text:
Cinnamon Rolls with Cream Cheese Icing
From Better Homes and Gardens: The New Cookbook, page 144
Makes 24 rolls
4 3/4 to 5 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 package active dry yeast
1 cup milk
1/3 cup butter
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 eggs
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup all purpose flour
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/3 cup butter or margarine
1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional)
1/2 cup golden raisins (optional)
1 tablespoon half and half or light cream
1. In a large mixing bowl, combine 2 1/4 cups of the flour and the yeast. In a saucepan heat and stir milk, 1/3 cup butter, granulated sugar, and salt just until warm (120 to 130F) and butter almost melts; add to flour mixture along with eggs. Beat with an electric mixer on low speed for 30 seconds, scraping bowl. Beat on high speed 3 minutes. Stir in as much of the remaining flour as you can.
2. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead in enough of the remaining flour to make a moderately soft dough that is smooth and elastic (3 to 5 minutes total). Shape dough into a ball. Place in a greased bowl; turn once. Cover; let rise in a warm place until double (about 1 hour).
3. Punch dough down. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface. Divide in half. Cover; let rest for 10 minutes. Meanwhile lightly grease two baking sheets; set aside. For filling, stir together brown sugar, the 1/4 cup flour, and cinnamon; cut in 1/3 cup butter until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.
4. Roll each half of dough into 12x8-inch rectangle. Sprinkle filling over dough rectangles. If desired, sprinkle with raisings and/or pecans. Roll up each rectangle starting from a long side. Seal seams. Slice each roll into 12 pieces. Place cut sides down on prepared baking sheets.
5. Cover dough loosely with plastic wrap, leaving room for rolls to rise. Chill for 2 to 24 hours. Uncover; let stand at room temperature 30 minutes. (Or, to bake rolls right away, don't chill the dough. Instead, cover loosely; let dough rise in a warm place until nearly double, about 30 minutes.)
6. Break any surface bubbles with a greased toothpick. Brush dough with half-and-half. Bake in a 375F oven for 20-25 minutes or until light brown (if necessary, cover rolls with foil the last 5 to 10 minutes of baking to prevent overbrowning). Remove from oven. Brush again with half-and-half. Cool for 1 minute. Carefully invert rolls onto a wire rack. Cool slightly. Invert again onto a serving platter. Ice with frosting or drizzle with glaze.
Cream Cheese Frosting
From Recipezaar
8 ounces cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 cups confectioners' sugar
1 tablespoon milk
1. Stir together all ingredients until smooth.
I decided last week to embark on a journey into new baking frontier. It was completely foreign
territory--one I had never experienced before in my years of recreational baking-- and I was absolutely terrified of the exotic, temperamental beast I was about to wrestle with. Knowing others who have ventured into this land, I've heard the stories of triumph and also those of tragedy. I felt it was time to experience it for myself. I finally took on the challenge of baking with yeast for the first time--I made homemade cinnamon rolls.
The week before, Boyfriend and I hit the mall to catch a movie (Seth Rogen's Observe and Report. Odd movie, but I love Seth Rogen). I had just gotten off of work and was kind of hungry but not completely starving, so we decided to grab a quick snack. Right next to the box office is the most glorious place on Earth--Cinnabon. Mmm. Savoring each bite of those warm gooey pieces of heaven, I thought to myself, I need to make these. It took about a week for me to work up the nerve to attempt it, but I finally made myself some cinnamon rolls!
Yeast scares me. I don't know why. Maybe it's the idea of playing the part of a mad scientist, ready to scream "IT'S ALIVE!!" at my foaming, growing, crazy little creature in my bowl.. Or the fact that you have to treat it just right or you'll either not bring it to life at all, or kill it immediately. I'm not the greatest at keeping things alive.. (Except my cat. He seems to be fine. But plant life--I'm the Black Widow of houseplants.) So I was a little hesitant to try my hand at a yeasted baked good. Would it rise? Or would I kill it? I was glad to find that yeast comes in packages of three at the grocery store, because I had already told myself I was getting more than one, just in case. I've made too many trips BACK to the grocery store when something has gone wrong--I've learned to prepare for the worst the first time around. With enough yeast for 3 attempts, I felt a bit more at ease, and ready to take on the beast.
My first worry came as I was kneading my dough. It was sticky and wasn't looking like the smooth elastic ball it was supposed to. I had already used all the flour I was supposed to use, and it still didn't feel right. So the "lightly floured surface" turned into a heavily floured surface, and I kneaded away. Finally it came together and went into the oven with a bowl of warm water for its first proof. I held my breath waiting to check on it. I finally peeked at about an hour--success! It was double in size and pushing up on the plastic wrap I had covering it! Time to roll it out and sprinkle the cinnamon! Rolling it was really easy.. It was the sprinkling that I had trouble with. The recipe calls for cutting butter into the brown sugar-cinnamon mixture. I'm sure this would have worked well if I had done it on any other day.. But the day I chose to bake was the most beautiful day of the year so far. It was sunny and in the 80s, so I took the rare opportunity to open up the doors and windows and enjoy the sun! The only problem--it made cutting my butter next to impossible. It was too warm in the house and my well chilled butter started to soften up almost immediately. The coarse crumbs it was supposed to make ended up as a paste instead. Sprinkling wasn't an option anymore, so I scattered the chunks around the dough and spread it with a knife instead. Next time I might just spread softened butter by itself on the dough and sprinkle the brown sugar-cinnamon mixture on top, rather than trying to mix them.
After rolling up and cutting the dough, they went into the oven for the 2nd proof before baking. Again--Success! I brushed them with the heavy cream I had left over from the Vanilla Bean Scones and put them in the oven. The recipe says to bake them for 20-25 minutes. I strongly suggest checking them starting at about 10 minutes. When I went to rotate them at the 10 minute mark, they already looked well on their way to being done. I reset the timer for another 5 minutes to check on them again, but decided to take a look a little early. 14 minutes and they were overbrowned. I think they were probably about done at 12 minutes. So definitely check them early! If I had left them the full 20 minutes it suggested I would have had burnt little hockey pucks!
The recipe suggests coating the rolls in a Vanilla Glaze. It sounded alright, but I really wanted something that tasted more like my beloved Cinnabon. Searching the web, I found recipes for Cinnabon's Cream Cheese Frosting. Mmm. I love cream cheese frosting so much. The one I ended up using was very yummy, but not quite as fluffy and light as Cinnabon's. It was still pretty good though! I definitely suggest making these to serve a crowd. I made a whole batch and gave half to Boyfriend and kept the other half for myself. I ended up eating the entire half a batch, and in the process gained about 5 lbs. (That also could have been from my diet-disaster weekend in Cleveland to see the Indians play the Red Sox on my birthday! I think it's the rule of Grandparents to make sure you're well fed. Dinners of fried chicken and breakfasts full of pancakes, eggs, and more bacon than you can shake a stick at were the theme of the weekend. Not to mention the entire tote bag full of snacks we took to the game. And I completely broke my no-soda rule and had a Cherry Dr. Pepper.. Then I finished off the Cherry Coke from my Hi-Hats that was still hanging out in my fridge when I got home! Time to hit the gym. Hard.)
My first baking experience with yeast is complete! It actually wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. It ended up being somewhat pleasant. Except for my house smelling like yeast for about a week. They were good, but didn't quite live up to my hopes for them. They were a little dry--not quite the soft, fluffy, melt in your mouth rolls I had dreamed of. I'm not sure if that was because of the overbaking or the recipe itself. I guess I'll have to try again someday, and try for a better frosting recipe too. I liked you Cinnamon Rolls, but Cinnabon definitely has you beat.
7 comments:
- Heavenly Housewife said...
wow these look so good! i'm going to book mark this. i just love anything with cinnamon in it, but cinnamon rolls are a real favorite for me
- May 5, 2009 at 1:54 PM
- Ingrid said...
Hurray for beating the yeast beast! Guess what I did too! Though my yeast was used in pizza dough! Loser blogger that I am didn't take any photos, yea, I suck! Your photos on the other hand look great.
- May 5, 2009 at 2:50 PM
- Danae said...
HH- Me too! I'm gonna make these so many more times! I'll just have to remember not to bake them as long.
Ingrid- Now that I've somewhat gotten over the yeast fear, I'd LOVE to make some pizza dough with it. How'd yours come out? Even though you don't have pictures, are you still going to blog it? I'd love to read it!
- May 5, 2009 at 3:55 PM
- How To Eat A Cupcake said...
I don't get why people hate the smell of yeast... I LOVE IT! I guess it's an acquired thing. When are you gonna make pizza dough?????? :D :D :D
So how was that movie? My b/f and I love Seth Rogen too, but the previews look... eh, not good...
- May 6, 2009 at 9:08 AM
- Danae said...
HTEAC- I don't mind the smell of yeast. I actually liked it! For the first couple days.. by the end of the week I couldn't figure out why it was still hanging around!! I don't know when I'll make pizza dough. Maybe sometime soon. Anyone have any really great recipes?
The Seth Rogen movie was alright. Very odd and not quite what I expected, but I still enjoyed it. Not as much as some of his other movies though..
- May 6, 2009 at 11:30 AM
- Pat said...
