
So anyway, an architectural sidebar, I
hope you learned something about columns, because I totally did,
and they were really cool.
Something else I learned is that even though we
think of these historic buildings
is kind of plain, and brown, or yellow,
they were painted bright, beautiful colors in history.
I mean, I knew this from Egypt in my visit from 2006 as well,
but it was amazing to see it in Greece.
Funny story, I thought the Acropolis was being rebuilt,
from archaeological evidence.
It's an old building.
It's not unusual that they get destroyed over time.
But that's not entirely true.
In fact, the Parthenon was built around 450 BCE,
and it stood for thousands of years
until, in the 1600s when the Venetians from Venice
shelled it during the Great Turkish war.
See, the Turks had taken over Greece,
and they were storing gunpowder inside of the Parthenon,
thinking that the Venetians would never
attack such a beautiful, historic old building,
and they were, of course, wrong about that.
So they were shelling it and shelling it,
and then they lit the gunpowder and exploded
the whole building.
Now it's more complex than what I want to get into,
but obviously history happens.
So now, it's being reconstructed,
and the important stuff that they're finding
is being stored in a really nice museum nearby
that I also visited.
I went to temples all over the place, the National
Archaeological Museum in Athens, the Benaki Museum,
which is a private museum of the history of Greece.
It was super interesting.
And the history was, of course, incredible.
But Greece is still suffering from their economic collapse.
As recently as December of 2018, their unemployment rate
was 18%.
So Athens in the touristy areas are very fancy.
But in the regular residential areas,
the sidewalks weren't always up to date.
There's no real hipster community that I could find
or a ton of boozy millennials like I'm
used to seeing here in San Francisco,
but the Hellenic people, as they prefer to be referred to as,
were incredibly kind and warm.
And they have everything that we have.
I just had to find it.
I went to see Avengers--
End Game, and I had Greek subtitles,
which means I didn't hear any of the jokes,
because everybody else read them and then laughed
over the audio, which is fine.
I'll just have to see it again now that I'm back in the US.
But of course then, three days into our exciting, blissful
learning vacation, we were slated
to visit the island of Santorini,
famous for this picture.
Because if you go to Google Maps, all you gotta do is look
and you'll see this picture.
However, the night before our flight,
we had to call a doctor at 3:00 AM
because my mom woke with incredible pain in her abdomen.
And she didn't know what to do, and he recommended an ambulance
immediately.
And even still, I thought, the vacation might continue.
Maybe we'll catch our flight.
They didn't.
All we knew was that my mom was in a huge amount of pain.
She couldn't move.
She couldn't sleep.
She whimpered and cried.
It was actually many of the worst hours of my life,
sitting there, comforting her, talking to her,
and trying to figure out what the hell was going on.
I was trying to talk to the doctors,
but I don't speak Greek.
Many of the doctors spoke English, but the nurses,
not always.
When you have questions, and you want something,
and they can't answer, little language barriers feel huge.
[INAUDIBLE] and I were distraught,
but we were confident that we were
at least getting good care.
Mom had CT scans and x-rays.
She was given pain meds and flooded with antibiotics.
And we were told that there would be a surgery to help,
but we didn't really know what it was helping with
or how risky it was.
And it was risky.
We heard different numbers, as high as one in five
could die from this.
And, of course, we also heard the reverse.
My mom has an app on her phone from her hospital in Michigan
that lists every medicine she has taken or is taking--
doctor visits, diagnoses, allergies, and the records
of what the doctors do when she goes and visits them and why.
Without that, I don't think my mom would be here today.
Our first day in the hospital while she
was writhing in pain in the hot hospital room in the bed
next to me in a strange country, during her fits of sleep,
I used our data plan to log into her app,
connect to her hospital servers, and pull up her records
and show these to the doctor.
We were scrolling through the records
together, trying to figure out what
it is that was wrong with her-- and we
were talking about each one.
And then, he said, stop, stop, stop.
Go back.
Ms. Dominguez, did you have diverticulitis, he asked.
She told him she didn't have it, but they thought
she might be a risk for it.
She had not really thought about it.
He immediately left the room and started planning the surgery.
This was the bit of evidence that he needed
that helped save her life.
And we wouldn't have thought to bring it up,
because who thinks of every little thing
that a doctor has ever said to them.
Thanks to the ACA and these electronic medical records,
my mom is here.
My mom was diagnosed with diverticulitis.
So let me draw a picture for you.
If this is your bowel, these little pockets along the walls
are diverticulita.
When they get infected, which can happen, they can pop.
When that happens, there's a hole from your bowel
into your abdominal cavity, and the hole,
through that, the stuff that's in your bowel goes,
and it sprays toxic contents onto
the innocent and unexpected organs
of the metropolis of abdomen.
