Physicians typically dash from one patient or procedure to another through long exausting days. Jeannie Pflum, D.O.’97, an obstetrics and gynecology doctor in Santa Rosa, CA, is no exception.

When they’re able to pull free for a while, most doctors like to slow down. Here, Pflum is an exception.

A speed demon since she was old enough to commandeer two wheels or strap on a pair of skis, Pflum gets her heart pumping while off-duty by pushing super souped-up cars and motorcycles to their limits on table-flat dried lakebeds.

She’s the second woman to be clocked at over 300 miles per hour in a car, but the only woman to reach that speed in a car and also set a speed record on a motorcycle. In October, Pflum established a new record by donning an armor-plated leather suit, hunkering down behind the handlebar of a 1,000cc motorcycle in the desert near El Mirage and accelerating to 186.4 miles per hour.

“It was fun!” said the doctor, who’s 44, the mother of two and stepmother to two more. “It definitely makes my blood pressure go up.”

She joined a super-select club of drivers in October 2002 when she hit 302.179 mph in a torpedo of a car built by family friend Seth Hammond of Santa Barbara, a big name in the costly, adrenaline-rich sport of chasing land speed records.

Pflum will tell you it is an absolute rush to go more than 300 mph in a car, maybe even more of one to accelerate to nearly 200 mph on a motorcycle. But the main reason she treks to the torrid Bonneville Salt Flats and El Mirage to push wheeled vehicles to speeds typically known only by contraptions with wings?

It’s to spend quality time with her dad.

“People ask me, ‘Why do you do this?’ It’s because my father started me,” Pflum said. “It’s a really cool father-daughter thing.”

Breaking speed records is Jeannie Pflum's idea of fun - and a great way to spend time with her dad, Lee Gustafson. Above, Pflum and friend Seth Hammond prepare Gustafson for a race.

Her dad is Lee Gustafson, a retired boat-store owner in San Luis Obispo County, CA. All his life, Gustafson has loved to build engines.

“He tells me a story about taking an engine apart on his bed, and his grandmother wanting to kill him,” his daughter said.

For decades, Gustafson has built engines for Seth Hammond, who for fun creates some of the fastest cars in the world.

Hammond and Gustafson both set records in the long, tubular Lakester-class car (think of a Cub Scout’s Pinewood Derby racer).

Jeannie Pflum grew up hanging out with Hammond and her dad as they built crazy-fast cars and accompanying them to the Bonneville Salt Flats to see what they could do. As a young woman she left

Southern California to pursue a career in medicine – she studied at the medical school that would become Des Moines University, then served her residency at the University of Vermont and joined the Sutter Medical Group of the Redwoods. She’s an ob-gyn specializing in minimally invasive gynecological surgery.

But she never stopped trekking to the desert whenever possible to spend time with her dad and to share in his love of cars built solely to go fast.

“It’s a father and daughter, ‘I’m going to go hang out with my dad’ sort of thing,” she said.

In 1999, she decided to do more than watch. She asked to drive the Lakester on a speed run. Her father and Hammond, whose wife, Tanis, began driving in 1986 and broke several records, saw no reason to deny Pflum. Though it’s inherently dangerous to drive a car more than 200 mph, the Hammond-Gustafson team holds that a trained, properly suited and belted driver in a well-built car is less likely to be hurt on the lakebed than on the highway drive home.

Pflum is astride the cycle on which she exceeded 190 mph.

These days Pflum is focused on reaching 200 mph on a Honda 1000cc motorcycle modified and owned by another colleague of Hammond and her father, Jamie Wagner of Torrance, CA. She figures the 186.4-mph record she set in October on a 1.3-mile course at El Mirage was a good step. One of the best parts of that run: Her dad didn’t think he’d be able to make it there, but he arrived just in time to see her go.

Speed-demon Pflum sets another record
After this article was published on Nov. 2, Jeannie Pflum set a new record on a Class 1000cc production motorcycle, owned and built by Jamie Wagner, of 190.198 miles per hour. She set the record Nov. 14 on the El Mirage dry lakebed in the Southern California desert.

The Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) is the sanctioning body for the Bonneville Speed Week events in August and the El Mirage dry lakes events held once per month, May through November. To compete at the lakebed, the owner and rider must be members of a participatory club. Pflum is a member of the Gear Grinders out of Southern California.

“It’s true what they say – the first time you see a total solar eclipse, your first question is, ‘When is the next one?’” she says.

Over the past decade, Prescher has viewed five total solar eclipses, when the moon completely blocks the sun’s bright surface. This “totality” lasts only a few minutes, but Prescher says it’s worth every second.

On one level, a total eclipse makes visible parts of the sun not normally visible to the human eye, such as its corona and prominences. But viewing the phenomenon goes beyond the visual treat, Prescher says.

“It’s very emotional. It’s hard to put into words how you feel when you’re standing at the edge of a lake or in the African desert and suddenly the moon takes this Pac-Man bite out of the sun,” she says. “It’s fascinating.”

