On Tuesday, November 7, 2017, Oklahoma City’s Brightmusic Chamber Ensemble will present its second concert of the 2017-18 season, “Masterworks for Three,” featuring chamber works by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century composers, all of whom wrote extensively in the genre. The Ensemble will present trios by Mozart, Mendelssohn and Brahms. The Mendelssohn trio is one of his most popular chamber works and is recognized as one of his greatest. The sweetly-melancholic Brahms trio commemorates the death of his mother earlier that year and was the last chamber work he would write for the next eight years. All three compositions on the program of this Jeannette Sias Memorial Concert are masterworks by three of classical music’s greatest masters. The works on the program are: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Trio in G Major, K. 564 (for violin, cello and piano) Felix Mendelssohn, Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, op. 49 (for violin cello and piano) Johannes Brahms, Horn Trio in E-flat Major, op. 40 (for horn, violin and piano).
Brightmusic musicians performing are: Gregory Lee (violin), Meredith Blecha-Wells (cello), Kate Pritchett (horn) and Amy I-Lin Cheng (piano)
The performance will take place at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, November 7 at St. Paul’s Cathedral, 127 NW 7th Street (at Robinson). Individual concert admission is $20 per ticket. Children, students and active-duty military personnel are admitted free with ID. More information about this concert is available on Brightmusic’s website at http://www.brightmusic.org.

Volunteers help travelers on their way

by Bobby Anderson
Staff Writer

When Paul and Kim Sanders retired they wanted to volunteer.
The first assignment they found was stuffing envelopes for an upcoming local fundraiser.
It wasn’t exactly what they were looking for.
“The majority of my life I’ve been an outside salesperson,” Paul Sanders explained. “Sitting in an office just wasn’t my cup of tea.”
But while he was volunteering he did strike up a conversation with someone who volunteered at Will Rogers World Airport.
An invitation was extended and he decided to give it a try.
It’s been eight years now since Sanders – and eventually wife Kim – began manning the Traveler’s Aid welcome centers at Will Rogers World Airport.
And for both of them it’s one of the highlights of their week.
“It’s a lot of fun. We have a good time,” Kim Sanders said. “We meet different people. Everyone who comes through with questions is always friendly.”
The Sanders’ and around 70 others volunteer their time each week to man one of the welcome center booths – one on the main terminal level and the other by baggage claim.
WELCOME WAGON
Will Rogers World Airport sees around four million passengers annually.
That’s a lot of coming and going and volunteers like Paul and Kim are in the thick of it.
NBA stars, mayors from other cities and TV personalities – are just a few of the people that have come to Paul over the years looking for help.
“It’s a fun experience and it’s only four hours a day so you’re not tied down,” Paul said. “It’s a four-hour shift so if you’ve got to be gone or going on a trip … we’ve got people who can come in.”
Upward Transitions (formerly Traveler’s Aid) runs the visitor’s center at Will Rogers World Airport. For more than 90 years, Upward Transitions has touched the lives of Oklahomans, elevating those in need, stranded or homeless to a position of self-sufficiency.
Upward Transitions was founded in 1925 as Travelers Aid and was one of the first agencies to become a member of the United Way of Central Oklahoma. The group receives support from a diverse set of funding sources including the United Way, private foundations, federal, county and city grants.
Megan Chapman serves as the Traveler’s Aid Volunteer Coordinator.
“One of the things that we have the opportunity to do that not a lot of agencies can do is we can provide financial assistance for stranded travelers,” Chapman said. “It could be anything from you getting pickpocketed on your way here and you can’t pay for a taxi. We do help stranded traveler’s get home. That’s our mission of our agency both here and downtown – to bring people home.”
Chapman said her organization has been called on to help victims of domestic violence often find their way to the airport. Those stranded at the airport overnight or facing personal emergencies can also turn to the group.
And they’re greeted largely by senior volunteers trained to make things a littler easier.
“I’m always looking for people who are friendly,” Chapman said. “This is an interactive position. It’s not sitting in an office stuffing envelopes and doing mailings. The needs are greater. People are looking for lost baggage or a place to eat.”
“Often our volunteers are the first face people see or the first person someone talks to when they arrive in Oklahoma. We’re kind of looking for people who want to be ambassadors of Oklahoma City and the airport.”
Chapman was a Will Rogers airport volunteer after six years in the Navy. She loved the experience and a year into her service the position of director came open.
“The reason I love airports isn’t the airplanes – don’t get me wrong, I still have a heart for aviation – but it’s because of the people,” Chapman said. “You meet so many people. Everyone in here has a story whether they’re traveling through on vacation or grieving the loss of a loved one. We like to find out what their stories are.”
That’s the hook for Kim, whose smile automatically lights up a room.
“It gets us out and it helps other people,” Kim said. “When you get done at night you’ve done something. And here it’s something different every time. It’s not like an office. You never know what’s going to happen.”
For more information on how to volunteer you can contact Chapman at 405-232-5507, extension 107.