Try using real Cinnamon in your recipe and reduce on the sugar.
The Cinnamon in the US is actually Cassia which has a high level of coumarin.
- May 23, 2009 at 3:58 AM
- Maggie @MaggieCooks said...
Im drooling at this cinnamon rolls! :D
I cant wait for winter to come to bake this and enjoy them with some hot chocolate! :D
- September 6, 2011 at 12:51 AM


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More than a decade ago, Maurice Hines declared that he was done with tap dancing.
"This summer, I told my mother, 'I'm tapped out,' " Hines said during a 1999 interview with the Washington Post. "I gave my tap shoes to her.''
But Hines changed his mind, happily for us, and he is far from tapped out. To see just how far, check out the irresistible "Tappin' Thru Life: An Evening with Maurice Hines,'' at the Cutler Majestic Theatre through Sunday, presented by ArtsEmerson and directed by David Dower.
Now 69, Hines cuts an unabashedly ebullient figure onstage, allowing not so much as a millimeter of ironic distance between himself and his material, or his audience, for that matter. He's a performer intent on having and giving a good time, whether crooning standards like "It's Only a Paper Moon,'' "Honeysuckle Rose,'' and "Come Fly With Me,'' or showcasing his still formidable tap skills.
In "Tappin' Thru Life,'' he pays tribute to his late brother, Gregory Hines, who died of cancer in 2003 at age 57. We see a photo of the two of them as youngsters, in short pants, and another of them in formal attire, "trying to be the Nicholas Brothers,'' Hines observes wryly.
Beginning in childhood, they performed as a duo for many years but had a falling-out in the early 1970s. They reconciled, though, and teamed up in "Eubie!'' (they also played brothers in Francis Ford Coppola's film "The Cotton Club'').
In one poignant sequence, Maurice twirls and tap dances next to a spotlight meant to represent his brother — "Can you see him?'' he asked the audience on opening night. "Cause I can see him.'' — while drummer and music director Sherrie Maricle taps out Gregory's side of the number.
But the overall tone of "Tappin' Thru Life'' is one of high-spirited playfulness. Although the repertoire is a bit too familiar, Hines clearly wants to celebrate the songs he loves, Before launching into Lerner and Loewe's "Get Me To the Church on Time,'' he says Lena Horne once told him: "Every song doesn't have to be related to what you're talking about. Some songs you just like to sing.'' After he finishes the number, Hines exclaims: "Oh, I love that song!''
"Tappin' Thru Life'' would be stronger if Hines more fully developed the fleeting stories he tells of his encounters with Frank Sinatra and other legends. He's more expansive when telling family tales. He describes the time their father put a record by Count Basie on the family Victrola, prompting 4-year-old Maurice and Gregory, a toddler, to begin dancing. Their parents later took them to the Apollo Theater in New York, where none other than Count Basie was playing.
Canny showbiz veteran that he is, Hines knows the value of allowing himself to be upstaged. He feigns outrage when brothers John and Leo Manzari, protégés whom Hines discovered four years ago in Washington, suddenly materialize on the Cutler Majestic stage and launch into a dynamic tap routine.
"Trying to push the old man off: You know how they do,'' Hines says mournfully.
Then it's their turn to be upstaged, by 11-year-old Grace Cannady, a member of the Boston Tap Company. She delivers a dazzlingly intricate performance (choreographed by Sean Fielder) while tossing looks of mock defiance at the Manzari Brothers.
But Hines has more than a few tricks up his own sleeve. He lets out a little yelp during "I've Got You Under My Skin,'' cleverly literalizing the song's title.
Backed by the Berklee College of Music Select Big Band, which does superb work all night long, he performs a swinging, finger-snapping rendition of Frank Loesser's "I've Never Been in Love Before,'' at one point throwing up his hands, as if surprised by the sudden onset of the emotion in question. Hines knows how to sell a song, even one as improbable as Stephen Still's "Love the One You're With.''
Maurice Hines cuts an ebullient figure onstage, allowing not a millimeter of ironic distance between himself and his material, or his audience, for that matter.
Hines closes with "Too Marvelous for Words,'' praising Boston's resiliency — "What you've been through, and what this city can come back from'' — and dedicating the song to the city. It's a class act by a class act.

subset: commoncrawl


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Ashley Judd addresses Republicans' attack advert
The actress has been contemplating branching out into politics for some time, and is a fierce supporter of President Barack Obama.
Her passion for the Democratic party has impressed politicians in Kentucky, where she attended university, and a survey revealed she is the candidate of choice to run for state Senate.
However, the actress' interest in a political role has sparked anger among the campaign team of Kentucky's current Senator Mitch McConnell, who have released an advert warning voters about her "Hollywood liberal" views, insisting she is out of touch with the state as she lives in neighbouring Tennessee.
A voiceover on the ad says, "You know what this country needs? An independent voice...for Obama. Her own grandmother says she's a Hollywood liberal, but isn't that what we need? Ashley Judd, an Obama-following, radical Hollywood liberal who's right at home here in Tennessee...I mean Kentucky."
Judd has refused to lose her cool over the attack and has issued a statement on her behalf which reads, "Ashley thanks Senator McConnell, (political adviser) Karl Rove, and their negative allies for all the attention as she considers her future political plans, although a decision hasn't been made yet."


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Combined Law & Human Rights in Ghana by Eric McAdamis
My law school education in the United States made me appreciate the societal value of a robust legal system and raised my consciousness to the fact that most people in the world live without the same level of legal expectations that I am accustomed to. By the time I finished my degree I knew that I wanted to take a once in a lifetime opportunity to give something back to people in a less developed country where the concept of inherent human rights being inalienable has yet to become firmly established. Accordingly, I elected to take a gap year in order to travel and volunteer for the Common Wealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) in Accra, Ghana before pursuing my Ph.D. in political science.
After many long hours of scouring the internet, I found Projects Abroad to be the most experienced and competent organization available to help volunteers bridge the cultural divide that is inherent in any overseas project. I knew there was no way to fully appreciate another culture or the problems it faces short of total cultural immersion. With Projects Abroad I was able to live with a local family and experience the day-to-day culture with the peace of mind that I had a support system in place should any problems arise.
Upon my arrival in Accra I was greeted kindly by a member of the Projects Abroad team who escorted me to my homestay. I could not have known then, but my escort's light-hearted manner and jocular state of mind was to become characteristic of most everyone I encountered in Ghana. Having been to the third world before, worst case scenarios weighed heavily on my mind during the ride to the home of my host family. As one does not approach this sort of undertaking without a degree of trepidation, I guess it's fair to say that I had landed in Ghana hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. Relief immediately overwhelmed me the moment we arrived at a house with four walls and a roof!
Living arrangements squared away, it was time to get to work. I didn't know quite what to expect at first, but I can now say that the best part of my time in Africa was without a doubt the opportunity to get hands on experience dealing with tangible human rights issues impacting the lives of people in Ghana. From my very first day at CHRI I was very aware that I was a very long way indeed from the ivory tower of law school back in the states! CHRI felt alive with activity and there was always a new client coming into the office with a fresh complaint of a human rights violation of one sort or another. Unlike most initial forays into professional environments in the industrialized world, volunteers with at least some legal education can expect to be interviewing clients and playing critical roles in open cases from the very outset at CHRI.
Perhaps the most interesting experience I had at work was traveling to the Lake Volta region of Ghana with CHRI to help produce a workshop on child trafficking and widowhood rights. All of the volunteers and permanent staff members at CHRI were an enthusiastic and adventuresome bunch that made great travel companions on a bus ride over rugged terrain that took what seemed like an eternity!
Addressing human rights issues in some areas of Ghana is particularly challenging as a result of insufficient decentralization of government and the lack of proper dissemination of information in the more remote areas of the county. I was therefore very pleased to see that so many people from all over the region showed up to learn about what rights they are entitled to. The highlight of this event was when we got the chance to go with police officers to a remote island village to actually interview children who were suspected of being trafficked to work in the local fishing industry. It was an ineffably moving and life-changing experience to be physically present in a remote village in Ghana where unconscionable acts are not reduced to mere lifeless ink on paper, but rather are manifest in real lives played out in a real-time environment.
Overall, I had an incredible experience in Ghana and I could not have asked for more from Projects Abroad and CHRI. I was made to feel safe and welcome from the time I stepped off the plane until the time I made my heart-wrenching farewells. As I reflect on my time in Ghana, I believe the people and the indelible images associated with my experiences at CHRI will forever serve to remind me of the amazing personal growth that volunteering abroad fostered in me. It was a meaningful and worthwhile opportunity that I would recommend unreservedly to anyone who has a passion for the universal and unalienable nature of human rights and aspires to be part of the realization of such a promise.
Eric McAdamis
Esta es la experiencia personal de un voluntario en el proyecto y es el panorama de un momento específico. Tu experiencia puede variar, pues nuestros proyectos se adaptan constantemente a las necesidades locales y a los logros obtenidos. Los cambios climáticos estacionales también pueden tener un gran impacto. Contáctanos para obtener más información sobre lo que puedes esperar de este proyecto.


