A month ago Dr. Aas called and left a message. He was raising money for one of his local projects, the Sacred Heart Music Center. Its not one of my top priorities. I’ve only been there once for a performance – Ladyship Black Mombassa. But for Hans Aas I was happy to send a little something in.
Today the Trib has a nice little story about the Aas’s, both physicians, and their most recent trip to Africa’s Cameroon.
I first heard of Dr. Aas when my wife brought home a New York Times article that folks were circulating around Minnesota Power. The good Doctor’s name probably inspired it since you get a very different word if you replace one of the a’s with an s. It was pretty low humor for the Times. What made it a bit of a double entendre was Han’s work as a gastroenterologist. That’s the medical speciality dealing with the tunnel which all animals that have evolved past sea anemones allowing them to transfer food from one end to the other as opposed to ingesting it from one end and ejecting the waste from the same location.
Every child past the age of six knows not only what the other end of the tunnel is but what’s its called. Hence the story with a big “ick” factor.
The ick comes from our desire to prettify nature. We don’t like to think of ourselves as what we are – a little bag of water with a trillion other critters living on and in us hitching a half billion year ride from generation to generation. You could even think of us as tubes with gut containing a little of the outside world in the same way as our cupped hands might contain a drink of water. Except, ick, that our guts are a home for zillions of one celled animals that have evolved to eat the food we send them and consequently help us digest it. Without them we are toast. They don’t waste much time getting inside us after we are born although the more antiseptic the enviornnment of a hospital and the more rigorous the hand washing regime the more time it probably takes for the full complement of bugs to take up residence.
And that was the subject of the story. Duluth’s own Dr. Aas not spelled Ass had found a way to save people’s lives who had lost these vast colonies of food digesters. This is a big deal because this is becoming a very common occurrence because we consume vast quantities of antibiotics, often unnecessarily. Sometimes the powerful new antibiotics kill damn near everything in the gut with the exception of a single bug nicknamed C Diff.
When this happens its necessary to kill off the C Diff to make room for the whole jungle of other bugs. Imagine a world in which the only living thing was rats. That’s a little like your stomach with a C Diff invasion. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure out how Dr. Aas saw this problem and came up with a solution. It was the subject of the Times Story.
Well guess what? My dear Claudia very nearly had to resort to this treatment some years ago when our old cat bit her. I even wrote about the cat biting part in my column for the Reader Weekly.
This post started out to be inspired by small concidences rather than the nitty gritty of biology, not that I’m all that afraid of the latter as you may have noticed before. So I’ll just get to the co-ink-i-dinks.
About six years ago Claudia and I were at a fundraiser for the Bong Memorial in Superior. We had been talking about a trip to some fun but yet to be determined place when bidding opened for a surprise auction item – a week stay in a Danish cottage. It was spontaneously offered up by Marta and Hans Aas who both grew up in the shadow of Nazi Germany’s occupation of their former homeland. We bid on it and ended up with one of the most fun vacations we’ve ever had. If you type in “Denmark” or “Strandby” or “Copenhagen” you will see that the vacation coincided with the start of this blog. It also coincided with the demise of the damn cat who put Claudia in the hospital and nearly in need of Dr. Aas’s remedy for C Diff.
Its 7:00 in the morning and I’ve just written a lot more than I feel I have time to proof read. I hope you will forgive what is likely to contain a great many thypos and mistakes. BTW “Thypos” is a jok.
Oh, one more thing about the Aas’s. They have a great little Raspberry Farm just off of the Jean Duluth Road. You can pick buckets of berries in season.