The famous cat, named Zooby, turned 18 years old this month! Yes, she is still alive and well! To celebrate, her caretaker and author, Sherry Kelly, is giving away 18 copies of Zooby’s book, A Cat Named Zooby. The book is being handed out randomly in various places around the OKC area. Kelly says some people are very reluctant to accept something for free, while others are very pleased and excited. Zooby is slowing down in her old age and spends most of her time lying in the sun or on her heated pad. Since recovering from paralysis eight years ago, she has become one very spoiled miracle of a cat!

Saturday will mark a half-century since Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. In the 50 years since, space missions have had an unlikely touchpoint right here in Oklahoma—at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.
In 1978, Shannon Lucid, Ph.D., then working as a post-doctoral researcher at OMRF, was selected as part of the first class of female astronauts in NASA’s space shuttle program. Her time at OMRF, where she’d studied how chemicals cause cancerous changes in cells, had not prepared her for the media onslaught that followed the announcement.
Local and international news outlets, including crews from Time, Life and People magazines, came to OMRF to interview Lucid. She even appeared on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
Despite Lucid’s newfound fame, she remained “very down to earth,” said Don Gibson, who worked in the lab with Lucid during the six-plus years she was at OMRF. She spent several months wrapping up her scientific projects at the foundation, determined not to leave any loose ends for her colleagues.
It took seven years of training, but in 1985, Lucid became the sixth American woman to reach space. And as a mission specialist aboard three different space shuttles, she put her scientific training to use.
She conducted a project on the growth of ice crystals and studied the effects of space on wild wheat. She observed quail embryos and, in a nod to her days at OMRF, even did a project with lab rats.
“On the Columbia, we had 48 rats to tend, and I worked with them every day,” Lucid told OMRF’s Findings magazine in 2016. “No one else on the mission had ever done that sort of thing, so I was a natural for that task.”
While NASA’s research has focused on what transpires far above the earth’s surface, many of the projects on space flights also aim to change things right here on our planet. That was the case with a pair of experiments that OMRF’s Allen Edmundson, Ph.D., sent into space in 2003 aboard the shuttle Columbia.
The experiments involved taking cells from cancer patients in their natural, liquid form and transforming them into solid crystals. Once the cells had been crystallized, which happens more readily in the gravity-free atmosphere of space than under earthbound conditions, Edmundson planned to bombard them with radiation to study their structure. He hoped that unmasking the cells’ structure might lead to new cancer treatments.
However, after 16 days in space, the Columbia disintegrated upon re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere. All seven astronauts on the shuttle died.
When Edmundson later viewed photos of shuttle debris found near Nacogdoches, Texas, he was stunned. There, amidst the wreckage, was a small, aluminum container that had held his experiments.
“I couldn’t believe that our little box could have survived a fall from 200,000 feet,” he said. Still, his experiments did not.
The Columbia tragedy put a temporary halt to human space flight, but those missions eventually resumed. This past March, Vice President Mike Pence announced that NASA was aiming for a new generation of Americans to reprise Armstrong’s lunar landing by 2024.
“We still have so much to learn from space,” said OMRF President Stephen Prescott, M.D. “Judging from history, I feel confident that Oklahoma scientists will continue to contribute to this process of exploration and discovery.”

