Two more thoughts. Buy one. Then compile your medical history, current medications and other pertinent medical information into a document and transfer it to the drive. Zip that puppy into your wallet and leave it there. You can also store the document in Dropbox or another web-based program like Backupify just in case (in emergencies, sometimes we lose our wallets).
Better yet: Park all of your medical information on a mobile app (more below) so your phone becomes your personal medical library.
You've just taken a big step forward in disaster preparedness.
None of us can “prepare” ourselves for a disaster on the scale of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 11 and the subsequent nuclear reactor failure. This would equate to imagining your current life – the streets where you walk the dog, all the neighborhoods, the closest grocery and dry cleaners, the closest hospital and shopping center – obliterated and splintered into pieces for miles. All of it washed away and covered in mud. Even journalists, those soldiers of information gathering in dire circumstances, have been shaken while covering this disaster.
Some of my first thoughts following news of the earthquake, before I'd even seen images or understood its magnitude, concerned cancer patients. What would you do, I thought, if you were in the middle of chemotherapy? Or recovering from a bone marrow transplant BMT? The week the earthquake hit I'd been visiting with Ann Gregory and her husband, Chris. They are BMT veterans. As she was about to undergo her second bone marrow transplant, Hurricane IKE hit the gulf coast. Her hospitalization at MD Anderson went on without a hitch. But the apartment where Chris was staying had a sewage backup as well as power failure. For a week he lived in their car in the MD Anderson parking garage.
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| Lovell A. Jones, Ph.D. |
He says the best thing any of us can do is to have all of our medical information on a flash drive. "Until the electronic medical record becomes a reality, the best thing any cancer patient can do to guarantee continuity of care is have all their information on a flash drive. We've also found that we need to tell people to dedicate that drive to strictly to health info. Nothing else."
The SECURE project will be working with elementary school children on disaster preparedness in order to increase everyone's knowledge of preparedness, especially their parents. What consortium investigators at Meharry Medical College have found already is that stress during events such as Hurricanes Karina, Rita and Ike seem to increase infant mortality following such storms.
There are steps all of us can take to keep us from becoming a statistic before our time. I've compiled some info below. I hope you find it helpful. For those in states bordering the gulf coast, I've also included the RED CROSS link on evacuation routes.
And by all means, if you have helpful links or mobile apps to share please let me know and I'll add them to the list.
Stay well,
Jody
*Mobile Apps:
1) SOS4Life Cool app (IPhone & coming to Blackberry) that holds your medical history AND translates it into seven different languages.
2) IChemo Diary Merck. (Free download from Apple) Program to monitor your chemotherapy treatment and side affects.
3) In Case of Emergency: (Free Blackberry download): to store emergency contact info.
*Ways to Prepare for a Natural Disaster -- Helpful, consise info./ http://www.breastcancer.org/tips/emergencies.jsp
* "Coping with Cancer After a Natural Disaster" -- Excellent summary from American Cancer Society
* "Emergency Preparedness & Response" Center for Disease Control
*Red Cross Shelters
On Twitter #FF @CDCEmergency @CrisisSocialMedia (#smem)
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