From jk at cbastro.org Tue Sep 3 12:37:42 2002 From: jk at cbastro.org (Jonathan Kemp) Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2002 06:37:42 -1000 (HST) Subject: (cba:news) update Message-ID: Hi, As some of you know, Joe flew to New Zealand a week ago to attend the Photometry 2002 conference and meet the many Kiwis who are such a strong part of the CBA. Unfortunately, Joe got ill when he was in New Zealand and he suffered a seizure during his early return to the US. After a few nights in a hospital in Los Angeles, he's now resting at a hotel in a more person-friendly environment and hopes to return to Columbia/Princeton within a few days and to normal activities within a week or two. Fortunately, a student from Columbia has managed to get out to LA to help facilitate the recovery and return. So, the communications will be a bit slow for just a while... Cheers, Jonathan CBA Hilo From jop at astro.columbia.edu Sun Sep 8 14:18:43 2002 From: jop at astro.columbia.edu (Joe Patterson) Date: Sun, 8 Sep 2002 14:18:43 -0400 (EDT) Subject: (cba:news) Back on the Mend Message-ID: <200209081818.g88IIhg14519@fidelio.phys.columbia.edu> Dear CBAers, Time for the full story. I sure owe it to the Kiwis, who watched me vanish so fast from their country. I arrived in Auckland feeling a little off... perhaps nuthin' special after 23 hours of flying. Jennie writes that I didn't seem to know what day it was or when the conference was. A day later I was visiting Bill and Rosemary Allen at Blenhem. Splendid hosts, but I recall long periods of silence there; people who know me well can guess what that means. (I can guess it too, but judgment gets cloudy - I thought I could battle through it). Arriving at the conference town of Nelson, I was worse. I sporadically knew that I was supposed to talk the next day, but I don't think I knew much else. Anyway I saw Marc (Bos, the conference organizer) at a reception and told him of my worries. He said something comforting, but several people asked me some easy questions, which baffled me. The next morning at 5 a.m., I get dressed and look for a hospital. There's no help available (NZ hotel desks seem to close) but in about an hour I manage to call a taxi and go to the Nelson hospital. They appeared to turn me away because I was a foreigner. I might have misunderstood this, but anyway they told me about another health-care facility that would treat me. I walked back to the hotel and was elated to see Fred and Jennie, who had a car and had the previous night offered to help. On the way over, she said my hand was cold and clammy. I see the doctor pretty soon, and within two minutes I throw up ~25 times in rapid succession. A truly impressive performance... it's just too bad I wasn't six years old. I feel better, and manage to explain my problem. But in twenty minutes I feel big-time dizzy again. I just have to fly home. I suppose a mistake... but judgment gets awfully cloudy. Grant Christie meets me at the Auckland airport. I was totally thrilled to see him. Not only do I recognize him, but he is so calm and level-headed and knowledgeable. I feel better immediately. I have no idea what we talked about. Then I board the plane for LA. About halfway into the flight, my head reaches a new level of distress. I take an extra pill (to ward off epileptic seizures). The medication is oral and takes ~12-24 hours to be absorbed into the bloodstream... but there's nothing else to do. It's basically past the point of no return. A few minutes later, I can't remember if I took that pill. I might have taken another. I stumble forward and tell a flight attendant. I score a quick seat upgrade, and various people hover around and talk quietly to me. I knew my name and profession, but not much else. I keep asking when do we land, and the answer is always two hours. Someone told me they would divert to Honolulu (she made it sound like a threat! - how bad is it, Jonathan?). Maybe that explains the time invariance of 2 hours... or maybe it's just the common pattern of repitition associated with epilepsy (I might have asked 30 times in a row). I hear a public announcement that seems to refer to me, and soon a Good Samaritan is sitting next to me. An unforgettable guy, although I'll never know his name (I've tried - no dice). I thought I heard an Israeli accent. He seemed to know a lot about seizures and a lot about talking to people in distress. I'm talking with incredible slowness now. Going downhill, but because of him I'm not feeling in any danger (very helpful, since one flight attendant looked at me like I was a ghost). The plane lands in LA, and paramedics take me away. Now I can't talk at all. I have the gran mal seizure in the ambulance, or possibly the airport ER, or possibly the second ambulance. The total seizure experience, at least mine, is like a very fast nova - two days up and seven days down, with a long tail. The gran mal component is very brief but is a convenient t=0 marker (the analogy to maximum light). Despite the swashbuckling name, it's not a very dramatic phenomenon - to the victim, it's nothing at all, just a dreamless sleep accompanied by perhaps a minute of small tremor. Thrashing about is mostly Hollywood stuff, I'm told... but admittedly, I've never seen a gran mal. There are many different seizure types, but mine are dominated by thousands of petit mal seizures, which last for about a week and are basically unobservable except