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Submitted by Colby on
Athens, GA is a renowned wellspring of great music, from R.E.M. & The B-52′s to the Elephant 6 collective and garage rockers The Whigs can justly be considered a part of it. The band is out with their 4th studio album Enjoy The Company and this video for "The Waiting" is a good sample of the crunchy garage-y goodness in store for you there.


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Clinical and Health Economic Evaluation With a New Baha® Abutment Combined With a Minimally Invasive Surgical Technique
|The safety and scientific validity of this study is the responsibility of the study sponsor and investigators. Listing a study does not mean it has been evaluated by the U.S. Federal Government. Read our disclaimer for details.
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT01796236
Recruitment Status : Active, not recruiting
First Posted : February 21, 2013
Results First Posted : December 22, 2015
Last Update Posted : March 14, 2017
- Study Details
- Tabular View
- Study Results
- Disclaimer
- How to Read a Study Record
To demonstrate that the minimally invasive surgical procedure in combination with the use of the Cochlear Baha BA400 abutment is associated with a reduction of inflammation/infection, overgrowth, pain and numbness at the site of implantation compared to the traditional surgical procedure in combination with the use of the standard Baha abutment (Cochlear Baha BA300 Abutment).
To demonstrate that the minimally invasive surgical procedure in combination with the use of the Cochlear Baha BA400 abutment is associated with a reduction in direct medical costs, due to shorter surgical procedures, faster wound healing and less complications compared to the traditional surgical procedure in combination with the use of the standard Baha abutment (Cochlear Baha BA300 Abutment).
|Condition or disease
|Deafness Hearing Loss Hearing Loss, Conductive Hearing Loss, Mixed Conductive-Sensorineural
|Device: Minimally invasive surgery and BA400 Device: Traditional surgery and BA300
|Not Applicable
Despite extensive soft tissue reduction, the most common complications associated with Baha implants are related to adverse skin reactions around the abutment. The reduction of the skin also adds complexity to the surgical procedure that is otherwise a routine type of skin incision. A less invasive surgical technique avoiding reducing the thickness of the skin would render a simpler and shorter procedure and would be aesthetically appealing to the patients, as permanent hair removal in the area around the abutment would not be required. Faster healing and less numbness (sensory loss/ paraesthesia) at the implant site may also be expected if the soft tissue thickness is left intact.
The Cochlea Baha BA300 Abutment together with a surgical procedure that includes soft tissue reduction was CE marked in April 2010. The test abutment, Cochlear Baha BA400, together with a surgical procedure that does not require soft tissue reduction was CE marked in June 2012.
The rationale behind this investigation was to make a 'head-to-head' comparison between the BA300 and BA400 Abutment and the associated surgical techniques in order to collect information regarding complications (inflammation/infection, numbness and pain), aesthetic outcome and utilisation of direct medical cost associated with surgery.
|Study Type :
|Interventional (Clinical Trial)
|Actual Enrollment :
|106 participants
|Intervention Model:
|Parallel Assignment
|None (Open Label)
|Primary Purpose:
|Official Title:
|Clinical and Health Economic Evaluation of a New Baha® Abutment, With a Minimally Invasive Surgical Technique. An International Multicentre, Open, Randomised, Comparative, Parallel Group, Investigation. 1y Investigation, 2y Follow-up
|Study Start Date :
|February 2013
|Actual Primary Completion Date :
|June 2015
|Estimated Study Completion Date :
|July 2017
Active Comparator: Minimally invasive surgery and BA400
This arm involves no softtissue reduction around the BA400 implant.
Device: Minimally invasive surgery and BA400
The Cochlear Baha BA400 Abutment has been designed with a concave shape at the lower aspect of the abutment. The abutment is made of commercially pure titanium and is coated with a hydroxyapatite layer on the entire soft tissue-contacting surface of the abutment up to 3 mm below the top surface (2 mm below the top surface on 6 mm abutments).
Active Comparator: Traditional surgery and BA300
This arm involves traditional soft tissue reduction around the BA300 implant
Device: Traditional surgery and BA300
The BA300 abutment is made of commercially pure titanium and is available in two different lengths (6 mm and 9 mm).
- Number of Participants With Local Adverse Events as a Measure of Safety and Tolerability [ Time Frame: 12 months ]
Combined endpoint of infection/inflammation, overgrowth, pain and numbness will be evaluated, as the sum of the following four events:
- Holgers Index >=2 any time between 3 weeks to 1 year
- Any overgrowth any time between 3 weeks to 1 year
- Pain (scar/neuropathic) according to POSAS >=3 any time between 3 weeks to 1 year
- Any numbness any time between 3 weeks to 1 year Each medical event is counted only once per subject resulting in a score of 0 to 4 for every subject.
- Numbness [ Time Frame: 12 months ]Numbness summary analysis.
- Pain in the Scar and Neuropathic Pain [ Time Frame: Day 10, Weeks 3, 6, 12, 24 and Month 12 ]The subject rated the following questions 'has the scar been painful the past few weeks' and 'have you had any neuropathic pain during the past weeks' on the 1-10 scale were 1 = no, not at all and 10 = yes, very much.
- Wound Healing [ Time Frame: Day 10, Weeks 3, 6, 12 and 24 ]A surgeon or a surgical nurse determined if the wound was healed or not healed.
- Surgery Time [ Time Frame: Day 0 ]Surgery time (minutes) was recorded
- Inflammation [ Time Frame: Day 10 to 12 Months ]Max of Holgers index from day 10 to month 12 was recorded, using the Holgers scale from 0 - 4, where 0 = no inflammation and 4 = removal of abutment/implant necessary due to infection.
Choosing to participate in a study is an important personal decision. Talk with your doctor and family members or friends about deciding to join a study. To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contacts provided below. For general information, Learn About Clinical Studies.
|Ages Eligible for Study:
|18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult)
|Sexes Eligible for Study:
|Accepts Healthy Volunteers:
Inclusion Criteria:
- Eligible for the Baha system
- Signed informed consent
Exclusion Criteria:
- Patient scheduled for simultaneously bilateral implant surgery
- Uncontrolled diabetes as judged by the investigator
- Condition that could jeopardize osseointegration and/or wound healing, e.g. osteoporosis, psoriasis and use of corticosteroids
- Unable to follow the cleaning instruction
- Unable to follow investigational procedures, e.g. to complete quality of life scales
- Participation in another investigation with pharmaceuticals and/or device
- Condition that may have an impact on the outcome of the investigation as judged by the investigator
- Suitable implant position for the 4 mm implant not found during surgery due to insufficient bone quality and/or bone thickness
To learn more about this study, you or your doctor may contact the study research staff using the contact information provided by the sponsor.
Please refer to this study by its ClinicalTrials.gov identifier (NCT number): NCT01796236
|Service ORL
|Toulouse, France, 31059
|KNO arts, Amphia Ziekenhuis
|Breda, Netherlands
|Deventer Ziekenhuis
|Deventer, Netherlands
|Dept. ENT/KNO
|Eindhoven, Netherlands, 5623
|NT department
|Maastricht, Netherlands, 6202
|Otorhinolaryngology, Hospital Clinico Universitario De Valencia
|Valencia, Spain, ES-46010
|ENT Clinic
|Gothenburg, Sweden, 411 35
|Principal Investigator:
|Robert Stokroos, Professor
|NT department, Oxford Building , Peter Debyelaan 25, 6202 AZ Maastricht, The Netherlands
|Responsible Party:
|Cochlear Bone Anchored Solutions
|ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier:
|NCT01796236 History of Changes
|Other Study ID Numbers:
|First Posted:
|February 21, 2013 Key Record Dates
|Results First Posted:
|December 22, 2015
|Last Update Posted:
|March 14, 2017
|Last Verified:
|February 2017
Keywords provided by Cochlear Bone Anchored Solutions:
Bone anchored hearing aid
Bone anchored implant
Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB)
Health Utility Index (HUI)
Holgers Index
Implant stability
Additional relevant MeSH terms:
Hearing Loss
Hearing Loss, Conductive
Hearing Loss, Mixed Conductive-Sensorineural
Hearing Disorders
Ear Diseases
Otorhinolaryngologic Diseases
Sensation Disorders
Neurologic Manifestations
Nervous System Diseases
Signs and Symptoms


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Question: I'm in the fortunate position of being able to attempt to fix a problem. Some background: I am more intelligent than average (150+ IQ) and have lived the cliche of someone who gets bored easily and doesn't apply himself. This, plus the necessity of putting my wife through college after I dropped out, means I have been chronically underemployed.
A few years ago, I lucked into a complete change of scene, finished my degree with straight 4.0s and got a job with a real career track. A few people in upper management see my potential and want to help me get promoted, but I've got a few rough edges to smooth out. The largest is my delivery: matter-of-fact to the point of abruptness. I've had it all my life, and it's given me a reputation as a know-it-all.
I've done a lot of soul-searching and have polled my friends and family, who agree I can be condescending. Their advice boils down to "act dumber."
Now I've been given an opportunity to help train new employees, and management will be watching to see if I can do so without acting like a "glass bowl." I'm terrified that every time I have to correct someone, I'll cement my reputation and squander this opportunity. Any advice?
Answer: A glass bowl, maybe, but a reflective glass bowl. There's hope.