Prescher discovered the hobby after she and her daughter moved from Omaha, NE, to San Diego. Wanting to meet people, she began studying astronomy at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center and Space Theater. In 1999, she learned about a travel opportunity to Romania to view a total eclipse of the sun. She saved up for her and Audrey to go.

“I was addicted,” she admits. In July, Prescher traveled to Yichang, in the Hebei Province of China, to view the longest total eclipse of this century, during which the moon completely covered the sun for six minutes and 39 seconds at a point over the Pacific Ocean. This year, she and Doug plan to view an eclipse near Tahiti.

“People may wonder why I would travel halfway around the world to see a few minutes of totality,” she admits. But her enthusiasm makes sense given the trips themselves, which have included Africa’s Victoria Falls, Egypt’s Great Sphinx, China’s Great Wall and a seven-day cruise down the Yangtze River.

Interacting with local residents and fellow eclipse-chasers is a bonus, too. Total eclipses occur approximately once every 18 months but in a given location only once every 300 to 400 years, creating a unique individual and group experience.

“In Egypt, 20,000 people were gathered at our site to view the eclipse,” she recalls. “At the last minute we had to move because the Egyptian president decided that was where he wanted to view it. But we still enjoyed great viewing from the mesa we were on.”

Kelly Prescher’s “eclipse canon”
Location                                  Date                            Length of totality

Bucharest, Romania             Aug. 11, 1999             2 minutes, 23 seconds

Zambia, Africa                     June 21, 2001             4 minutes, 57 seconds

Solum, Egypt                      March 29, 2006          4 minutes, 7 seconds

Novosibirsk, Siberia            Aug. 1, 2008               2 minutes, 27 seconds

Yichang, China                  July 22, 2009               5 minutes, 25 seconds

Shedding light on solar eclipses
According to NASA, the moon is about 400 times closer to the earth than the sun, while the sun is about 400 times larger than the moon. That creates the illusion on earth that the two orbs are the same size, enabling the moon to completely block the big star’s light when their paths cross, casting the moon’s shadow on earth and creating a total solar eclipse.

A partial solar eclipse occurs when the sun and moon are not completely in line. An annular eclipse occurs when the two orbs are exactly in line, but the moon’s apparent size is smaller than the sun’s. That makes the sun appear as a very bright ring, or annulus, around the moon.

The path of totality is the track of the moon’s shadow across earth’s surface, typically about 10,000 miles long but only 100 miles or so wide. That path is where eclipse-chasers want to be.

With the sun’s surface visually blocked, viewers can see its less-bright corona, a halo-like plasma “atmosphere” that extends millions of miles into space. Also visible are the sun’s prominences, the whip- and loop-shaped features that extend outward. Because the direct light of the sun is blocked, some brighter stars and planets are visible, too.

Eclipse-chasers like Kelly Prescher closely study the NASA eclipse website for information on weather trends, paths of totality and best viewing locations.

Using tents allowed DMU alumnus Pat Crocker and his colleagues to treat an influx of H1N1 flu patients efficiently and effectively.

Pat Crocker and his crew got creative in coping with an H1N1 flu surge last fall.

Most medical centers expected the H1N1 flu virus would increase their patient counts this year, but last fall Pat Crocker, D.O.’80, and his colleagues found themselves in an especially hot spot for the flu and in the media.

“Austin turned out to be one of the early epicenters of H1N1,” says Crocker, emergency medical director at Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas. “We started seeing flu patients in early September and got up to 400 a day, 70 percent with the flu or influenza-type illnesses.”

Fortunately, Crocker and the Dell team were ready. They expanded their “surge capacity” plan made after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and used during Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The plan mapped out a pandemic care area that provided immediate, delayed and overnight care capacity, with pre-packaged and palleted supplies ready for rapid deployment. The plan also featured three Western Shelter tents, erected on the medical center’s parking lot, that could be assembled in two hours and provided a weather-secure environment.

How did patients feel about being treated in a tent?

“They were really happy,” Crocker says. “They would drive up and see a swarm of patients and think they would have a long wait, but it was very efficient. From intake to dismissal, a patient would be in and out typically under 30 minutes. And the kids and families thought the tents were kind of cool.”

The tents relieved the load on the medical center’s emergency room and kept the highly contagious from other patients, he says. The well-organized process likely kept people from getting sicker, too.

“Before the tents were up, 8 to 10 percent of our patients were leaving the hospital without being seen” because they didn’t want to wait, he notes. “That fell to less than 1 percent after the tents were erected.”

The tents also drew a surge in media attention. ABC’s “Good Morning America” and CBS’s “The Early Show” both broadcast from Dell, and almost 80 other television and radio stations covered the hospital.

“Our 15 seconds of fame lasted a little too long,” Crocker laughs.