with an EEG. The dominant component is really CONFUSION (and quietness - it's really hard for me to squeeze out entire sentences). Since I always get an "aura" or advance warning, I don't have risk of hurting my head in a fall (the principal real danger of epilepsy, unless the disorder comes from a more ominous underlying cause). I wake up two days later in an Inglewood hospital. Typical hospital - dozens of tubes connecting you to machines and IVs and what- not. Terribly unpleasant. I can stammer a few words to the nurses - really just my name, but after they tell me the answers ("you live in New York"), I can feel, and say, that it's probably right. I still don't know the names of family or friends. Eventually they bring a phone, and the sound of familiar voices chokes me up and reduces me again to gurgling sounds. Remember the LA riots of 1991? Inglewood was a major site of arson in '91, and allegedly there was shooting at incoming aircraft approaching touchdown (it's on the final approach pattern, and pilots refused to land at LA for ~4 days). This was a really bad neighborhood and bad hospital. Run by some chap named Mengele... anyone ever hear of him? Anyway, you got almost no attention; and even when a doctor was actually in the room, possibly through taking a wrong turn in a corridor, they seemed to be incapable of listening. The treatment was just awful. I'll spare you the equally long story of how I struggled to get RELEASED from the damn hospital... that's the Iliad, the violent part, whereas you're done with the Odyssey. After another day I was able to speak to my neurologist back home, and her exact advice was "get the hell outta there". I stayed in LA two more days, and struggled with some odd post- seizure phenomena - incredibly heightened emotions and powers of hearing - which decayed away. On September 6 I woke up in my own bed, to a beautiful late summer day and the sound of songbirds. What bliss! Within a day I saw that CBAers had been hard at work studying LS Peg and V1432 Aql round-the-globe. Presto, even an observation from the HST appeared magically in my inbox! That was really joyful, to think about all the nights CBAers stared at these stars while I was coping with my human problems. It made me feel like I had dozens of friends, with the friendships oddly cemented through the light of stars hundreds of parsecs away. I'll write again tomorrow, mostly about astronomy. My main goal in travelling to NZ - networking with Kiwi and Aussie CBAers - was mostly unachieved since I was so terribly compromised. But at least I learned to be more careful about unaccompanied trips crossing many time zones. (My last seizure was in Taiwan January 2001.) I'm gonna stay close to home for a year, then maybe venture somewhere with more help available, and/or a decent plan on how to avoid a repitition. Thanks for listening! Joe  From jop at astro.columbia.edu Sat Sep 21 22:45:47 2002 From: jop at astro.columbia.edu (Joe Patterson) Date: Sat, 21 Sep 2002 22:45:47 -0400 (EDT) Subject: (cba:news) Time for a change! Message-ID: Dear CBAers, Thanks so much for your faithful coverage during all my down and recovery time! We're up to 55 days now on V1432 Aql; with a 48 day supercycle, we've covered one plus a little extra... so we can finally quit on that one. At first LS Peg was looking really intractable. But after enough data rolled in, it was evident that the star has a pretty simple photometric variation after all. Your basic negative superhumps, with epsilon = -0.041+-0.003. It looks pretty constant in phase and amplitude throughout the 44 day campaign, except for a coupla nights when the star was ~0.4 mag brighter. There's also some QPOs and assorted riffraff... but the star is sufficiently well specified that we can say sayonara for the year (and probably for a few years). Good, that knocks out our two red-letter targets. The third CBA target, V1494 Aql, is a personal favorite but I have to admit that the light curve is pretty damn well specified by our June-July data. So let's wipe the slate clean and go to all new stars. We have an upcoming observing run at Kitt Peak, and our prime object will probably be KUV 01584-0939, a 16.6 mag helium CV with an orbital period near 10.3 minutes. This is borderline too faint for good CBA measures... but we could use observations from the bigger scopes, and especially AU/NZ since we have no coverage there explicitly planned. (Woudt and Warner will observe it from SAAO, so Africa is well covered.) The ideal evening CBA target for both hemispheres is FO Aqr. Although we've been getting scattered pulse timings over the years, we've never had a campaign, and the one we carried out on its kissin' cousin AO Psc revealed quite surprising superhumps. At 13.7 and with huge 21 minute pulses, it gives data suitable for framing! If you're northerly and have a little more glass, try GD 552 (=Cep 1). We have HST data over the next month, and would like to compare with the optical behavior. The 105 minute wave is very elusive - so you probably won't like the light curve at all unless the star does something very unexpected. Finally there's BO Cet (0206-02) for a little later in the night. Another whole-world special. Decent X-rays, and decently bright (14-15). Kind of an unknown. There's gotta be a period in there somewhere - let's find it! I think I'm pretty much back to normal. Classes have started, and I really treasure the routine! Joe