Know-it-alls know all the answers, but not when and how to share them. The smartest people I know let others be smart, too — not by "acting dumber" but by being strategically generous.
They ask questions instead of spitting out answers: What do you think? Does anyone have a different idea? What if we tried this instead?
They recognize that everyone has a contribution: Great point, and I'd like to build on that by adding . . . . Let me defer to Eloise on that topic.
They dissent politely: I see where you're coming from, but I think . . .
They acknowledge vulnerabilities: I sometimes struggle with expressing myself tactfully.
They apologize as needed: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be brusque.
They laugh at themselves: Whoops, I had a Sheldon Cooper moment there. Bazinga!
Some specific tips: Watch videos of your training sessions with a mentor who can identify when you veer into condescension. Consider professional analysis to learn what situations bring out your best and worst qualities, and why.
Finally, forget your IQ. These are the real signs you have potential: You acknowledge your rough edges, you excel when you apply yourself and you're "terrified" — the best motivator of all.
Miller has written for and edited tax publications for 16 years, most recently for the accounting firm KPMG's Washington National Tax office. You can find her on Twitter, @KarlaAtWork.


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What to watch for in the second half
On the night after the All-Star Game, my wife and I scrolled fruitlessly through the television's on-screen guide.
You forget, in the course of 30 teams playing 162 games, just how devoid of quality content that guide can be when America's pastime takes a brief break. There were cooking shows and home-remodeling shows and "Seinfeld" reruns and, yes, I suppose we could have taken this opportunity to learn more about Egyptian mummification on one of the history channels, if we were so inclined.
On the night after the All-Star Game, my wife and I scrolled fruitlessly through the television's on-screen guide.
You forget, in the course of 30 teams playing 162 games, just how devoid of quality content that guide can be when America's pastime takes a brief break. There were cooking shows and home-remodeling shows and "Seinfeld" reruns and, yes, I suppose we could have taken this opportunity to learn more about Egyptian mummification on one of the history channels, if we were so inclined.
We settled on a romantic comedy that was neither romantic nor funny.
Summer nights without baseball are a bit bizarre, aren't they? It's like a detox but without the supposed health benefits. It's like a fast from fastballs, not food. There's no peeking at the score on your phone when you're out and about. No background ball chatter on the radio if you're relaxing on the porch or driving in the car. And as far as TV is concerned, well, let's just say the remote control might as well be lost deep in the couch cushions.
"I just flipped on Root Sports Pittsburgh expecting to see the Pirates, and there's poker on," my buddy Mike e-mailed me literally just as I was writing this. "Downgrade."
Time for an upgrade.
Today is our Opening Day, Part Deux, our return to normalcy. There are 15 games on tap, six division titles and four Wild Card spots on the line and a million bits of minutiae to discuss, managerial decisions to second-guess and statistics to study.
It is a testament to the pull of baseball's steady, six-month pace that even the briefest of breaks feels oddly like an eternity. But our time astray is over, and not a moment too soon. Because on the second night after the All-Star Game, I was starting to feel like a mummy myself.
Here's a non-exhaustive but still-extensive list of things we're looking forward to in the second half:
• The upcoming Trade Deadline and all the requisite hand-wringing, ridiculous rumors, Twitter paranoia and instant analysis it causes. Should be fun!
Seriously, though, we're dying to know if David Price goes anywhere.
And if Cliff Lee proves healthy enough to get dealt.
And we'd love to see Adam Dunn play for a contender. Pretty strange that he's played 14 seasons and been to the Oscars before he's been to a dugout in October.
On that note ...
• Jose Bautista and Felix Hernandez -- arguably the best active veteran position player and pitcher to never reach the postseason -- will be playing meaningful second-half games.
• Bryce Harper. At long last, he's healthy. Now, is he ready to spark the Nats?
• Evan Gattis. "El Oso Blanco" will be back any day now, and his power bat is essential for a Braves club searching for consistency.
• Jose Abreu's run at the rookie home run record. He's got 29; Mark McGwire set the record with 49 in 1987. Game on.
• George Springer. He's just three homers away from breaking Lance Berkman's Astros rookie record (21).
• The newly qualified Lonnie Chisenhall vying for a batting title on an Indians team in another playoff hunt.
• Max Scherzer's continued bid to top the $144 million he turned down in Spring Training. So far, so good on that front.
• Victor Martinez's bid to become the first player since Barry Bonds (2004) and only the second since the mid-1950s to hit at least 30 homers and strike out fewer times than he goes deep. As it stands, V-Mart has 21 homers and 23 K's.
• And, oh yeah, the Tigers' bid to claim their fourth straight American League Central title.
• The Orioles going for their first division title since 1997.
• The Blue Jays aiming for their first since 1993.
• The Mariners looking for their first playoff appearance since 2001.
• Big, beautiful, blue-clad crowds at Kauffman Stadium when the Royals try to push their way into their first October since 1985.
• Tim Lincecum. He's started to put it together for a Giants team in a dogfight with the Dodgers. And any start Lincecum makes against the Padres (the Giants face them seven times in September) is now required viewing.
• The callups. Even in situations lacking 2014 hope, there is at least 2014 hype. Perhaps this September we'll see the likes of Noah Syndergaard (Mets) or Javier Baez (Cubs) or Mike Foltynewicz (Astros) or Alex Meyer (Twins) or Archie Bradley (D-backs) or maybe -- if we're really good and do our homework and brush our teeth -- Joey Gallo (Rangers).
• The Adam Wainwright-Clayton Kershaw National League Cy Young battle. At the moment, it looks like a race between these two established aces. We know who got the All-Star nod, but who will get the hardware?
• More Bartolo Colon at-bats. You can never really get enough.
• The Padres finding their new GM.
• That A's-Angels race. The only clubs in baseball with winning percentage of .600 or better happen to reside in the same division. Could get ugly.
• Giancarlo Stanton, doing more things like this
• The NL Central rookies. Have you noticed how much better Billy Hamilton has gotten, month by month? Have you considered how much more dynamic the Pirates and Cardinals can be if Gregory Polanco and Oscar Taveras reach their potential? Can you imagine how much deeper that Milwaukee rotation will be if Jimmy Nelson's Triple-A showing translates?
• More Yasiel Puig Instagram videos. Heck, more Puig, period.
• The continued development of Mookie Betts. It's been too long since baseball had a Mookie.
• The Yankees calling up more guys whose names begin with a "Z." Surely, the well that brought us Zelous Wheeler and Zoilo Almonte can't be tapped, can it? We need more Yankeez!
• Derek Jeter's final game. All right, we're not really "looking forward" to it, but we've definitely got it circled on the calendar. And with the Yanks' playoff hopes taking a huge hit due to injuries, No. 2's finale could come Sept. 28 in Boston, with the final home game Sept. 25 vs. Baltimore.
• Mike Trout, possibly putting the finishing touches on that other MVP Award.
• Troy Tulowitzki, trying to hold onto pole position for his first.
• More baseball. Break-free, and ready for the big finish.
Anthony Castrovince is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his columns and follow him on Twitter at @Castrovince.


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Steph-fernandes1 needed a new logo design and created a contest on 99designs.
A winner was selected from 77 designs submitted by 27 freelance designers.
Unique Fitness Training
I am a 27 year old female fitness trainer, about to start my own OUTDOOR fitness business.
I love exercising outdoors (at the beach or in parks)
I am a happy, fun-loving person & would like my logo to show that as well. I don't like anything too over-the-top. Simple but effective.
Adults between 18-50yrs of age for personal training and groups -- Outdoors!
Unique fitness programs for kids.
Training groups for mums & babies.
Therefore, my logo can't be too specific (eg, image of a kid running)
My target audience is everyone at the moment. Most people hate that answer but it is true. I will be running personal training sessions for adults (particularly Corporate people) as well as children. My business is unique because I will also be designing programs for children. I will be targeting schools. I am trying to stand out from the other millions of trainers out there. I am passionate about health and the benefits of exercise on mental health & well being. Unique Fitness Training will teach people how to create lifelong habits and enjoy exercising in the long term. No gym memberships required.
I would like the colours to represent happiness and energy. I like bright greens and light blues, aqua etc.
Find out how a design contest works or learn more about our logo design services.


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The City of Broken Men
There's a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where every American soldier injured in Iraq and Afghanistan is brought, treated—if only for a few days—and then sent home. Devin Friedman follows the story of a planeload of men and their week in this miraculous netherworld between war and peace, life and death
Picture a metal can, like an empty coffee can, and the bottom of this can is lined with copper, and above the copper is an explosive charge, and when someone throws this device at the rear wheel well of an American Humvee in Mosul, the charge detonates, the blast element melts the copper, and the copper launches from the can with enough heat and force to pierce the Humvee's armor plating and pour into the interior of the vehicle. This is called an explosively formed penetrator, this device.
It is an adaptation of pretty simple technology to suit the conditions of this particular war, and it has changed the course of events profoundly. The copper blob, soiled by accelerant and blasted metal, ies past Sergeant Cooper in the rear seat, embeds some small bits of shrapnel in the driver, Sergeant Hudson, and pierces the engine block, igniting a re that inside of ve minutes will engulf the vehicle. Between the wheel well and the engine block, though, this molten copper also blows through the left leg of a guy named Michael Brown, a private rst class with the military police, out of Hawaii.