www.whisperingcreekretirement.com

by Bobby Anderson
Staff Writer

Norman Regional Health System Infection Prevention Specialist Julie Smith, RN, MS, CIC has a new ally in the war on germs in her health system.
Actually, she has four new allies and not one of them is over four-foot tall.
Norman Regional Hospital recently invested more than $400,000 in new Xenex Germ-Zapping Robots, which have been credited by other healthcare facilities across the U.S. for helping reduce infection rates.
“We’ve begun to see an impact already,” Smith said. “Your typical day-to-day cleaner doesn’t clean C-diff spores so you have to use special cleaners such as bleach, which is the only thing that works. This will kill the C-diff spores and it cleans the air.
“We have already seen a decrease in hospital-acquired infections.”
Think R2D2 with the ability to emit UV light 10 times brighter than the surface of the sun.
Norman Regional has four new pulsed xenon ultraviolet (UV) disinfection robots that will enhance patient safety by destroying the microorganisms that cause hospital acquired Infections (HAIs).
These robots use UV light technology to quickly disinfect an enclosed space. The Germ-Zapping Robots emit a blast of UV light that kills bacteria and viruses in minutes within an enclosed area.
Depending on the size of the room, the Xenex robots can disinfect in just 5-10 minutes. The germicidal UV light disinfects a variety of areas and surfaces including bedrails, tray tables, machines, monitors, keyboards and computers.
“We’ve taken the approach that patients come first,” Smith said. “That’s our main stance. If it takes a little longer to turn over the room then we’re going to do it. It’s the right thing to do.”
The technology also provides a total kill of the Ebola and Zika viruses.
It has shown impressive declines in a number of organisms at various hospital sites around the country including:
*70% reduction in ICU C. diff infection rates
*53% reduction in C. diff infection rates
*57% reduction in MRSA infection rates
*100% elimination of VRE in isolation rooms
“The Xenex LightStrike, no-touch disinfection system uses pulses of full spectrum UV light to fuse the DNA of organisms. Once the organism’s DNA is fused it can no longer replicate or mutate, and is no longer infectious,” said Clyde Brawner, Director of Environmental Services at Norman Regional.
Two robots will be stationed at Norman Regional Hospital and two will be at the Norman Regional HealthPlex. After a housekeeper has completed the process of cleaning a room which includes removing trash and wiping surfaces with a disinfectant, the robot will be wheeled into the room to begin its work. The robot uses intense bursts of UV light to disinfect high-touch areas in patient rooms and operating room suites.
It can also be used to disinfect other areas such as utility closets, waiting rooms and more.
“The UV robots are another way that Norman Regional is making patient safety a priority,” said Darin Smith, Pharm.D., Vice President of Quality and Performance Improvement. “It’s both important and necessary to have multiple methods of effective disinfection in our arsenal to protect patients, visitors, and healthcare staff.”
Xenex’s patented Full Spectrum pulsed xenon UV room disinfection system is used for the advanced disinfection of healthcare facilities. Due to its speed and ease of use, the Xenex system has proven to integrate smoothly into hospital existing disinfection operations.
Norman Regional Health System is a multi-campus system that serves the healthcare needs of south central Oklahoma.
Norman Regional Hospital is licensed for 324 beds and offers a full range of services including emergency care, oncology, an intensive care unit, surgery and more.
The Norman Regional HealthPlex campus is licensed for 136 beds and features the services of cardiovascular, spine and orthopedics, women’s and children’s and more. The Norman Regional HealthPlex is also the home of the Chest Pain Center and the HealthPlex Heart Hospital.
It has grown to employ more than 2,700 people and have 356 physicians credentialed on the Medical Staff.
The burden of treatment costs has shifted from insurers and CMS to hospitals.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistics show that in the United States, one in 25 patients will contract an HAI while in care, with close to 75,000 of these patients dying annually.
CDC figures also show that HAIs cost the United States healthcare industry upwards of $30 billion dollars.