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Tapped In: Micro-Apt Design Winner, Fighting Heart Disease in Women, History Buffs Show

Joanna Fantozzi — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 19:28:21 +0000

NEW WEBSITE MAKES GOVERNMENT MORE TRANSPARENT
Want to know more about how city officials are spending taxpayers’ money? Now there’s a website that helps you follow the buck. The website, called Checkbook 2.0, was recently released by City Comptroller John Liu. City residents can now see inside New York’s purse and look up department payrolls, capital spending or search the largest checks paid out by the city. (A check to the School Construction Authority, which was paid $99 million for a project in July, is the biggest.) People can even look up financial trends across the city, like average income, and compare those numbers to nationwide patterns. Coming soon to the website: the city’s budget and revenues on view for curious taxpayers.

MICRO-APARTMENT DESIGN WINNER ANNOUNCED
New Yorkers are used to living in tiny apartments, but the shoebox is about to get even smaller. Last week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the winners of the “My Micro NY” apartment design contest. The winning designs, by a team from Monadnock Development LLC, Actors Fund Housing Development Corp. and nARCHITECTS, feature 9-to-10-foot ceilings and somewhere around 300 square feet of space. Almost half of the 55 micro-units, which will be built on East 27th Street, will be available at an affordable price.

“New York’s ability to adapt with changing times is what made us the world’s greatest city,” the mayor said when announcing the winner. “And it’s going to be what keeps us strong in the 21st century.”

The space includes ample storage, a tiny kitchen with a full-size fridge and a living/sleeping area. The building itself is a part of Bloomberg’s program adAPT NYC. Construction will begin in the fall.

CORNELL TECH CAMPUS COMES ONE STEP CLOSER
The proposed high-tech Cornell NYC campus for Roosevelt Island is one step closer to fruition. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer approved the plan last week under a few conditions. The brand-new tech campus is designed to attract students of science and technology and will feature energy-efficient buildings and new degrees like the Master’s of Engineering in computer science. The project, with residential, commercial and academic buildings, is expected to be completed by 2037.

But Stringer did approve the project with some stipulations: He wants to create a community advisory board, expanding the red bus line and expanding the hours of the open campus space.
The new tech campus is part of a citywide plan to help foster New York’s growth as an incubator of technology and innovation.

“The proposed project will have significant benefits to New York City as it will expand our ever-growing tech sector,” Stringer said.

HISTORY BUFFS REJOICE!
The 59th annual Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory at 67th Street and Park Avenue is now under way, and runs until Feb. 3. The show will feature 73 exhibitors with wares from Ancient Rome to mid-century Americana. The show will, as it usually does, benefit the East Side House Settlement in the South Bronx. Tickets are $20. Don’t miss “Young Collectors’ Night” on Jan. 31, featuring cocktails and a private viewing of the show.

FIGHTING HEART DISEASE IN WOMEN
On Friday, Feb. 1, Lenox Hill Hospital is offering free screenings for cholesterol, blood pressure, calcium scores, glucose, BMI and vascular health. Visitors can also sample heart-healthy snacks and check out free yoga demonstrations. At the Einhorn Auditorium, 131 E. 76th St., 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

WAITING ROOM

admin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:33:31 +0000

We need funny stories, warm blankets and magazines just to keep our minds from focusing on the waiting room, the gateway to chemo land. It must be different for other kinds of patients—nurses and doctors don’t necessarily remind them of death.
The first time, my mother and I walked toward the room in silence, holding hands. I’d collapsed without warning in a Miami shopping mall. Eight days before I’d had emergency 12-hour brain surgery to remove the softball-sized tumor wanting to kill me.
The hallways were cold and quiet. The green chemotherapy sign grew closer, and our hands grasped tighter. More people arrived: an older couple, a young girl in her twenties, a young boy with his mother. Others fell asleep or watched the TV at full blast.
Only a few people in front of us—maybe it will be quick.
They called my name. Not bad, only about 45 minutes.
A hippy-ish, peaceful-looking doctor with gray hair and blue eyes walked into the examining room. He laid out the chemo plans, like a syllabus for the semester.
“Not bad,” I said. My oncologist laughed and then gave me a funny look. He saw my lack of fear. And he introduced me to another patient, who was in remission.
I’m nowhere near remission. Most of my senses—sight, sound, taste, touch—are gone, buried beneath many painkillers and my mostly covered head.
But every other week, I’m back in this waiting room, on alert, as if on call, as doctors are every day.
I see familiar faces and new ones, the new ones looking just like mine did on my first day. I also see people throwing up, and bald, gray, tired people, loss of life in their eyes.
I meet a guy in a similar brain-tumor situation. We compare our surgery scars. We compare other things that occur to us. Attitude still has to keep on rising around life.
We’re all competing. Will I get my chemo quickly or have to wait for hours in a full waiting room? Do I have a fast nurse, or is she a bumbler? Is the IV needle nurse going to be good, or will she have no clue of how to find my vein and give me a bruise?
I can see cancer as just a cross to carry—or to briefly battle. I think about all of this while I’m waiting. So I always hope the wait will be short.
Again, I find strength in myself. Each time chemo is finished and the waiting room waits, I feel I’m receiving an angel’s guidance.