Picture a metal can, like an empty coffee can, and the bottom of this can is lined with copper, and above the copper is an explosive charge, and when someone throws this device at the rear wheel well of an American Humvee in Mosul, the charge detonates, the blast element melts the copper, and the copper launches from the can with enough heat and force to pierce the Humvee's armor plating and pour into the interior of the vehicle. This is called an explosively formed penetrator, this device.
It is an adaptation of pretty simple technology to suit the conditions of this particular war, and it has changed the course of events profoundly. The copper blob, soiled by accelerant and blasted metal, ies past Sergeant Cooper in the rear seat, embeds some small bits of shrapnel in the driver, Sergeant Hudson, and pierces the engine block, igniting a re that inside of ve minutes will engulf the vehicle. Between the wheel well and the engine block, though, this molten copper also blows through the left leg of a guy named Michael Brown, a private rst class with the military police, out of Hawaii.
Immediately, Michael can't feel anything below his hip. He looks down and sees his boot, and inside that he sees his green Army-issue tube sock, and inside that he sees brilliant red esh and then two white circles of bone, one smaller than the other, that have never been exposed to light or air. The lower part of his leg hangs by a piece of skin. The phrase bridge of skin appears in his mind. His blood is emptying out and pooling beneath him.
Before the Humvee incinerates, Brown's team leader pulls him out of the vehicle and onto the hot greasy asphalt, where he continues pumping out blood. Then this contractor lady, a former bodybuilder named Miss Dee who helps his unit train Iraqi police, is standing over him. She shoulders him and takes him to another truck. He hears air support arrive, helicopters. The ride out is the longest ve minutes of his life, and after that, a gap in the tape. Later, he wakes up without a lower leg, at the combat hospital in Mosul, which he remembers as a face or two and a dirty plaster wall. He is awarded a Purple Heart by his lieutenant colonel and he does his best to appear dignied or at least coherent. Some time passes; they load him onto a plane or maybe a helicopter—it has to be a plane, but it sure feels like a helicopter—and take him to Balad. Then, once again, he's being shipped out.
Inside of forty-eight hours, Michael Brown is strapped onto a stretcher, hanging like a shelf off the fuselage of a C-17 transport plane. There's a guy stacked above him and another below, plus two rows of men on gurneys in the middle, and across the way a guy who has a stump where his hand should be and two others where his legs should be, all the nurses in their ight suits crowding around that man and saying, What's your pain level one to ten and Put this pillow under your leg and Can you take a big breath for me?—Mike Brown feels bad for staring, but he does and he thinks, Man, that guy is really fucked. And then he feels the pressure of the plane accelerating down the runway, lights extinguished to protect against attacks, the plastic tubing connected to everyone tilting toward the vertical, and they're up, the slurp of wheels sucked back into the belly of the plane, grinding through the dust higher over the dead earth that is most of Iraq, a few orange res smeared onto the black. A little while later, the pilot comes on: "We have just left Iraq," and a muted little cheer goes out, Michael Brown noticing how small he feels away from his unit, to whom he feels deeply connected, away from his family, shivering with the cold of blood loss even beneath the eighty-ve blankets he's wrapped in, heading "to Germany," though the geographical nature of the place he's not sure about, the plane moving past invisible black earth and over some black meaningless sea, he and these eighteen other compromised bodies that he's never seen before and will not see again, all bound for a place that is only in between.
It's not like Michael Brown is the rst guy to get hurt in Iraq. He's not even the rst Michael Brown to get hurt in Iraq. The Michael Brown in question was more or less the 44,360th person hurt badly enough to be evacuated out of Iraq or Afghanistan. And every one of those men and women take this ight, out of Bagram or Balad.
In the morning, the big gray plane begins its slow fall from the sky, dropping into the thick, damp air over Germany, groaning again with fractional g's that yaw the metal fasteners on the gurneys and pull at the plastic tubing, until it's reeled in by the brick-straight runways of Ramstein Air Base, where buses wait to take them to an ugly little hospital on top of a hill in the Rhine Palatinate Forest. It is called the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, itself a reengineering of pretty simple technology that has changed this war profoundly, and for the past ve years the only hospital in the whole complex, dysfunctional, miraculous, weirdly pedestrian American military medical system where absolutely every hurt man who doesn't die spends time.
It is early still, 7 a.m., and outside the front doors of the hospital is a wintry mix of cold mist and German Weltschmerz, if that means what I think it does. The bus, with its shipment of injured people, appears at the end of the asphalt drive. It draws closer, begins to back up to the hospital entrance through a cloud of its own vaporous exhaust. Inside, in the lobby, there are maybe thirty hospital staff waiting, and they start to move toward the door. There are people in Army fatigues, Navy fatigues, Air Force uniforms, people in scrubs and white coats who would look normal in any hospital. There are lots of young people who joined the military after the war began and have never been to the places the injured are coming from, and a fair number of gray-headed folks who've been called up from the reserves. They are mostly women, a lot of them stout in those Army shirt-tunics with the pilated camo they use now, and many of them a light brown, belonging to an emergent American post-black ethnicity, a majority with their hair harnessed vigorously. Their faces are placid, and they seem to say without speaking: I will take care of you, but I'm not going to cry or anything. There is no more sense of urgency than in a crowd waiting out a break at a pharmaceutical conference. This is routine, this delivery of the wounded. It occurs once or twice a day, as it has just about every day for the past ve years.
The bay doors of the bus open, and the rst stretcher appears. "Careful," a voice from inside the bus says, "watch the O2 tank on this side. It's strapped but not tight to the leg—it's very painful." A man, his face a steamy plastic mask, is lowered from the bus, onto a waiting gurney, laid over with one of the quilts the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and VFWs and other organizations, official and not, send over. Then a chaplain, an upright German national with a pink face and a gray mustache, takes the patient's hand and leans down and says with some gravity, "Welcome to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. Thank you for serving your country. We want to serve you now."
They appear one at a time, the second one is breathing on his own, the third is holding a stuffed penguin, the seventh is a black man torqued between two steel plates to keep his back immobilized, with zero body fat and veiny biceps and some kind of red mandala tattoos on his shoulders, his head somewhere inside the aluminum sandwich, his arms moving but maybe not his legs. I wonder if he's terried; I am terried thinking about being inside that thing with no idea what has happened to me. Among those who are unloaded is Mike Brown. They seem exotic here in this little German hamlet on top of a hill, excreted from the bus while still in their dusty combat fatigues, their standard-issue boots with actual Iraqi dirt caked onto them, like seeing people getting off their ight from Cancún in the dead of winter still in shorts with sunglasses on their heads. One of the nurses, a guy from the Inland Empire, Southern California, says, "You can smell the war on them."
Without a lot of fanfare, they disappear to their designated spots in the hospital, wheeled by nurses and orderlies carrying printed instructions. Each is brought to the room he's been assigned, issued hospital pj's, tested for brain injury, visited in a timely manner by one of about fty representatives of the active combat units that will arrange for gear and personal effects to be sent on to wherever is appropriate, issue them $250 allocated by Congress, as well as a phone card to call home. More or less the same routine experienced by the 44,000 people who have come and gone before this shipment here at the busiest trauma hospital in the world, the single experience every injured U.S. serviceman and woman shares. None will stay more than two weeks, and almost all will be gone again in three days.
Landstuhl is the central hub in a military medical system developed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you are in the military and you get hurt, and if you don't die immediately, you are treated by a eld medic, and if you don't die then, you're brought to a forward surgical team, which is basically a doctor operating out of the back of a truck, and if you don't die there, you are taken to one of a half-dozen CASHes (the next generation of the MASH eld hospital) in Iraq or Afghanistan and from there to the large brick-and-mortar hospital in Bagram or Balad, where you are readied for the ight to Germany. Everyone hurt badly enough to leave his unit goes to Landstuhl, where he gets preliminary care, undergoes surgery, receives medication, waits out his fever, goes through a course of blood thinners, etc., and then gets triaged back out—the burn victims lighting out for Brooke Army Medical Center, the wounded Army to Walter Reed, the wounded Navy to Bethesda, the less injured to any of a dozen smaller, less specialized places.
In the afternoon, fog pushes against the windows along the white corridors. It's easy to get lost in this hospital, under its low ceilings, in its fourteen identical wings lined with framed reproductions of Frederic Remington paintings—the Rough Riders falling bloodlessly on San Juan Hill. It could be a hospital in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the sound of squeaky white shoes on linoleum, the grim fried chicken and canned green beans turned out in the cafeteria, the cryptic medical messages chiming in over the PA. Except for the Army captain trussed in white bandages, a glossy red spilling down his arm from where the skin on his chest was incinerated in a blast. Except for the 350 fresh Navy reservists in forest camo from Illinois, standing in groups of three and four in every hallway you look down, women near 50 with spray-stiff hair and lipstick and at accents, men with baldy pates who look like dentists. Except for the security check at the fortied entrance.