Dell and its parent organization, Seton Family of Hospitals, used the social media website Twitter as well as tents to tackle the flu surge. Crocker and a fellow emergency medical physician, Tate Ehrlinger, posted daily and sometimes hourly reports – “tweets” – about H1N1, physician recommendations and other helpful tips (www.twitter.com/setonh1n1).

While the number of flu patients at Dell has declined to about 200 per day, Crocker and his colleagues continue to watch for signs of the H1N1 making an antigenic shift. That occurs when two or more different strains of a virus or different viruses form a new subtype that could be more virulent or resistant to the vaccination.

“I think we were really lucky that we didn’t see that. Most patients seemed like they had a bad cold,” Crocker says. “In the months ahead, we will see if the H1N1 virus recombines with the bird flu or other virus.”

He’s also concerned by the virus’s high incidence among people under age 18, and the fact it’s “clearly active” in summer months. “That’s really unusual for the flu,” he says. “You have to wonder what’s in the future – seeing the flu year-round?”

Worried whether your child has the flu?

Pat Crocker, D.O.’80, chief of emergency medicine at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, TX, advises parents to call or see a doctor if a child has flu-like symptoms and
• is younger than a year old
• is more ill than you would expect
• has a fever for more than three days
• is lethargic and symptoms do not improve after taking Tylenol
• has an existing chronic illness or some other risk factor.

He advises a trip to the emergency room if symptoms include shortness of breath, chest pain, trouble breathing, persistent vomiting, seizures or confusion.

Source: www.seton.net/about_seton/fluh1n1_information

In 2000, Cindy Hauber woke up finding herself being prepared by an emergency medical technician for an ambulance ride. When he asked why she was trying to look at her feet, she replied, “I just want to make sure there wasn’t a toe tag.”

When the Iowa Games began in 1987, Cindy Hauber dove into the 200-meter freestyle race. Although it was her first swim competition and she had “no idea how swim meets were run,” the 2005 graduate of DMU’s doctor of physical therapy program won.

Hauber went on to compete in the Iowa Games’ swim events every summer, missing just two years – in 1991, when her daughter was born, and in 2000, when a ruptured cerebral aneurysm sent her to the hospital for several weeks, sapped her strength and cut her weight by 20 pounds. Her neurosurgeon said the event would have killed her had she not been in tip-top physical condition.

Hauber, however, refused to let an exploding blood vessel keep her down. She returned to Iowa Games competition in 2001 and now has more than 100 Iowa Games medals in swimming, including gold medals in the 2009 500-meter freestyle, 50-meter backstroke, 200-meter individual medley and 50-meter butterfly. She also placed second in the 55-59 age division in the 2009 Iowa Games triathlon.

“I want to be a role model for others that you can persevere and overcome difficulties,” she says.

For her accomplishments, Hauber was named the Iowa Games 2009 Marty McHone Female Athlete of the Year and then the 2009 National Congress of State Games (NCSG) Female Athlete of the Year.

“Cindy’s longevity in competing, her overcoming health problems, citizenship and all her support of fellow athletes made her the perfect selection,” says Jeff Scully, executive director of the Maine Games and chair of the NCSG awards committee.

A physical therapist with Homeward, an Ames, IA, home health agency, Hauber was surprised by the awards.

“When you’re competing, you know there’s always someone faster and better,” she says. “It’s neat to think someone thinks you’re doing pretty good.”

Pretty good for someone who, post-aneurysm, could barely swim three laps. A longtime biological sciences laboratory technician with the USDA National Animal Disease Center in Ames, she was frustrated by memory loss that forced her to “figure out other ways to organize my thoughts.”

Still, the aneurysm had a silver lining – it nudged her to pursue the career she’d always wanted in physical therapy. Her husband, Wayne, encouraged her. “He said, ‘Otherwise, you’ll always ask yourself, “Would I have made it?” You might not, but at least you tried.’”

It wasn’t easy. Aneurysm-related headaches and back pain forced her to take a medical leave during her program. But she persevered in school and in the pool, buoyed by Wayne and their children. Sons Eric and Karl, then college students, took the time to quiz her on muscle insertions and innervations; daughter Rachel often helped her study and tucked encouraging notes in her backpack.

Hauber, who rises as early as 4:30 a.m. to exercise, now works one-on-one with clients in their homes, a job she loves. “They feel you’re part of the family. You can work on their whole well-being,” she says. “Some can get so depressed being home-bound. I tell them, ‘You can do this,’ and I give them a social outlet.”

Hauber, chair of the southwest district of the Iowa Physical Therapy Association, coordinates physical therapy volunteers for Iowa’s Special Olympics competition. The 56-year-old also keeps her sights set on swimming in an international competition at age 80. She’s still humbled by her recent awards, though.

“At the national games banquet, I hadn’t been hugged and kissed that much since our wedding reception,” she says. “My husband said I’d better not get too big a head. I said, ‘Well, I’d float better with a bigger head.’”

View the National Congress of State Games video about Cindy Hauber and her achievements.