HOP ON THE MAMMOVAN

admin — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:32:31 +0000

The feeling after diagnosis, Virginia Bierman said, is the hardest part.
“I broke down and cried hysterically in the taxi because I knew it would be the last time that I would allow myself to cry about it,” she said, recalling the day she was diagnosed with kidney cancer. “People with cancer don’t talk about it very much, probably because their loved ones are afraid if they utter the word ‘cancer,’ everyone might fall apart.”
Hoping to help others, Bierman eventually joined a community education effort that runs a novel cancer detection program from public libraries in Queens, New York. The program, called HealthLink, claims to be the first cancer screening effort that uses libraries to reach poor and uninsured people who don’t have the regular checkups that might detect the disease earlier.
HealthLink and its associated Cancer Action Councils are run by a consortium of not-for-profits supported by American Cancer Society, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and local cancer centers and public libraries. The effort, launched in 2007 with $2.9 million in federal funds, claimed to have reached more than 1,000 people through programs and screenings by March 2008. A related initiative, a “mammovan” that travels to libraries around Queens offering free mammograms, had screened 123 people and detected four cancer cases by then, according to a HealthLink coordinator, Tamara Michel.

The ‘mammovan,’ which provides free mammograms at libraries in Queens.

The libraries are the perfect place to attract local residents, Michel said.
“The libraries are very widely used, so they’re ideal locations,” she said. “In some of the locations we got a lot of people just passing by, who then made appointments for the next visit.”
More than a quarter of the residents of this immigrant-heavy part of New York City speak little or no English, and almost the same percentage have no health insurance, program participants say. And the cancer rates are alarmingly high: late-stage breast cancer diagnosis in Queens is three times the national average—and colorectal and prostate cancer is nearly double.
Bierman, a health coordinator at the Astoria Blue Feather Head Start pre-school, works every day to promote healthy living. Via the councils she can interact with other community members to discuss how to fight cancer in the community.
Similar anti-cancer community outreach programs are cropping up elsewhere. The Witness Project, begun in Arkansas and now operating nationally, has survivors share their stories to help break down the fear and silence that many women associate with cancer.
In Alabama, prison officials oversee The Butterfly Project: a program that educates incarcerated women in the two state prisons about the importance of early detection. The project received national media attention and was incorporated into a video that is now screened in women’s correctional facilities across the country.
“The Cancer Action Councils are vital,” says Michel. “Every community and neighborhood has unique needs and, therefore, requires very different strategies if we are going to increase access to health care.”
“Every family that is touched by cancer has different needs,” said Eartha Washington, vice president of the breast cancer support service Shareing and Careing, a member of the Cancer Action Council and a 14-year survivor of breast cancer. “Whatever those needs are, we’ll meet them.”
Washington advocates a buddy system, under which women with cancer are accompanied to hospital appointments by a fellow survivor and outreach worker. Shareing and Careing also offers a counseling service. “We receive calls, and do whatever else is necessary,” she says.
Washington also works with the Witness Project of Harlem, a breast and cervical cancer education program based on the Arkansas movement focusing on black women.
“It’s a fact that overwhelmingly more white women get breast cancer, but overwhelmingly more black women die from it,” she said. “It’s the same cancer. It’s just discovered later.”
If the HealthLink screenings find any trouble, uninsured women don’t have to pay for treatment—the Queens Cancer Center will provide it for free. “We work with hospital partners to coordinate mobile unit visits, and follow-up treatment where necessary,” said America Cancer Society spokesman Keith Hudson.
Council members hope this program will be a model for community-based anti-cancer efforts nationally.
“It would be wonderful to see similar programs in other states,” says Jennifer Erb-Downward, project coordinator at Memorial Sloane-Kettering. “This type of partnership has a great deal of potential to improve health outcomes for people who are presently not accessing the care that they need.”
“I see our group really coming together to bring cancer awareness to a new level in this neighborhood,” Bierman said. “I believe we as a group can save lives by giving knowledge and resources for treatment to the community.”