All the wards are lined with little white rooms, and inside those rooms are patients, pallid heads on white pillows. Everyone's the color of chicken skin. And they mostly have this arch to their forehead, the manifestation of a very poignant inner moan. You pop your head into the doorway and they look at you like you are on a TV show broadcast in Urdu. John Crosser is racked with fever and infection, lolling around his bed, his broken leg immobile, his blown-up arm. Derena McCray sits in his bed while a machine bends and unbends his leg, and his wife, a little Italian girl he met at a club near his base in Italy just before he shipped out, looks at a magazine through sunken eyes. At this late date, people are getting cycled through Landstuhl more than once. Because there are not, relatively speaking, that many men and women in the combat sections of the armed forces, and because the tours are so long (in the Army they're fteen months) that it seems like almost everyone deployed to a combat zone has already survived something. The primary objective of Landstuhl, as it is written in the manuals, is to preserve the ghting force, get people back to their units downrange.
In the surgery wing, there's a break room where three or four men are eating a casserole out of Tupperware. One is a doctor visiting as a representative of the American College of Surgeons, a certain Dr. Sise from Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego.
"I saw more in the rst two days here in terms of the severity of injury than I will see in three years in my trauma center," Sise says. His eyes are clear and his black hair is responsibly cut. He has cried a few times since he's been here, but while he talks, what he betrays is a certain excitement about just how interesting the injuries he has seen are. These are inventive injuries, things never before conjured by the human mind. Not a lot of gunshot wounds—if you get shot at, either they miss you or you're in a coffin ying to Delaware. It's more like wiring from bombs embedded three inches deep in soft tissue. Organs seared by Humvee door hinges still scorching hot when they violate the abdominal cavity. "The blast injuries are like nothing I've ever seen before," he says. "There's a guy right over there, ICU, who had his testicles blown off, the esh in his inner thigh, his anus, just sitting in a vehicle that got blown up. I saw one the other day where inside his leg there was a cavity basically the size of one of those small Nerf footballs, twelve inches long by six inches deep of just mangled muscle. The shock wave of the blast had damaged the muscle and then the debris had been forced up inside."
Landstuhl was a normal hospital before these wars began, dedicated to treating the ordinary medical problems of the enlisted men stationed nearby and the veterans who decided to stay in Germany. If you aren't one of the people who undress the wounds, it still seems like a regular hospital. And while it seems normal, orderly, pedestrian for the people working here, Landstuhl has actually become a complex, exceedingly dynamic system, thanks to some pretty special circumstances—a jet-powered war fought by a wealthy country not very close by, with outposts in friendly lands halfway between home and war. Thirty trauma patients arrive one day; twenty souls are outbound the same day. Twenty-three incoming tomorrow; thirty-two checking out. The motion contained here is extraordinary—not just the 40,000 patients processed through here but the roughly 10,000 doctors and nurses and orderlies and enlisted men who have passed through, none staying more than three years, most considerably less than that.
A male nurse wheels Michael Brown into the operating theater. Brown is all bristly brown brush-cut hair and yellow skin, deposited in a pocket of white sheets in a bed ratcheted so he's almost upright. He's on plenty of morphine and something called a nerve block that they use for amputations, since basically all of the nerves in a given appendage are severed, if you can imagine that pain. He's kind of smiling, struggling through the pharmaceutical fog to be a part of this tableau—the young black tech arranging shiny metal cutting tools, the mesomorphic male nurse hauling in jugs of saline and Betadine prep, four or ve other people moving in and out of the room with a sense of single-mindedness. They start to hook up the surgical apparatuses to Michael Brown without letting him know exactly what they're doing or really even looking at him, which doesn't appear to bother him at all. He looks more like someone who's about to watch a surgery than someone who's about to undergo one. Before they lift him onto the operating table, he recognizes me as the guy in his room who asked him to sign a release so his medical history could be written about. "Are you going to tell my story in specics?" I say I don't know, maybe. He says, "Why mine in specics?" I say I don't know; you're here right now and I'm here right now, I guess.
The nurse anesthetist, a woman named Captain LaFleur, pulls up a stool next to him and starts talking to him like they're old friends while she readies her gauges and bottles and tubes. She's treating him with a special dignity. She takes a syringe and injects it into a port on Michael Brown's IV.
"Okay, Mike," she says. "I'm giving you some Versed. It's like Valium." Then she leans in so only Brown can hear her and says, "Thank you for serving, you're very brave, thanks for protecting us."
"Thanks for taking care of me," he says.
She asks him to count backward from a hundred. At ninety-four, she tapes his eyes shut with clear tape. She tells everyone in the room she's going to intubate; she needs quiet. Then the surgeon, Dr. Sigmond, enters wearing a mask. Sigmond is a trauma surgeon from Philadelphia, about 35, arrived not one month ago. He talks loudly and walks with a swagger. He has some tattoos on his upper arms that say things in Japanese. Someone somewhere puts some loud methy white-people music on the speakers. The procedure they will perform is to wash out Mike Brown's amputation, check the health of the wound, trim out any dead tissue. It's Sigmond's fth such wash-out since Monday.
"Must be amputation week," he says.
Then, piece by piece, Mike Brown begins to disappear. They put a blue curtain up between his face and the rest of his body, then a blue sheet is laid over his lower torso, his good leg is covered with another blue sheet, then his compromised leg is laid over still another brilliant blue sheet and propped up with a blue towel and lit with huge overhead lamps. The only thing left is that single leg, pale and hairy and bright, with a crude seam where his calf used to be before the introduction of the exploding coffee can—if someone were to walk into the room right now, he may not even know this was a leg at all.
Sigmond asks for the music to be turned down and says, "Okay. We have Michael Brown. DOB 23 August. This is a wash-out for a below-knee amputation. Everyone agree?" Everyone agrees, the music comes back up.
When Sigmond slits open the incision with a knife, a new world is revealed. Red, brilliant, wet, confusing, without discernible form except for a thick ring of white fat below a layer of skin, and some white bone. They wash it out roughly with a plastic saline-sprayer–suction machine that looks like something you'd buy on TV to detail your car. They poke and prod the muscle with an electried wire to see if it contracts, if it's alive, and you can smell burning esh, which doesn't smell any different than burning hair. If any tissue is dead, it's sliced off, like cutting the cooked layer of gyro meat.
Brown will have three surgeries before he leaves Landstuhl (and then four more when he gets to Walter Reed). They do some of the high-wire, complicated surgical procedures here—reapproximating colons, repairing arteries, installing shunts in the skull—but mostly what they do is take men to the operating room, remove their dressings, open up their wounds, clean them out, and perhaps most important, trim back the dead tissue. This is one of the major surgical weapons employed here at Landstuhl. The technical term for it is debridement, a procedure that's been widely used since the end of World War I. It involves cutting back (i.e., slicing off) tissue in a devastating wound, cutting away anything dead or dying, cutting back more than one might logically eliminate, so that it doesn't get infected, so that healthy tissue has a chance to grow back, so you incrementally, incrementally, incrementally increase the chances of a full recovery.
Which is basically the medical theory of Landstuhl in a nutshell.
When the United States invaded Iraq, there was an ad hoc process for the movement of the wounded, a case-by-case system adopted from the civilian world and previous wars. In the intervening years, a new structure has accreted, and Landstuhl has become the main transit station in a complicated military FedEx system where the injured are freight. In the grass next to one of the hospital buildings is a series of trailers that is the nerve center of this system, called the DWMMC, which is pronounced dwimmick and stands for Deployed Warrior Medical Management Center.
The DWMMC is where the military tracks every wounded person from the moment they get to a combat hospital until they're sent off to a hospital in the U.S. It's administrated by a surgeon named Captain Miguel Cubano, a man in his late forties with a big, strong face, no-bullshit metal-framed glasses, and neatly trimmed nose hair. He is originally from Puerto Rico, a product of the military who also holds advanced degrees from Johns Hopkins. He explains the way the system works. Usually within about four hours of a serviceman like Mike Brown being injured, someone downrange sends the DWMMC an electronic message—a so-called patient movement request. A virtual prole is created. Almost every hour, messages, called traces, are generated as the patient, undead and moving inexorably toward Landstuhl, works upward through the system. Digital X-rays and doctors' comments are attached. When the patient gets to one of the two big air bases that are departure points for all ights to Landstuhl, his name appears on the white marker board in the main office of the DWMMC. Flight manifests are assembled, changed, notated on this marker board—how many ambulatory patients will be on each ight, how many intensive-care patients, the time of wheels up in Iraq or Afghanistan and the time of wheels down at Ramstein. The DWMMC receives updates in-ight—patients crashing on board, hemorrhages, what have you. As patients get closer to Landstuhl, people in these trailers have medicines pulled, schedule specialist appointments, set up surgeries. Captain Cubano, here at the single narrowest spot in the system's funnel, where every data point passes by one at a time, must then make sure that every single patient gets cycled out again—sent to the appropriate hospital given his or her ailment and hometown, etc.—inside of two weeks so there will always be space for the next busload.
"The number of patients coming in at a single time would overwhelm a civilian hospital," Cubano says. "Eighty percent of hospitals would be overwhelmed by one bus with thirty patients. You don't see that except in a mass-casualty ercise. We have a mass-casualty ercise every day; that's our joke."
This system has made it possible for the U.S. military to push survival rates to unheard of percentages. It is the positive story of the war. Ten percent of those with serious injuries die, compared with 28 percent in Vietnam, 34 percent in Korea, and 30 percent in World War II.
