Over the years, I've written thousands of leads--the majority prior to the explosion of online journalism. What I have left are yellowed newspaper clippings. So, here are some of my best leads:
--Frank Couillard died waiting for a paramedic.
For 26 minutes, two Moyer's Corners volunteers trained in basic life support did what they could with cardiopulmonary resuscitation and a turkey baster substituted for the suctioning device they didn't have.
All the while, the volunteers begged for help from volunteer paramedics, trained in advanced life support, who never arrived.
The chaos that ensued as Onondaga County dispatchers tried to summon professional ambulance crews is not uncommon.
--May 17, 1989
--Onondaga Nation Chief Charles Webster died the way he lived for the last 16 years. Alone.
His body lay on his apartment floor at 338 Gifford St. for up to a week before the odor prompted neighbors to call police.
Officers used bolt cutters to open the door to Apartment 501 Tuesday.
Inside, a blue chair was the only piece of furniture in the room. It was facing the window.
And lying near the chair, on his back, was the body of the 71-year-old man who had been chief of the Beaver Clan for more than 20 years.
--Sept. 8, 1988
--They're stealing patients, swiping wheelchairs, ripping down each other's advertisements and bullying little old ladies.
They're the three Syracuse transportation services for elderly and handicapped people. And their fierce competition is getting out of hand.
Officials say no one's gotten hurt. Yet.
Medicaid fraud investigators are taking a closer look.
"I think at some point, if this kind of activity continues, the attorney general's office is going to have to play some role in it," said Robert Stone, Onondaga County's social services administrator.
--Dec. 17, 1989
--Here it is 12:35 a.m. on a school night, and a 17-year-old we'll call Sam is performing, or trying to perform, sobriety tests for an audience of Liverpool police officers.
He's not doing too well.
First, his right index finger touches past and beneath a split second.
He stalls toward the end of his alphabet.
And went Sgt. A.R. "Tony" Farella tells him to walk heel-to-toe down a line, Sam's feet wobble across to opposite sides, crisscrossing heels and toes, never even touching the line.
It's a wonder he's able to stand at all.
On Halloween, Sam had celebrated his 17th birthday.
Three nights later, on Nov. 3, Sam became a piece of the teen population that law enforcers are battling most in the fight against drunk driving. So far this year in Onondaga County, drunken driving has killed seven people. That compares with 23 in 1987 and 13 the year before.
--Nov. 10, 1988
--Cindy Ruebsamen's daughter was recovering from surgery to correct double vision when the $2,280.67 bill arrived. The Cicero woman scanned the charges:
$1,251 for the operating room.
$65 for anesthesia.
$4.34 for the intravenous needle.
Ninety cents for some tubing.
And $555.24 for something called a "New York State Surcharge."
Ruebsamen blinked. A 32 percent tax on medical care? "I thought it was a mistake," she said.
--July 21, 1997
--Hospital executives soon will barter like car salesmen when they're dealing with health insurance executives.
They'll advertise the way department stores do.
They're likely to slash their prices on hip surgeries and hawk the burn treatment or neonatal care that patients can't get anywhere else.
This is the future of health care in New York after hospital deregulation.
The state Legislature passed Gov. George Pataki's reform package last week, doing away with state-set rates, creating an 8 percent tax on hospital and other medical bills and overhauling one of Central New York's major industries.
--July 21, 1996
--The archer knew better than to shoot an arrow without its tip. He pulled back the bow anyway and became one of Dr. Joseph Fischer's emergency cases. When the arrow shot past the man's index finger, it sliced off the side of the finger. The skin sliver stuck to the arrow. The arrow buried itself in the ground.
Fischer, a plastic surgeon who specializes in hand surgery, reattached the skin sliver. He dug out mud that had packed into the arrow, removed and cleaned the skin, and sewed it back to the man's finger at Community-General Hospital.
Most victims of summertime injuries aren't so lucky. Many will lose fingers or toes, or mangle their hands or feet beyond repair. Memorial Day weekend, the gateway to summer, is when Fischer's business starts picking up.
--May 30, 1990
--The number of people with the AIDS virus in their system is increasing everywhere, and the number of new cases of AIDS will double to more than 1 million by 1991.
Those statistics were the sobering welcome as more than 10,000 experts gathered in Montreal at the fifth International Conference on AIDS.
