Current Affairs Boston bombing

[ED]

And you know, this whole thing kind of makes me happy.

Anywhere else in the world, if a similar thing happens, there's on the order of at least ten times more deaths and other casualties. Even Jerusalem, you're talking double digits.

Which is fitting, I guess. Boston is the City Upon a Hill, the New, the True Jerusalem, going back to the Arbella. The Hub of the Universe. America's not God's Country, but Boston is God's City.

WTF are you talking about??

Er, his home has just been bombed and he's feeling a bit emotional? Maybe? Give it a rest and use your head.

It's more than a feeling.

Oh my. Bravo, Sir

[choffer]

Big Pictures

Horrific. Can't imagine what it would have been like to go through something like this.

[kurtsimonw]

Some horrible stuff.

[leviramsey]

This one's not gruesome (not much blood & gore), but just gripping

[Stevo985]

Incredible pictures in that link, Levi.

 

Horrifying and Gruesome, but that sort of stuff shouldn't be censored, imo.

[choffer]

that sort of stuff shouldn't be censored, imo.

Mostly I'd agree but I can't unsee that shot of the guy whose leg was shredded (page 4 I think) and I really wish I could.

[Ingram85]

The 12th pic I fear has been described incorrectly, I fear its a man hugging his deceased girlfriend

Just horrifying.

Some are saying the guy in the 6th pic with the grey hoodie on is who they had under guard at a hospital. I reckon its bollocks twitter drivel but who knows.

Wonder how long it will be before we get concrete info on who is responsible?

[Stevo985]

The girl in picture 12 is the same girl from picture 9.

 

I'm far from an expert and obviously you can die from a leg wound if you've hit an artery but I imagine there'd be more blood. My guess is she's not dead from that.

[leviramsey]

Some are saying the guy in the 6th pic with the grey hoodie on is who they had under guard at a hospital. I reckon its bollocks twitter drivel but who knows.

It's not consistent with a lot of what's come out. The guy under guard was stopped while running, covered in others' blood, but with burns on his hands.

Edited April 16, 2013 by leviramsey

[CI]

I'm not comfortable entirely with the pics. I know it's their job but a) taking pictures of people dead or in the process of dying or seriously injured and b. people putting them onto the www. I know it's the world we live in now but it makes me feel uneasy

Edited April 16, 2013 by CI

[Stevo985]

It's documenting the event.

It's important, imo. It means we see the realness of these things and don't forget how tragic they are.

 

If someone had told me about the explosion and 2 people died I'd obviously think it was tragic but I don't think I'd be as effected by it as I am seeing pictures like that. It would just be numbers.

 

By all means if someone can help but they're standing taking pictures, then I'd feel uneasy, thy should be helping.

But on the other hand, those people could quite easily turn on their heels and run for their lives. It takes courage to photograph stuff like this.

[leviramsey]

Apparently (I may have misheard things), the mother and sister of the 8-year-old who died (the father was running in the marathon and had just crossed the finish line) were both double amputated.

Wow.

Just wow.

[Ingram85]

The girl in picture 12 is the same girl from picture 9.

 

I'm far from an expert and obviously you can die from a leg wound if you've hit an artery but I imagine there'd be more blood. My guess is she's not dead from that.

Yeah I've just looked again, your right. The picture made me think the worst.

[leviramsey]

On the bright side, this could well be a Cocoanut Grove for prosthetics

The Cocoanut Grove was Boston's premier nightclub during the post-Prohibition 1930s and 1940s. On November 28, 1942, this club was the scene of the deadliest nightclub fire in US history, killing 492 people (which was 32 more than the building's authorized capacity) and injuring hundreds more. The enormity of the tragedy shocked the nation and briefly replaced the events of World War II in newspaper headlines. It led to a reform of safety standards and codes across the country, and major changes in the treatment and rehabilitation of burn victims.

Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston City Hospital took dozens of burn and smoke inhalation victims, and the event led to new ways of caring for both. Surgeons Francis Daniels Moore and Oliver Cope at Massachusetts General Hospital pioneered fluid resuscitation techniques for the burn victims, whose wounds were treated with soft gauze covered with petroleum jelly instead of tannic acid. The event was the first major use of the Hospital's new blood bank, one of the area's first.

Survivors of the fire were also among the first humans to be treated with the new antibiotic, penicillin. In early December Merck and Company rushed a 32-liter supply of the drug, in the form of culture liquid in which the Penicillium mold had been grown, from New Jersey to Boston. The drug was crucial in combating staphylococcus bacteria which typically infect skin grafts. As a result of the success of penicillin in preventing infections, the US Government decided to support the production and distribution of penicillin to the armed forces.

Erich Lindemann, a Boston psychiatrist, studied the families and relatives of the dead and published what has become a classic paper, Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief, read at the Centenary Meeting of The American Psychiatric Association in May 1944 and published in September of the same year. At the same time Lindemann was laying the foundation for the study of grief and dysfunctional grieving, Alexandra Adler was working with more than 500 survivors of the fire and conducting some of the earliest research on post-traumatic stress disorder.

To this day, MGH is considered one of the top few hospitals in the world for burn care, and the Shriners' Hospital is likewise one of the top few for pediatric burn care (disclaimer: I'm not (yet) a Noble).

