"In Youth We Learn; In Age We Understand."

Step, step, step... remember you only have to log 7,000 steps five days a week at the beach, in the mall, on a treadmill or in the park to get to an activity level that will help you. Make time for you. You are worth it!

In March 2000, my heart doctors and I did try conservative drug-therapy before deciding on the pacemaker solution. That approach only worked for six months because my body adapted very quickly to all prescribed levels of meds and that fact superseded the benefits of our drug management program. During this time period, I received my VERY FIRST LIST of heart-healthy & heart-buster choices which started with consumer products I should work to eliminate and/or avoid as often as possible.

It was no surprise that tobacco was at the very top of that list, but right next to tobacco was cream cheese! "Cream cheese?" I yelled. Yes - I said, cream cheese!! As a self-proclaimed dairy-crazed, cow-obsessed, cheese-lover, I had never focused on what it would take for my body to ABSORB cream cheese; DISTRIBUTE it through the bloodstream to tissues and organs; METABOLIZE it through the liver & gastro system with the help of enzymes; and finally EXCRETE it through the intestines and/or kidneys. In short, this mild soft unripened cheese made from whole sweet milk enriched with cream is a very slow-mover in the body and leaves a trail. In pharmacokinetics,(**Definition below signature today), & pharmacology circles, this end-to-end process is called "ADME" for short, so allow me to use this acronym throughout this text.

Obviously, I was in the earliest stages of my denial, so threatening to wall-paper the bathroom with these food choice lists (along with all lists like them...) and looking for matching boarder at Siperstein's made for loud rip-roaring jokes! Looking back - the joke was on me.

Six years later, I found myself working an intriguing contract assignment at Schering-Plough Pharmaceutical in Kennilworth, NJ and there was just no running away from the body's ADME processes and the fate of substances administered externally to a living organism.

My recruiting management background was 90% Global Financial Services and I always ran from the sciences the same way I hid from organized sports. The first assignment executives handed this english major with a smoking keyboard was in "Global Pharmacovigilance" - which is the "pharmacological science relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects to minimize hazards associated with medicines and to prevent harm to patients." Oh my gosh - I didn't even know how to spell the department name, so how could I succeed? Why was I here at all? Happily, those answers came soon enough...

To become the credible representative I needed to be to sit face-to-face with employment candidates who applied for jobs in Schering-Plough's Research Center, I learned as much about this industry and the world class tools, technologies and methodologies that drive it as fast as I could. The professionals at Schering-Plough, like my own cousin Michelle (Chilinski) Brugger - a top notch Scientist in S-P's Radio-Chemistry Department - literally work everyday to deliver products and medicines that keep people alive and/or keep the quality of patient's lives in-tact for decades on-end.

My gosh - I couldn't believe I was learning life-enhancing tips about my own body through the window of global information systems that capture this data for the purpose of research that saves lives throughout the world. One amazing project required that I source, identify and recruit high caliber Computational Chemists to work in the area of Bioinformatics and whose responsibility would be to predict the Toxicity qualities of compounds as they made their way through the ADME processes in the body. Such work is executed through methods involving Quantitative Structure-(Activity & Property) Relationships, (**Definition below signature today or you can phone Brian Conaghan or Tom Brusgard who can explain further).

I sat in complete awe, as I listened to one PhD candidate after another describe their life's work: patents, projects, analysis, clinical trials, go-to-market strategies and results which had changed the face of how this research was done around the globe.

I want to make this explanation easy for my girls at OSU: Leaders in these fields dedicate their lives to understanding how the human body Absorbs, Distributes, Metabolizes, and Excretes everything we put into it. Everything that goes in "will do its own thing" - good or bad - and then make it's way out. Some products, medicines and food choices have an easier time going though our system than others, (i.e. apple sauce vs cream cheese). Some products create toxic experiences. In many cases, the longer it takes for a product to execute the ADME process, the more bad stuff it has the potential to leave behind for you and me to deal with, (i.e. - Mommy, where are my cholesterol pills?)

I NOW know why I worked at Schering-Plough. I'm supposed to create my own "ADME-Covigilance" Department in my house. That is, use the same science pharmaceutical firms use to create my own plan relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects in my body when I choose to administer substances externally.

I now accept the fact that I own full responsibility to minimize hazards to myself associated with all consumer products. As part of this commitment and to prevent harm, I will work to mitigate risks as I see them. Afterall, the goal of TishTrek is to be here for my husband Harry, my beautiful daughter Kate and my wonderful son Scott as far into the future as biology and a healthy body will allow.


Best regards,
Everybody's Cousin Tish
Score: 7/51

Quote of the Day: "In youth we learn; in age we understand."
- Marie Ebner von Eschenbach


** Definition from Wikipedia:

Pharmacokinetics, sometimes abbreviated as PK, (from Ancient Greek pharmakon "drug" and kinetikos "to do with motion"; see chemical kinetics) is a branch of pharmacology dedicated to the determination of the fate of substances administered externally to a living organism. In practice, this discipline is applied mainly to drug substances, though in principle it concerns itself with all manner of compounds ingested or otherwise delivered externally to an organism, such as nutrients, metabolites, hormones, toxins, etc.

Quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) (sometimes QSPR: quantitative structure-property relationship) is the process by which chemical structure is quantitatively correlated with a well defined process, such as biological activity or chemical reactivity.