If left alone, it's like a Weiss and Benioff slaughter
in there--
an ultimately slow-moving and disappointing story
without a lot of nuance.
And eventually, basically, my mom would have died.
At this point, I'd been in the hospital with little
or no sleep for over a day.
We had to check out of our hotel.
We had to pack mom's things so we could move them to an Airbnb
that I booked close by at the last minute.
We had to call and try and cancel all
of our hotels and flights, tours and everything,
the other people we were traveling with,
they were just going on, because what else were they
going to do, you know?
The rest of our vacation was up in the air
and probably canceled.
Of, course, cancellation not really an option
when you're in Greece, they didn't really do that.
Also, my dad was still in the US, and she needed him.
So I booked him a flight at the last minute,
and all this had to happen fast.
He got on a plane, and mom went into surgery at 3:00 PM,
36 hours after we called the hotel doctor.
And I went to the Airbnb for a few hours--
mainly to cry, really--
a lot, really hard.
I learned a lot while she was in the hospital
for that 36-hour day.
Greek hospitals don't seem to have air conditioning.
And it was very hot-- even though it was not even
the hot season; it's spring.
But they were very clear about what pain meds she was getting
and what they were planning.
The doctors were in to talk to us and her all the time.
There were times when a half dozen different doctors
and specialists were standing around her-- cardiologists,
surgeons, general practitioners, talking to each other,
talking to her, talking to me, talking to each other again.
Even the chief of medicine came in and talked to her
about what they were planning.
The American health care system, by comparison,
seemed super-broken.
While she was in surgery, I sat there in the waiting room,
sweating, because it was hot, but also crying, and waiting,
and sweating, and crying, and waiting,
freaking out, and pacing.
And at 8:20 PM, they opened the door,
and they said she made it.
And it was just a wave of relief.
Four hours of surgery and just not knowing if I was ever
going to see my mom again was--
it was hard.
It was pretty hard.
But she came out, and I saw her face, and I just--
it was just a wave, a wash of relief.
Emotion, it's a pretty powerful thing.
The surgeon followed her into the ICU
and then came back and saw me.
And she was still covered in sweat and my mom's blood.
And she said that she would be OK.
They performed Hartmann's procedure on her
to fix her problem.
You can Google it.
I'm not going to tell you all about it,
but essentially they cut out a large part
of her large intestine.
Mortality and morbidity was really high, she said,
because she didn't have good words to describe it
in a gentle way.
So the next few days were going to be really tough.
She was going to have to be monitored constantly
to see if she was going to get infections from the surgery
and if she was going to be OK and that her body was going
to handle the fact that they just cut out
a large portion of her intestines, which she'd
had for almost 70 years.
And on top of all that, she had sepsis.
Sepsis is when the body's immune system gets a little crazy,
has gone haywire.
Essentially, there's too much infection,
and it doesn't know what to do, so it just throws everything
at it, and that can kill you.
And that makes sense, because there's so much
bacteria in fecal material.
So when it gets into the body and it's not
in the safe tube of the bowel, that's
a pretty nasty infection.
And if we hadn't brought her in when we did and they hadn't
immediately put her on antibiotics, who
knows what would've happened?
She might not be here today.
And in the ICU, they continued that process,
with medications, pain meds, and, of course,
antibiotics to keep her safe and keep her
from getting an infection.
And after a few days, the sepsis was gone.
And over the next week, we could visit her twice a day
for 30 minutes at a time, and we had to put on masks,
and wear gowns, and booties, and gloves.
And every day, she got a little bit better.
And after a week in the ICU, she was moved into a regular room.
And, again, every day she got a little bit better.
She had no infections.
The doctors were shocked.
And the whole time, she was becoming friends
with all these people-- the nurses, the doctors,
she knew the nurses' names and which
ones wanted to move to the UK, where
they paid nurses better, or go back to school,
or which ones had children.
They all knew her, too.
She was like a little celebrity, in this private hospital,
in this little part of this giant multi-million person
city.
Our Greek vacation was slated to end on May 1st,
and I was supposed to fly to Vienna,
visit some friends; then, to Geneva in Switzerland to visit
CERN; and then back to here to make videos for you.
And I felt like she was doing better,
and my dad was with her, so they encouraged me to leave.
But I should come back, because I needed
to finish what I started.
Now Vienna is a really interesting town.
I toured around with my friend, who grew up there,
and his amazing wife, and their toddler.
And then I went on to CERN, and whoa, it's
like stem Disneyland.
I got to visit Atlas, a 7,000-metric ton detector
of tiny bits of broken atoms, 100 meters underground under
Swiss villages, because you think of CERN as, like,
in the future, but it's really in the middle of nowhere
outside of Geneva, and it's just cows, and horses,
and fields above it, which is so interesting.
