Vital Signs: Paralyzed by Faith

The Medivac helicopter made a noisy descent to the landing pad at University Medical Center in Salt Lake City. The patient on board was on the final leg of a long journey home from South Africa. Jeremy Clark, an ambitious 23-year-old college graduate, had been on a Mormon mission in Johannesburg when he awoke one day unable to move his legs. He was briefly hospitalized there, but the South African doctors could not explain his sudden paralysis and found no evidence of injury or infection, so he was transferred back to the States by air ambulance.Medics wheeled Jeremy to the neurology ward, where I was waiting. They said he had been about three weeks into his two-year commitment in South Africa when one morning he did not show up for his assignment, nor did he answer his 
phone. Someone finally went to his apartment and found him lying there, immobilized.“He’s been like this for a week, doctor,” the medic told me. “He hasn’t spoken since this happened.”The youthful-looking, blond-haired patient stared at the ceiling, his blue eyes unblinking. “Good morning, Jeremy,” I said. I felt invisible in the silence. “Are you in pain?”No reply.“You’re home now,” I said. “We’ll get to the bottom of this...”Image: iStockphoto

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Vital Signs: A Leg of Legendary Size

The patient was a petite 80-year-old white-haired woman in pressed Bermuda shorts. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. 
Schulman,” I said to her, trying my best not to gape. The medical resident, Charles, had warned me that her leg was seriously swollen, but I still almost did a double take when I saw it.If her left leg was a slender maple, her right was a giant redwood. It measured about three times the circumference of the left and was swollen all the way from her ankle to the very top of her thigh. It was by far the biggest swelling I’d seen in my career.“How long has it been swollen like this?” I asked Mrs. Schulman.“More than a month,” she said. “And don’t tell me to elevate it; I have it up all the time. I can’t bend it, I can’t garden. It’s terrible!”Charles filled me in on her medical history. She was on a blood thinner for an irregular heartbeat and a pill for high blood pressure. A few months earlier, she had tripped on a sidewalk and landed on her right knee. It still ached from time to time.“Don’t forget my cancer,” Mrs. Schulman piped in. “I had lung cancer five years ago, and I beat it!”Alarmed, I willed my eyebrows not to rise. It was painfully obvious that she might be wrong. Since cancer increases the risk of blood clots, a single swollen leg in a patient with a history of cancer was a blood clot until proved otherwise. I could see from Charles’s widened eyes that he hadn’t known about her cancer history until that moment...

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With $1.3M From Voyager & More, Chirpify Brings Direct Music, Ticket Sales To Twitter

In February, Chirpify rebranded from SellSimp.ly and launched a Twitter commerce platform that allowed brands and consumers to buy, sell, donate and transact through tweets without leaving the comfort of Twitter. Since launch, Chirpify has seen growing traction, thanks in part to a promotional campaign launched at SXSW, called "Tweet-a-Beer," which resulted in a huge boost of traffic for Chirpify, with two new users signing up every second. Today, the startup's direct sales model for Twitter is officially getting further validation -- this time in the form of capital -- as the startup announced that it has secured $1.3 million in series A financing. The new round of investment, which adds to the $50K in seed it raised from its incubator Upstart Labs, was led by Voyager Capital, with participation from Geoff Entress, BuddyTV CEO Andy Liu, former Facebook exec Rudy Gadre, Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes, and TiE Oregon Angels.

Technology/Internet/With-1-3M-From-Voyager-More-Chirpify-Brings-Direct-Music-Ticket-Sales-To-Twitter

Dollars, Sense, And 40 Billion Facebook Credits

Roughly 16 billion Facebook Credits were distributed and consumed in 2011. In 2012, I predict that the use of Facebook Credits will soar by three times to over 40 billion Credits spent on virtual goods, digital goods and more. The growth will be fueled by new digital content available on Facebook, use of Facebook Credits to reward brand loyalty and better marketing of a social currency that is still in its infancy. The following chart shows the growth of Facebook Credits revenue reported by Facebook from 2009 to 2011.

Technology/Internet/Dollars-Sense-And-40-Billion-Facebook-Credits