"I would look at the speed we operate at—in the previous conicts many of the casualties remained in-theater for a lot longer," Steve Flaherty, M.D., the chief of trauma of Landstuhl, says. "During Vietnam it was more than a month before servicemen were sent out to longer-term facilities. Casualties are coming to us much faster. And that has never happened before."
America has gotten better at war—maybe because we have had more practice, or a more industrialized approach, a taste for it, what have you—than anyone else. Part of that approach has been to work on what you could call a killer app. Let's call it: the Theoretical War with No Downside. A war that will be quick, beautiful, with very little dying on either side. Dying, after all, is the major downside of war. Precision armaments would reduce death on the receiving end. Overwhelming force would keep injury to a minimum on the American end. And for those who were hurt, all but the most drastically compromised could be saved with a system that would involve discipline, technology, and a serious premium on speed. Get the man with the blown-off leg to a safe, prepared hospital before he can change out of his boots. It's not about inventing new medicine; it's about adapting existing technology, getting the wounded the medicine we already know about before they die. And the system has worked exceedingly well.
In the past ve years, the Landstuhl-based system has become the most high-traffic, semipermanent, extremely expensive transglobal ambulance system in history. Fourteen ights per week to and from Landstuhl, for a grand total of 3,800 ights since 2003. You could argue that the greatest advance in the care of the wounded has been the simple application of money. The U.S. government can be accused of cutting corners on armored vehicles or body armor but not on this medical system. It's been reported that it costs $10,000 per person for the medical flight from Iraq to Landstuhl, and as much again to y from Germany to America. The budget of Landstuhl is double what it was before the war. A state-of-the-art prosthetic leg is $100,000, not including teaching someone how to use it or all the surgeries and physical therapy you get before and after. There are some estimates that say it costs the military as much as $1 million per seriously injured serviceman to get someone from Iraq to Walter Reed and out into the world again. And that doesn't include what we pay to take care of them in the future.
The Blarney Stone is an Americanized Irish pub in the cobblestony section of Landstuhl, the little German burg where every shop window bears a sign welcoming the American soldier, his American dollar, and his American English. Parts of the town are pretty in the European way, with stone buildings casting romantic old-world charm over the citizens. Other parts are dened by beer warehouse stores. Next door at the Ramstein Air Base, they have their own Chili's and a half-built mall that looks airlifted from Charlotte, North Carolina. In the Blarney Stone, there's a karaoke machine in the corner going full blast, so that you can't even make out what song is playing.
Dr. Sigmond, who performed the wash-out on Mike Brown, is sitting before a very tall beer with an enlisted man who works with him. Sigmond's got big brown eyes and a high lineless forehead and talks like someone whom people are paid to listen to. One of his Japanese tattoos means something like "The samurai is the rst to suffer anxiety for the people and the last to feel pleasure." Irony quotient appears low. I start things out on an ass-kissy note, or so I believe: What a mistake it was to shift traditionally military operations into the private sector. The contractors—like, you know, Blackwater—lack that higher, more noble directive that the military is meant to operate under. The Army doesn't spray civilians with bullets and then drive off toward safety down the wrong side of an Iraqi boulevard—
Sigmond locks eyes with me and says, "I am not over there, with guns pointed at me and bombs going off and IED attacks, so I think those forces, whether it's Blackwater or the military, need to do whatever is necessary to keep themselves safe and achieve their mission. And they should never, ever be questioned or doubted." I fear he might aikido my ass right there.
Then he says, "I am really glad to be able to talk to you. It is an honor and a privilege to treat these men and women. They are my heroes, I really believe that. They're why I get up in the morning. In my civilian job as a trauma surgeon, I treat people who don't care about the people who treat them. I treat a lot of people who are responsible for their own injuries, because they were with the wrong people or they were stabbed dealing drugs. But this is totally different."
We join up with another table of people, some nurses, some surgical techs, a young physician. A girl from Ohio, a private rst class stationed at Landstuhl, is turning 21 today. She comes over and sits on the physician's lap and says, "I always knew I was going to marry a doctor." The doctor orders up two oatmeal-cookie shots. He tucks her shot in the waist of his jeans. She takes it no-hands, drinks it, then swivels around and puts her butt out. "Don't I have a nice ass?" She disappears when she hears that her boyfriend, who's been banned from the bar for ghting, is waiting for her outside.
Sigmond's friend, a surgical tech, is talking to a woman (we'll call her W.) who also works in the OR. W. is in a revealing dress, holding a big beer in toward her body like it's a baby under threat of violence. She smokes a cigarette and rolls her eyes a lot.
"I bet you're just going to interview General This and Colonel That," she says. "They don't know shit. They don't scrub in every day. I've been here three fucking years."
There's an awkward silence, and I say, "You guys are doing great stuff here."W. says, "I know. I don't need you to tell me that."
The birthday girl comes back, looking for her doctor friend.
"You know whose birthday it is, too?" W. says. "That guy who got his nuts blown off. He's 21 years old, sitting in the intensive-care unit. His penis was what they call degloved. The whole top layer of skin was blown off. Happy birthday, right?" Tears well up in her eyes, and she tries to hide them with the back of her st. She doesn't pretend to hide them; she genuinely seems pissed that she's crying. W. doesn't want to be laying claim to the pain of these people. I remember talking to a vascular surgeon who came here unpaid, and while he found the work totally satisfying, he still felt somehow that the war was a total mystery to him. Sigmond's friend (he doesn't want his name printed) says, "There's a disconnect between soldiers and the people who are taking care of them. The soldier will look to see if you've got a combat patch. They see I have one, so sometimes that helps. But they also know I'm not there. So we're all kind of outsiders."
The truth is that the men who come to the hospital on those buses, they mostly seem so far away that you can barely see them. You can walk into the wards and turn on your tape recorder and talk to them for an hour or so while they ght to pay attention to you instead of whatever signicant pain they are in, you can watch them in the operating room while they lose consciousness, you see what they look like and try to understand the events that brought them here and imagine what all that must be like. But what happened to them happened to them, and though you are in the same physical space, you may as well be on the phone to Mars. W. and her friend, they are saying that the folks here at the Irish pub know what it's like to work here, to lay hands on the catastrophically injured. But even they do not really have access to them.
It's not that it doesn't get to you. It's not that, going through the paces of your day here at Landstuhl, you don't occasionally get emotionally torpedoed. One woman, sweet-faced, who worked at the Fisher House, which puts up the families of injured soldiers who make the trip to Germany, and sometimes the soldiers themselves if they're here for an extended stay, was working one evening, around dusk. She walked outside to nd a soldier smoking a menthol and listening to an iPod, crying. "Not like a few tears," she says. "He was crying like my own child cried when he was 3 years old." When she asked him why, he said it was because he was afraid to go back to Iraq but was too ashamed to let anyone know. Or another story: This chaplain named Ronald Pettigrew, evangelical, black, impenetrably chipper, is called by Jesus to sit at the bedside of a bilateral amputee who can't speak because he's got a breathing tube down his throat, and after some time he tells Pettigrew he wants to hear his wife's voice, and Pettigrew calls her for him, recites into the phone whatever the soldier writes on a marker board: i'm sorry, i love you. When he got off the phone, he wrote the word ring.
"He wanted his wedding ring," Pettigrew says. "I called back downrange. Got his wedding ring for him." Or: A young nuclear-medicine tech, bright-eyed, very polite, hails out of Columbus, Ohio, tells a story where one night, when it's late and the hospital is quiet, he gets orders to perform a brain scan, a nal test to make sure there's no brain activity before they take a young man off life support, and he sits with this still-warm human with white bandages around his head and wires strung out from his extremities as his brain scan comes up cool and empty. "And the parents are outside the office," he says, "in the middle of the night in Germany, holding hands." Or: The surgical tech at the Blarney Stone talks about when he sat with a guy from his best friend's unit who'd had his face blown off—"mushroomed" is how he describes it—sat and talked to him for hours and hours while he was in a coma as a favor to his friend, so the guy would know he wasn't alone. But that's the experience of caring for them, not the experience of being them, a truth that makes almost everyone here feel weirdly guilty and helpless.
And the fact is that even the injured themselves don't feel a real connection to their own injuries yet, still don't exactly know what happened to them, still feel more sorry for people they see across the plane from them than they do for themselves.
In the morning, Mike Brown will be moving again, in a plane, wrapped in blankets, strapped onto aluminum, up over the Ramstein bowling alley and the Ramstein Chili's, out over the vineyards and the cities of Germany, over borders and oceans toward home, on to the next phase of the system. If it's true that we could end this war in the next year, it won't be long until this place, as it's imagined now, is gone. It will become an artifact. Maybe a stop along the evolutionary trail of the wartime medical system, or maybe something that was dreamed up and then went away, no one the wiser, just some people without legs who remember it in a haze, some no-nonsense women with sprayed-stiff hair who were here for a year and then returned like from a fugue state to Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
Captain Miguel Cubano of the DWMMC explained it as he sat under his diplomas and plaques, describing the system he oversees.
"The whole idea of it is that it's going to be mothballed," he says, clasping his strong, cologned surgeon's hands before him. "It goes into a crate that says break open in case of war, and then this just becomes a sleepy military hospital again."