And I saw the new small wheel, and I
talked to the physicists, and designers, and experts
about what it is and also what's going on
at CERN over their two-year long shutdown.
Then, I flew back to Athens to help get mom back to Michigan.
Diverticulitis is fairly common.
Maybe 10 in 100 could get a little pocket
called diverticula, and up to a quarter of those
may get an infected one, called diverticulitis.
Incidents has increased in recent decades,
and it was first described in the late 1700s
by a French surgeon named Alexis Littre.
Unlike the small intestine, the rectum and the colon
only has one layer of muscle that keeps things moving.
And they're circular muscles.
And the intestines are attached to the abdominal wall
into each other by an organ called the mesentery,
and the organ is like the scaffolding and support
structures for the intestines-- you know,
blood vessels and such.
And in between the mesenteric attachment
points of the colon and the bowel
are these little weak spots in the colonic structure.
The muscles there tend to atrophy as you age.
And if you have a bad diet and you're obese,
then that's where these little pockets can form bursts.
This is yet another knock against any kind
of intelligent design, by the way.
Because why would you design a system
that has weaknesses like this?
One study found that 50% of diverticulitis cases
could be prevented with some simple lifestyle changes,
like avoiding obesity or having a BMI of less than 25,
lessening your red meat intake, avoiding smoking, making
sure to eat dietary fiber is really important, and of course
exercising at least a couple of hours a week.
While I was out of Greece, my mom
was discharged from the hospital.
She and my dad moved to the Airbnb I booked for them,
and a surgeon visited a few times to check on her.
That's right.
In a town of millions of people, the surgeon
from the hospital herself does the house
calls because that's her job and, again,
our system, not great.
And, eventually, I returned from CERN, and the change in her
was so palpable.
She was walking.
She was laughing.
She was reading her book and talking to my dad,
watching TV and enjoying her time in Greece.
And she actually looked at my dad and me and she said,
this is the weirdest vacation I've ever had.
We laughed so hard we cried.
She was serious.
She'd never visited a place for so long
that she had to go grocery shopping,
and do laundry, and learn about how to get around the town.
And she is a positive and amazing woman,
and that was a new experience for her,
so she wanted to talk about it.
After spending a month in and out of the hospital,
mom finally was declared fit to fly.
The surgeon kissed her on the cheek,
said goodbye, and walked out the door.
We got Mom on a plane back to Michigan.
My trip to Europe wasn't what I thought it was going to be.
Thanks to a bit of technology and knowhow,
the friendly, and competent, and incredible doctors and surgeons
at the Euroclinic Athens, and the positivity and inspiring
attitude of my mother, this was quite the adventure.
And, of course, you all helped, too.
All the messages of support, and the responses to my Instagram
stories, and the friends who texted and provided
emotional salves in my time of need,
I don't know how I could have supported both of my parents
emotionally like that without you.
So thank you, everyone.
Mom!
You did it.
Yeah.
We made it home.
After all that.
Next week, I'm going to return to our regularly scheduled
videos.
I'm putting together something on 5G
that I think you're going to like, and of course,
the videos from CERN and a whole bunch more stuff.
So until then, this is Trace, I heart you all,
and I'll see you in the future.
"Uno Dos of Trace" is supported in part by Skillshare.
This story, like many that I write, are non-fiction.
And writing nonfiction isn't always easy.
It's not just documenting.
It's organizing, and rereading, and reading, and rereading,
and reading, and rereading your texts,
and editing it, and making sure that you've
got a story and not just notes.
If you want to learn how to tell a good non-fiction story,
you should check out Skillshare.
Susan Orlean has an amazing class
about literary journalism, or long-form non-fiction
reporting.
It is awesome, but, then again, so is Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning community for creators;
maybe you've heard of it.
They've got more than 25,000 classes in design,
and business, and technology, and photography,
and, of course, marketing, writing, and film, and video.
They even talk about entrepreneurship in general.
Whether you want to fuel your curiosity or creativity,
or even just learn new skills or advance your career,
Skillshare is the perfect place to keep you
learning and thriving in 2019.
Because you're part of the Uno Dos of Trace nerd fam,
you can get two months of Skillshare for free.
The first 500 of you to use this link
and join the more than seven million creators already
learning with Skillshare are going
to get those two months for free.
And of course, you also support the show.
So it's a win-win.
Try it out.
Let me know what you think.
Make sure you click to watch more "Uno Dos of Trace,"
subscribe so you get new videos--
they're going to be so good.
I'm really excited.
I'm raring to make more stuff after that month off.
Let me know if you think a weekly community tab
blog would be cool.
I kind of liked making that while I was abroad.
And thanks again for watching.