--June 5, 1989
--Veteran teachers are intimidated. They don't want to talk about it because their students know more about it than they do.
Brand new teachers are apprehensive. They don't want to talk about it for fear of contradicting parents' views.
Some parents and teachers become upset when police officers are invited into classrooms to talk about it.
New York state is recognizing a new perplexity in education: Baby-boomers who are now teachers. Who grew up surrounded by marijuana. Who now are teaching drug education to fellow baby boomers' children. Only, the carefree "flower-child" attitude of the 1960s doesn't work with today's more dangerous, more addicting drugs.
--June 5, 1989
--Dr. David Benjamin was a terrible doctor, and the state health department knew it.
He was convicted of murder last week, for letting a woman bleed to death during an abortion in his storefront office in Queens. A decade ago, he was practicing reckless medicine in the Utica area, where he went by the name Dr. Elyas Bonrouhi.
Benjamin was sloppy with a scalpel, performed unnecessary surgeries and ordered inappropriate medications, according to state Health Department records. After he got kicked out of hospitals, he did surgeries and tried to deliver babies in his office--and offered cash bribes to a patient to cover for him, the records show.
Health department records detailing his actions read like a collection of medical horror stories.
--Aug. 13, 1995
--It was like any other funeral.
A minister read the gospel. "Amazing Grace" was sung. Mourners cried and shared hugs.
one thing made Ronald Derby's funeral different. Among the mourners was a man who considered himself Derby's spouse.
"We outlasted some marriages," 29-year-old Michael Royce said.
He and Derby, 36, who worked at Accurate Die Casting Co., were together for eight years. And they'd be together still, he said, if AIDS hadn't killed Derby on July 7.
With more than 32,000 gay men already dead of AIDS, the idea of obtaining spousal rights is pressing. Monogamy in the age of AIDS, health experts say, can save lives.
With monogamy comes commitment. And many gay men--including Derby and Royce--want that commitment to include marriage.
--July 16, 1989
--Pathologists at the Health Science Center in Syracuse spend their days looking under microscopes at the gunk doctors swab from our throats and noses.
What they're seeing lately is scary.
Some of the bugs infecting us with pneumonia are ferocious. They make today's bouts of bronchitis and sinusitis and meningitis more powerful.
Their force is knocking out even little kids with ear infections.
They're super bugs.
--Oct. 9, 1988
--They took apart rides and games for more than 12 hours after the Erie County Fair closed here at midnight Sunday. Then they took showers and naps, did their laundry, grabbed lunch, and purchased food and collected water for the trip.
Then it was time to wait.
While the train crew loaded the rides onto 47 flatbeds, carnival workers for the James E. Strates Shows wandered the neighborhood around the tracks. Some sat at a bar a couple of blocks away. Some fed quarters to a pay phone. Some visited the nearby convenience store.
How would they know when it was time for the train to leave?
"They know. Believe me, they know. They look, and they watch," said train master Mark Popovich.
This is the life of a railroad carny.
The Strates Shows is the only carnival that still travels across the country by rail. The 58-car train, a few hundred feet shy of a mile long, pulled into the state Fairgrounds in Geddes at noon Tuesday. No one was left behind.
--Aug. 25, 1993
--Dr. Frederick Parker sat in a conference room with a dozen doctors on a Wednesday in February.
It was a meeting called 'teaching rounds,' a chance to talk about cases, explore options and confer about proper treatments in a relaxed atmosphere--part of learning for new doctors at the State University of New York Health Science Center. Parker, 58, chairs the department of surgery and is chief heart surgeon there.
He described for his proteges a 69-year-old man who had heart bypass surgery after a heart attack in 1979.
Fifteen years later, the man has had another heart attack. Balloon angioplasty, to flatten the plaque clogging his arteries against the vessel walls, hasn't worked. An X-ray reveals a tumor in his right lung. Chemotherapy is having little effect.
He needs another bypass, Parker told the group. The man is hanging by a thread. If the heart disease doesn't kill him...lung cancer will.
His odds of survival are poor. The man says he's willing to take his chances, even if the operation buys him just a little time. He's not ready to die.
Should a surgeon operate?
It's a tough decision. Toucher today, perhaps, than 20 years ago when open-heart surgery was still considered a miracle. then, surgeons gave it their best and grieved over the patients who died.
