Edward Donald Martin Sr. of Cooper Landing, Alaska passed away Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013. Martin was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, N.Y., and as a child felt an inexplicable “driving force” to seek out patches of green clover amid the borough’s concrete and steel.Martin was born in 1931 in Brooklyn, N.Y., and as a child felt an inexplicable “driving force” to seek out patches of green clover amid the borough’s concrete and steel. Almost always, Martin still recalls, he managed to spot at least one four-leaf clover among the more common three-leaf standard.
In 1957, Martin headed north to Alaska, where he homesteaded and discovered field after field of “four-leaved grass.” There, in the Final Frontier, he spent his life building roads and pipelines, always keeping his head down as he walked, and often stumbling upon nature’s unnatural.
“You look for the unusual, not the usual,” he explained. “Anybody can see the usual.”
After Martin retired, finding four-leaf clovers became his preferred pastime, a chance to enjoy fresh air, exercise and glimpses of bald eagles and moose.
“It’s a challenge, and life is a challenge,” he said, struggling to explain why he does it. “Every day is a new door opening.”
Martin fills those days now, as one might expect, still finding more clover and resting easy, believing no challenger comes close to his growing total. With the record on the books, some folks have suggested he sell his collection, which sits in boxes at his eldest son’s house. Martin said he likes the idea, hoping the clover’s luck could rub off on whoever bought them.
“It’s a good way to get rid of depression,” he said, laughing.
As to how he — a self-described “old man” in small-town Alaska, with no fixed address — would go about finding the right buyer, that’s an answer, he says, he hasn’t stumbled upon yet.
“People keep saying why don’t I put them on eBay and see what people will pay for them,” he fretted.
“I don’t even know how to get on eBay.”
The Odds of Finding a Four-Leaf Clover Are Pretty Good Approximately one in 10,000 clover stems will have a four-leafed mutation.
Now that might sound daunting, but according to the Minitab Blog, you can find that many clover plants in a rectangular area covering approximately three-by-four feet. So you don’t need to cover a massive amount of area to find your lucky clovers.
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Scanning Can Help You Find Lucky Clovers Faster.
Amana Images Inc / Getty Images
If you try to check 10,000 individual leaves to see if one of them is a lucky clover, you’re going to waste a lot of time and energy. Luckily, there’s a better way.
Let your eyes scan over a limited area (an area about the size of an office desk works well, according to Scientific American). Don’t try to look for individual leaves, just try to see if something pops out at you as looking a little bit different from the surrounding clover.
If that doesn’t work for you right away, try using your shoe to gently brush over the clover, and see if turning the plants to a slightly different angle gives you a better perspective.
“Is the glass half empty or half full?” is a common expression, a proverbial phrase, generally used rhetorically to indicate that a particular situation could be a cause for optimism (half full) or pessimism (half empty), or as a general litmus test to simply determine an individual’s worldview.
Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma: poised for progress.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
My name is Nina Rose Valdiserri. I was diagnosed with a brain tumor called a diffused intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) at age 2 1/2. My tumor is very rare and the doctors gave me a 1% chance of survival. They said I wouldn’t make it to my 3rd birthday. I finished my last chemotherapy the week before Christmas 2008. The doctors said if my tumor doesn’t grow by May 2009 I will be in remission.
My doctors are incredible, one in particular found a new experimental treatment prot…ocol and it seems to be working, also Radiation, combined with Temodar, CCNU, Irinotecan, and Avastin. If this plan continues to work on me then we can use it for other children with the same tumor. It has been a long, difficult road. Two other girls that live in the same city as me with DIPG, have gone to heaven. I have other friends that I made over the years who also lost their battle.
I love going to the hospital. I had a port for 3 years and love to get my “tail on” (accessed) and walk around with my I.V. pole. Now I go to the hospital every 6 months for a checkup and an MRI once a year, sometimes I also miss it because I always look forward to seeing everyone who helped take care of me. For the most part I handled all my chemotherapy well and took most of the medications at home. We had a couple of setbacks but nothing major. We went to Disney World for my Make-a-Wish and still talk about it today. I’m from Michigan and it is cold in the winter, I love summertime so I can swim in my pool.
