Cheyenne-2.20.10-Go Red Symposium

This was my 4th visit!

This was a very long visit, but it was extremely informative. Parker, Ruby and I met in front of the school, yesterday, then got in the subway. They trains were all messed up so we took the A to 59th then transferred to a train I don’t remember. We took 3 trains total to get to Harlem Hospital. We arrived and waiting for us on another floor were a series of about 5 booths max. We walked around and my mother took a picture of us.

We then headed into the room, where a podium stood on the left side in front of a stage. There were two introverted booths on the stage sitting opposite each other. In the middle hung a screen with the projected image of the flyer that we had gotten a week or two earlier by email. We met a woman named Dr.Furgus. She was quite nice and very polite and spoke with eloquence and intensity. She wore a red turtleneck dress and lip gloss, her hair strait, with a single wave in them middle. She seemed like she was skeptical of our abilities to remain professional, since we were all wearing jeans. The last symposium had been severely casual. I had worn a black skirt and red sweater. Violet wore jeans and Uggs with a bright pink shirt. It was the closest thing to red that she owned. I didn’t bother to wear red, because no one was wearing red at the last event. But we were surrounded by doctors in white coats and nurses in scrubs, students in jeans and others in dresses. There was no dress standard. Though all of the speakers were moderately formal.

. We were told to sit in the front seat. We then walked around the booths out front, gathering T-shirts, pamphlets, pen and refrigerator magnets from various sponsors. The morning half was interesting but all we did was listen and pass out index cards for people to write down questions. Lunch was okay, quality wise. They served pizza at the last visit. But it would have been extremely contradictory to serve pizza after talking about health and what’s good for your heart. Though they did serve Snapple and sandwiches. We went back and listened for about 30minutes more. Then we went to a workshop about health. There were two ladies leading the workshop. One was hearing a cord sweater and slacks, the other in a red suit with white stockings and sneakers.

The lady in the slacks had a slide show and a table of junk food and had us guess the calories, showing us how much HFCS has gone up in the last 20 yrs and how obesity is the result of it. She showed us these graphs of Obesity and HFCS. There was a slide of good fat vs. bad fat. She then passed around plates showing us the portions people should be eating and we got handouts on the portions and calories and amounts of sugar in all of the foods and compared all these different kinds of cereals and juices and sodas. When we left at 3, she was starting to ask a woman what her favorite candy was out of a series of M&M’s, Twizzlers, sour patch etc. This was a very informative and decently engaging workshop and was much more interesting than the first Go Red visit. Amanda, our head contact, was not there, she had another event to attend, but the next, larger event she will be attending. I’m very excited and am looking forward to finally meeting her.

Here are some of the thousands of new things (in note form-they are part of the 11 pages of written notes we took) I learned about Heart Disease:

Cardiovascular Disease (Heart Disease)

-Any disease of the heart (cardio)

-And blood vessels (vascular)

CVD Facts

-40% deaths

-Expensive medical care

-27% of men, 44% of women will die within a year

-Leading cause of death for African Americans in US

-100,000 lives

-Can be prevented

-Expensive

Other things about CVD (Heart Disease)

-Racial and minorities receive lower quality health care.

-Less likely to receive needed medical care.

-Barriers include insurance and race

-Physicians are almost 75% white.

-Number one Healthy Heart Tip: Stay spiritually active, must be in touch with some sort of spiritual side.