Where to start?

I've obsessed about where to start my story. James Michner might start with pre-history and the separation of tectonic plates that led to the formation of North America, then how the seas covered what is now the central United States for eons. Then on to my ancestors , and finally to me. In this blog, I will cover my own history, observation of the many changes I've seen, and what makes the Midwest unique, but I'll trust you to look up the seas and rocks elsewhere. It is time to stop dithering and take the plunge.

Each of us has unforgettable moments; the shooting of John F. Kennedy, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and things more private. I've experienced many such events in my sixty-seven years, from the overhead flight of hundreds and hundreds of aircraft headed for World War II, to the morning of September 11, 2001. I think, however, that I will start with a week in December of 1982, that changed my life forever.

I had been in Washington, D.C. for a few days, attending a meeting of the US. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Committee of Blood and Blood Products, of which I was a member. We met three or four times a year to advise FDA on questions they had on the effectiveness and safety of the American Blood Supply. I had arrived on a Wednesday, and on Thursday the meeting of the Committee began in earnest. I, however was constantly interrupted by telephone calls from St. Louis all that first day.

A year of so previously, I had been appointed CEO of the Missouri-Illinois Blood Services Region, manager of the Bi-State Chapter of the American Red Cross, and Division manager of a large area that included the eastern half of Missouri and the sounthern third of Illinois. My responsibilities had expanded from Blood Services to Disaster Relief, Safety Services, Aid to Military Families, and a variety of other Red Cross activities. It seemed that not only was it raining very hard, but unseasonal tornadoes had been spawned by an Arctic cold front colliding with warm moisture-laden air from the Gulf of Mexico. It was not a frequent occurrence in the Midwest in December, but neither was it unknown.

The tornado had skipped along south of St. Louis, but did its greatest damage in the Illinois community of New Baden, which had apparently been flattened. I had about decided to leave the conference and jump on the next plane to St. Louis, when calm heads there said that they felt things were under control. They only hoped it would stop raining so they could better provide services to the families whose homes and business had been destroyed. I decided to stay and return the next afternoon, Friday, in part because I'd been advised that there would be an extremely important private gathering of the Committee the next day. And important it was.

A number of FDA officials, the Committee, and a few invited guests, adjourned to a private room for lunch, where we heard Dr. XXXX, head of a group from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) monitoring a growing number of cases of a disease that had not been recognized before. The presentation was long and had graphic details; and when it was over, I believed, despite the absence of totally convincing evidence, that the new disease was probably somehow transmissible. The disease was uniformly fatal, it was associated with an unusual form of pneumonia (which had triggered the investigation), and with a rare form of blood vessel cancer called Kaposi's Sarcoma. They had decided to call the new illness Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome or AIDS for short. CDC raised the possibility that it could be spread by blood products, though no one was sure how, and that it seemed to be spreading fairly rapidly.

Six hours later, my plane touched down on a rainy Lambert Field field in St. Louis, and when I checked for messages on my answering machine, the situation in St. Louis was deteriorating fast. In addition to Tornado relief, the Meramec River which runs through the southwestern St. Louis suburbs was rising rapidly, and the weather forecast was for more rain.

Things went from bad to worse. Despite vigorous sandbagging by hundreds of volunteers, many of them teenagers, the Meramec spilled out of its banks at Pacific, Missouri, floating dozens of trailers of their pads, ripping down buildings, and forcing the evacuation of the entire population to a nearby school, where Red Cross and the Salvation Army had set up a shelter. Later in the week, Tuesday or Wednesday, I got a call from an official of the State of Missouri indicating that the flooded trailer park had been under surveillance because a waste oil collector had dumped hundreds, if not thousands, of gallons of waste oil on its gravel road to "keep the dust down", and it seemed the oil was contaminated by high levels of PCBs, a powerful carcinogen. We had hundreds of people, including many youngsters standing in the water during the sand bagging operation. And it continued to rain. Hard.

I was 42 years old, only moderately experienced for a major flood disaster, I knew little about PCBs, and one of the most devastating events in medical history was unfolding with me in the middle. My life would be forever changed.