Thank you,
Nina
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With Another DIPG Story being:
Two years ago December 22nd, 2015, 15-year-old Camron Cozzi and his family received life-altering news: Camron had an inoperable brainstem tumor called DIPG. After completing radiation, Camron and his family took a Make-A-Wish cruise, and then headed to Cologne, Germany, where he underwent immunotherapy from April through November of last year.
“Early on you would think Camron was going to win the battle,” Cyndi says, since his first symptoms weren’t too bad, and radiation helped improve his balance. Camron also never had to take steroids to control his symptoms, so he didn’t gain the weight or have other steroid-related side effects that a lot of kids with DIPG do. And even though Cam had to give up playing lacrosse, he was still able to help out coaching younger teams in their town.
However, in October of 2016,
Cam started to struggle walking and an MRI showed he was in progression. One week before Thanksgiving, he had a shunt installed to help relieve symptoms related to hydrocephalus (fluid buildup in the ventricles due to tumor growth, which increases pressure in the brain). Up until he had the shunt surgery, Cam attended school.
His family contacted Dr. Burzynski in Houston after discovering Cam was in progression, and he received treatment at the clinic from January through May of 2017, when it was determined that he wasn’t responding to it. Throughout this time, Camron’s balance continued to worsen, and he started to use a walker to get around. By May, he had lost the use of his right leg and arm, so he needed a wheelchair for mobility. Around the same time, Cam also lost the ability to speak audibly.
Camron has had to rely on others to help him out with just about everything since last May—showering, dressing, you name it. “Once he started to lose his right side, he began to feel frustrated and mad,” Cyndi explains. “But shortly after, the happy, funny Camron that we knew started to show up again. His demeanor physically changed, reflecting his will to fight this battle.”
After the Burzynski clinic failed to help improve Cam’s condition, the family began researching other treatment options (of which there were few) and settled on Monterrey after talking with Parker Monhollon’s mother, Amanda. Camron was accepted into the program and received his first treatment on June 2nd, 2017. He’s completed all four recommended immunotherapy treatments, which he received alongside IA treatments 2, 3, 4, and 5.
Recently, Cam completed five rounds of cyber knife radiation back home in Washington to treat a secondary tumor in his thalamus. Between this and the Monterrey treatment, the doctors believe that the thalamic tumor will be eradicated. They also believe the Mexico treatment is working against the DIPG. https://makingdipghistory.com/
Elijah Simpson-Sundell. The 8-year-old was diagnosed with a brain tumor last spring. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post).
Almost 4,000 miles away in Cologne, Germany, is the private clinic that his family sought out. It’s one of the few places in the world offering immunotherapy for DIPG. The centerpiece of its effort is a vaccine made from each patient’s own white blood cells and tumor antigens, which are proteins that produce an immune response. The goal is to allow the immune system to recognize and attack the cancer.
After 18 months and 29 children, the results are “encouraging,” said pediatric oncologist Stefaan van Gool. But it’s far too early to know whether the approach extends survival. “We have to wait,” he acknowledged.
Elijah has flown to Cologne three times since October, twice with his father and once with his mother. In between sessions at the clinic, he visited Schokoladenmuseum — the Chocolate Museum — played cards and made friends with some of the other young patients.
Elijah died on April 23, 2017, a day after he turned 9 years old. He had a hard Saturday night, unable to sleep but for the fluids clogging his lungs. By yesterday morning he was slipping in and out of consciousness. We managed to get him some medicine to help dry some of the secretions in his chest and lungs, and started him on oxygen, and this calmed him and he slept peacefully, really only waking once more to complain about his favorite cat Bobbi, who had climbed into his lap.
At around 3pm his fever spiked as the tumor began squeezing off his brain’s capacity to regulate his temperature, and as we bundled him into the car and rushed to the hospital he slipped into a coma while his mom held him in the back seat.
As we reached the hospital and rushed him into the emergency room he stopped breathing. The doctors attempted for several minutes to revive him until Kristin and I collected our grief-stricken wits about us and asked the doctors to stop. And he was gone 🙁
Preview May the Force Be With You