Now, open-heart surgery has grown into big business. More than 1,300 people will have open-heart surgeries this year at Syracuse's' University Hospital and St. Joseph's Hospital Health Center. The miracle procedure of the 70s has become a routine operation. It brings the hospital millions of dollars for charity care and the miracle procedures of the 90s.
But a new emphasis on controlling the cost of health care is backing hospital into a corner. Insurance plans and the government, shopping for the cheapest bypasses and the best surgeons, are changing the rules, threatening one of the hospitals' largest sources of incomes.
Some doctors worry that the emphasis on saving dollars may reduce their chances to save lives.
Heart surgeons more comfortable wielding a scalpel are now grappling with a bottom line. Hospital administrators are asking them to help cut costs.
And that's not all. They're being pressured to improve their death rates.
So these days, surgeons pick their patients carefully and enter the operating room with some trepidation. A patient's death bears more than sorrow; it can mar a surgeon's record.
The temptation to turn away the risky cases, like the 69-year-old man with lung cancer.
Parker's residents mulled over the scenario. Just one said he'd choose not to operate.
--May 15, 1994
--Sit anonymously. Or go where everybody knows your name.
Pull out a credit card. Or toss in a buck when the basket comes around.
Weigh in. Or align yourself with a group that forbids stepping on the scale.
Count calories. Count points. Or count quarter pounds lost (or gained.)
Pray. Meditate. or hold hands in a circle.
Central New York offers a multitude of support groups for anyone trying to lose weight. (That was your New Year's resolution, wasn't it?)
You may not think you're the support-group type, but you may be surprised.
--Jan. 9, 2005
--Raymond Foster chain-smoked. He raced from the waiting room, outside and back to the waiting room again.
His mother was undergoing a precarious brain surgery. It was an operation that had never been done. Foster had encouraged her to have it. He knew she was likely to die on the table.
The 15 people on her operating team were prepared for disappointment. They'd promised to do their best, but they knew how impossible their task was. They'd been honest with Foster and the rest of the family: She wasn't at death's door. She was through the door and looking back.
Finally, the surgeon approached the waiting room. His head hung low. Foster cringed.
Foster remembered his first encounter with Dr. James Holsapple. He'd stepped out of his mother's room at University Hospital, so her roommate could have privacy as she used the bathroom. Standing in the hallway, he couldn't help but overhear a huddle of doctors.
They were talking in medical terms, about renal cell carcinoma and the sagittal sinus and circulatory arrest, but Foster made enough sense of the conversation to approach the leader.
"That's my mother you're talking about," he began.
Holsapple dismissed his neurosurgical residents and introduced himself. The patient's he'd been discussing was Foster's mother, Dorothy Allen, 68, of Camden.
Allen had a brain tumor growing on the back of her head, sitting in the Times Square of the brain's venous system. A colleague of Holsapple's operated days before but halted the surgery when Allen almost bled to death.
Now the wound was infected, and Allen was the neurosurgery department's conundrum. Everyone was talking about her desperate situation, feeling hopeless.
Holsapple floated a bold idea: Could they place Allen on a heart-lung bypass machine to take over her body's circulation? Could they cool her body enough to turn off the machine, stop her blood from pumping, place her in a state of "suspended animation"? And would that give them enough time to remove the tumor?
--Dec. 22, 2002
--You'd think a passionate and dedicated surgeon would enjoy a world away from medicine in his down time.
But Dr. Howard Simon escapes into medical thrillers. Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, Michael Palmer...he can get through a book in an evening.
As he was reading one night it occurred to him: I can do this.
So he did.
In a field littered with writers lacking inspiration or ability, follow-through or marketing, Simon made the process look simple.
His first novel hits bookshelves this month.
--Sept. 13, 1998
--Muriel Simons was going to beat cancer.
The 64-year-old woman from Rome had lived with lymphoma for almost two years. She was starting to get well. Doctors had taken some of her healthy bone marrow, harvested it and were waiting to return it to her body.
So Simons checked into Crouse Irving Memorial Hospital for injections of Paraplatin, the medication that would prepare her for the transplant.
"This was her last round of chemotherapy," said a nurse familiar with Simons' care. "More than likely, she was going to be cured."
Instead, her final days were turned to agony--apparently because a similar-sounding, similar-looking cancer drug was injected instead of Paraplatin.
--April 12, 1992