I can think, off the top of my head, of a few medical startups in Longwood (about a mile or so from the finish line) that are working on innovations in prostheses.

Edited April 16, 2013 by leviramsey

[AVFCforever1991]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/16/martin-richard-dead-boston-marathon-explosions_n_3090386.html

 

Really is grim stuff 

Edited April 16, 2013 by AVFCforever1991

[Kingfisher]

So, when are we going to invade Iran?

Edited April 16, 2013 by Kingfisher

[leviramsey]

I don't have any kids, but if I did I'd be bawling

It was a sunny Monday, like this one -- the day of her first big league baseball game -- and my pig-tailed seven-year-old stood on the Boston Marathon finish line, blinking back the sunlight.

This was our "Special Day," as she kept calling it, just the two of us riding the swan boats in the Boston Public Garden, eating ice cream from a van on Boston Common, then a lunch of Fenway Franks at the ballpark, and finally fortifying ourselves for the two-hour drive home to Connecticut with a bulk purchase at Sugar Heaven, the candy store on Boylston Street.

As my daughter drowsed in the back seat, bracing for a return to three siblings and domestic chaos, I asked her what she thought and she said: "Best day ever." And then, too soon, we were home, and Siobhan's carriage turned back into a pumpkin.

That was last Aug. 27 -- the last day of summer vacation, the day before school started -- but I returned to it again and again on Monday, after seeing that bomb go off next to Sugar Heaven, and the chaotic scenes that followed at the Boston Marathon finish line, where my daughter still stands in a photograph that I took on that other Monday seven months ago, our Special Day, a day full of promise and Skittles.

In that photo on the finish line, saved on my phone, she wears a sweatshirt emblazoned Love & Peace.

When the news broke Monday that the bombings had killed an eight-year-old -- another child out on a Special Day, Boylston Street a festival of flags and runners and happy spectators, and shop windows chockablock with candy -- I felt the way I did in December, racing home from the Newtown area after the Sandy Hook shootings and running into the house like Jim Valvano: looking for someone to hug.

It happened again on Monday, when Newtown residents were on the course and among the spectators in Boston. The kids burst into the house from a happy and oblivious afternoon in the park, bewildered and resistant as I hugged them.

When my eldest daughter, who is now eight, saw the chaos on CNN, I explained to her what had happened, and where. She asked who had done it (I didn't know), and why (I couldn't say) and whether the people who work in Sugar Heaven -- repeatedly in the background on TV -- were OK.

Sugar Heaven still comes up, seven months after our Special Day, because scarcely a week has passed since last August 27 that my daughter hasn't asked when we can go back to Boston, to another Red Sox game, to Sugar Heaven, and to run across the marathon finish line, arms raised in triumph like we'd just won the race.

She has plenty to remind her. We came home from our Special Day with a Red Sox cling decal for Mom's van, and a sequined Sox hat for Siobhan, and a father-and-daughter picture taken by the roving Fenway photographer in the stands. It's now framed on my daughter's bedroom wall, the Green Monster as backdrop to the Best Day Ever.

That day continues to echo with a series of inside jokes and secret handshakes. Shelling peanuts not long ago at Five Guys, Siobhan recalled in front of her siblings -- still lording it over them -- that the first time she had ever cracked open a shelled peanut was at Fenway, on our Special Day.

She has repeatedly changed the family photo on my phone's lockscreen to a photo of just herself, beneath the stands at Fenway, standing next to the Sox logo, on our Special Day. (It's on my phone right now, again, I see.)

Quite why or how that day has taken up so much space in her head is hard to say, except that it was the last day of summer, not to mention a rare day off from competing for her parents' attention, a day when we looked in every shop window on Boylston and Newbury Streets and the Red Sox beat the Royals and candy was in endless supply.

"Want to go to another game next year?" I asked as we merged onto the Mass Pike.

"I want to go to every game next year," she said.

I've been thinking of all of this all afternoon, and into the evening on Monday -- another beautiful Monday in Boston, when the Red Sox won and thousands had their pictures taken at the Boston Marathon finish line and plenty of kids would have pressed their faces to the glass of Sugar Heaven.

A Special Day for so many, Patriots Day, pregnant with potential as the Best Day Ever.

Except that now I'm looking at a picture of my eight-year-old blinking into the sunlight on Boylston Street, and I'm blinking back tears.

[leviramsey]

It's Grantland, so too long to quote, but I'll quote this bit with which I'm sure mjmooney can identify.

There was something comfortingly mundane in how truly angry she was. The best example of this came from my friend, Steve Brown, a reporter for WBUR, one of the local Boston NPR stations. Brown swore he heard one person say, "Damn it, this is the first time I ever got DNF'd."

[Delphouneso]

The issue over taking pictures of something like this is a difficult one for me. I completely agree with Stevo that this kind of thing shouldn't be censored, but at the same time I just can't put myself in the mindset of a person whose instinct reaction in a situation like this is to take photographs.

[Stevo985]

It's how you look at it though.

 

Some people's instant reaction is to go and help victims. In which case standing taking photographs seems a bit cowardly.

But on the other hand, a hell of a lot more people's reactions are to run for the hills, in which case staying and photographing what's happening seems admirable.

 

I don't have a problem with it. As I said, if they were the only people who could help and they're taking photos then I'd be bothered by it.