Link Banana

Daniel Bergner’s profile of Shurvon Phillip, a man struggling against his body since he sustained a brain injury in Iraq, is a sometimes difficult read. The conclusion:

And sometimes impossible to overcome, too, was the idea that Shurvon’s life might not be worth living; that I, in his place, would rather stop breathing, cease thinking, that I would prefer to die.

Whenever this idea took hold, I recalled a medical ethicist at R.I.C. telling me about studies showing that doctors and nurses tend to rate the quality of life of severely impaired patients to be far lower than the patients do themselves. The ethicist had spoken, then, about the ways that a life acquires meaning. And I thought about Malik scrambling onto Shurvon’s bed to show him pictures, and about Malik and Kyla curled and comforted on the floor below him. I thought, too, about a kind of exercise that Shurvon’s family discovered recently by chance and that Gail described: with Shurvon sitting in a wheelchair in the driveway, his nieces and nephews tossed inflatable beach balls, one pink and another blue, softly toward him, and he tried to move his arms to bat them back. “They were cheering like at a baseball game,” Gail said, remembering the first time the children did this. “ ‘Yeah! Go on Ya-Ya!’ ” Beach balls and high voices of excitement floated in the air around him.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff in Michael Sokolove’s few-week-old piece, but this statistic is certainly the most jarring:

If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.

I’m not quite sure how to react to these photos from Lebanon.

A few years ago the Defense Department decided to look seriously at prosthetic arms. Dean Kamen and Co. heard the call and have created something that looks straight out of science fiction. Though it doesn’t work quite as well as Luke Skywalker’s fake hand — for which it is named — it is impressive and seems a big improvement over any prosthetic I’ve ever seen.

(via Engadget)

Slate’s Explainer gives you advice you desperately wanted but never knew to ask for:

Don’t hit your head. People who fall just a few stories and land on their heads almost always die: According to a study published in the journal Injury, you’re just as likely to survive a five-story fall landing feet first as you are a one-story fall headfirst. Although no one knows exactly how Moreno landed, it’s clear he spared his skull.