Of Tornadoes and the Amish

Thursdays aren't usually that exciting. Most of the time it's just a normal day, only one more day until the weekend. Today was a little different though. Yesterday afternoon the dietitian I'm with for a couple weeks in the Pediatrics location told me to look some stuff up on a patient that she said was very interesting and then we'd talk to him tomorrow. So I start to look stuff up and it is definitely interesting. The little boy (15 months) was in at 5 months. after having weeklong diarrhea. He was severely underweight. Not too strange so far. But then I read, his mom did not breastfeed and instead made a homemade infant formula of water, milk, and molasses. Ok, definitely caught my attention now. Plus she's using raw unpasteurized cow's milk to make it. Crazy!! No wonder the poor guy has diarrhea- his gut just can't handle the cow's milk yet. Well, then I read on and it all starts to make sense--the family is not a normal family- they're Amish! So anyways I was excited for today because I have never been close up with any Amish people. I've seen some Mennonites from time to time, but the closest I've been to any Amish is seeing them in their horse and buggy as I pass them on the highway. So today I did get to meet the mom, dad, little boy, and his brother. The mom and dad looked pretty similar to the couple in the above picture. The family has a total of nine children and had two kids that died in childhood- one at age 2 for unknown reasons but possibly related to poor growth and the other at 5 months from the measles that affected his lungs. It was definitely interesting. It was kind of difficult to figure out what to do with them because there were so many cultural differences. The poor little guy was in with rotovirus and bad diarrhea and hadn't gained more than a couple pounds since he was five months!! Most families probably would have been reported to DHS for neglect. But it was hard to know if he had some underlying disease or if it was just nutritional because he never sees a doctor and has never been screened for all the diseases that most infants are screened for at birth. We sent them off with lots of nutrition goals and info so hopefully the little guy starts growing.

So anyway, I was pretty excited about the day when I got home this evening. Mike and I were discussing how hot and humid it was and how it just had that feel in the air that a tornado would later be on its way. Well, we were definitely right. We had a tornado headed right towards us. The weather all around us was just crazy with reports of golf ball up to "disc" size hail (which was so big, they didn't have a word to describe it so they used disc). We did get some hail here, but it was dime sized and probably not enough to damage anything. The tornado missed North Liberty, but did touch down in Iowa City and apparently caused lots of damage. I haven't heard if anything happened at the hospital, but the downtown area sounds like it got pretty messed up and that's the area of the hospital. I guess I'll see tomorrow when I go to work. It seems crazy to say, but I kind of like tornadoes- as long as there's no serious damage. I remember missing them in the spring when I lived in Boston. I guess I'm a midwest girl at heart!