Two months later, I wouldn't have recognized Mike Brown if he'd been sitting next to me on a ight to Dallas, because whoever I met at Landstuhl was not the same person. Here in the dim living room of the Fisher House, in the Walter Reed Medical Center, Mike Brown appears vigorous, outspoken, not at all ashen. He's seated on a oral couch with his wife of two years, Kim, with one eyeball on his infant daughter, Alyssa, big-eyed and downy-headed, with a snot bubble emerging from the concretized-mucus shell of her nose. The guy's eyes are bright. His skin is the color of the living. He is short and thick and upright and clothed, and you can see what he really looks like: a guy who could have been the starting fullback at a small high school. "You get a lot of benets if you're injured," Mike Brown says. "We got put up here for free. We don't have to buy any necessities—milk, eggs, cheese, whatever you can imagine, they just give you! And the Army gives you a minimum of $50,000 for insurance. Double amputee would get $100,000."
Mike doesn't remember Landstuhl well. He doesn't remember landing or being on a bus or that he was in the ICU. He doesn't remember how many surgeries he had or who his surgeon was. "It felt more like I was in America," he says. "Seeing all those people in uniform and everyone speaking English."
He's eager to show me the rehab center at Walter Reed, over in one of the main buildings, which looks like a replica of Independence Hall built in the '60s. I'd seen specials about these rehab centers on CNN and the evening news—this has always been an attractive place to the media, with its daily miracles, its focus on our American ingenuity and basic human decency—but it's still overwhelming to see it in person. It's like a state-of-the-art gym built for and populated entirely by a race of people with bodies slightly different from ours. A white man in Army shorts does leg raises, his calf missing its skin, so you can see the muscle, fully articulated like an anatomical drawing. Another man, on the oor, raises a plastic ball using an arm with the skin peeled off and replaced by netting, like a mesh laundry bag. Two guys barely old enough to shave play a tile game like Scrabble, one with a hooking prosthetic arm and the other with a hand sewn together smaller than it should be. Men like beta versions of robots lurch down the rubberized track on complicated metal legs while a black Lab in what looks like a photographer's vest trots alongside them, tongue lolling.
Things have basically gone as well as they could have for Mike Brown. He's not dead. His amputation is below the knee—way easier to walk on than if it were above. It's taken him half the time to recover and learn how to walk than it does most people. He thinks he's got a beautiful scar. He's worried he could develop a painkiller problem, with all the Percocet they're giving him, and he's freaked out about what happens when he leaves here. He doesn't know what his daughter is going to think when she looks at him. "What happens when I'm the only one with the metal leg and people are like, What a freak?" he says later, when we're eating lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, where he and his wife like to go when they feel like a piece of vanilla-macadamia-nut cake as big as your face.
Personally, I don't really think that's going to happen. I think it'll more be like: He'll get treated differently. He'll be on the outside of normal society, which the military already is. It's something none of these guys really understand yet, in my estimation. Mike Brown is not at war and he's still not, two months after his injury, really back home yet. When he moves out of the Fisher House, when he has been processed through Landstuhl and Walter Reed and rehab, when we've given him all that money can buy until he's out of the system and we've all gone headlong past the war except for the stories about how vets are homeless or committing murders or getting divorced or suffering from a weird lung disease or something, when he's out on his own, that's when Mike Brown will know what happened to him. Landstuhl, and the system connected to it, is the maximization of what we're capable of doing for the injured on a large scale, and it's not feasible to maintain that care as the timeline gets longer for people like Mike. It's kind of dazzling: We can send you to a broiling desert across the world to ght precision battles in a country you know nothing about; and we can beam you up when you're hurt and put you down in the middle of Germany, rebuild your leg, get you free cheese and $50,000. But there are some things we just can't do. And what it is we couldn't save Mike Brown from is what he'll nd out next.
Devin friedman _is _GQ's senior correspondent.


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Richard Blanco, the immigrant poet who read his work at the second inauguration of President Obama, said the event made him feel he was finally a real American and opened him up to "a new and greater purpose, reconnecting people with poetry ... almost like an evangelist of poetry."
Blanco, the first Latino, first immigrant, first openly gay person and the youngest person to be an inaugural poet, will read his verse and discuss what the inaugural role has meant when he appears at 7:30 p.m., Monday, March 3, at Mountain Avenue Theatre at Ashland High School. His presentation is being sponsored by the Chautauqua Poets & Writers series.
Blanco read his "One Today" poem at the inaugural. It opens with these lines:
"One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies."
Read to 38 million viewers, the poem went on to celebrate the shared experience of Americans, evoking images of school buses, geometry teachers, stained glass windows and moms watching their children on slides, as well as the tragedies of the Twin Towers.
"It was very exciting, to say the least," Blanco said in a phone interview. "I felt very connected with America at that moment. ... There was always a little part of me that felt I was not really an American. Here, I embraced America and was being embraced back. ... I found home and it was in my backyard all along."
Blanco, 46, was born in Spain and immigrated to the U.S. from Cuba. He is a civil engineer, with a focus on downtown redevelopment, "engaging the community and its vision for the town." He lives in Maine.
Blanco said he is not sure how he was chosen to be the poet for the inaugural, but said he understood it's the president who makes that decision.
"I can't help but think ... if he were a poet, he'd write along the same lines as I do, about what it means to negotiate this culture. I've always connected with his life story, a great American dream story — and that's what my work is about."
Known as the Poet Laureate of the Inauguration, the post is not the U.S. Poet Laureate but is a lifelong title.
"I don't have to give it back," Blanco said, "like Miss America has to give back her crown."
The honor, Blanco said, "completely changed my life, so I get to make my livelihood from writing poetry. It's my day job and my night job now. I feel I have a new and greater purpose, to reconnect people with poetry and reach thousands of people. It's a great honor, but more importantly, it's great for poetry."
Blanco said he found his love of words as an engineer, where he had to write many letters and studies.
"I had to start paying close attention to language as a very alive thing. Poetry took off from there as a means of creative expression."
In his readings and talks, Blanco said, he likes to raise awareness that all Americans have a real poet living within 50 miles of them and that the unique power of poetic language "happens organically ... and focuses on eliciting emotion in a compressed and acute way and accessing a deep and complex part of our psyche."
John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at email@example.com.
'An evangelist of poetry'
Richard Blanco, the immigrant poet who read his work at the second inauguration of President Obama, said the event made him feel he was finally a real American and opened him up to "a new and greater purpose, reconnecting people with poetry ... almost like an evangelist of poetry."


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David Einhorn's Greenlight Capital sued Apple Inc. Thursday over a proxy proposal that would eliminate preferred stock from Apple\'s charter.
In a press release, Einhorn said Apple could unlock "several hundred billion dollars of shareholder value" by issuing preferred stock to current shareholders with dividends tied to the company's enormous cash hoard.
Greenlight holds Apple shares and has been urging management to issue preferred stock since May.
However, Einhorn says the company's Proxy Proposal 2, would eliminate preferred stock from the company's charter "and thus restrict the Board\'s ability to unlock the value on Apple\'s balance sheet."
He said the company agreed to reconsider his proposals, but has refused to remove Proposal 2 from the agenda at its Feb. 27 shareholder meeting.
Greenlight alleges the proxy proposal violates Securities and Exchange Commission rules requiring corporate governance plans to be voted on separately.
Einhorn told CNBC Thursday that "Apple seems like it can never have enough cash." He said the firm rejected a proposal by Greenlight Capital to distribute preferred stock with 4% yield.
— Sital S. Patel
Follow The Tell blog on Twitter @thetellblog


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Ross Barkley was called up to the England squad for the crucial World Cup qualifiers against Montenegro and Poland.
Such a call represents the meteoric rise of the player who had just two Premier League starts to his name at the start of the season.
Under new Everton manager Roberto Martinez, the 19-year-old has quickly grown in to one of England's most promising young talents and is tipped to be part of the next generation of English stars.
All this seems a bit familiar, doesn't it?
The 2010/11 season saw a young 18-year-old rise at a similar pace but this time at Arsenal.
Jack Wilshere made 35 appearances for Arsenal in that season, soon becoming one of Arsenal's creative players in the centre of midfield.
He then suffered a number of injury problems that saw him play no games in the 2011/12 season and just 25 the next. This season, thanks to an ankle injury at the end of last season, he has been unable to re-ignite the form he first showed in 2010.
Both Barkely and Wilshere are similar players so who should play in the crucial games for England? Arsenal's 21-year-old or Everton's 19-year-old?
According to the stats, it seems that Wilshere may well have to settle for a place on the bench in Roy Hodgson's squad.
Premier League 2013/14 stats:
Jack Wilshere/Ross Barkley
Appearances: 5(1)/6
Goals: 0/2
Assists: 0/0
Passes: 42/45.7
Pass completion: 88.5%/88%
Shots: 0.3/3.2
Key passes: 1.2/1.3
Tackles: 1/1.5
Looking at these key stats, it is revealed that Barkley has beaten Wilshere in six areas whilst Wilshere is only better at pass completion by half a percent. Even that win is stifled by the fact that Barkley makes nearly four successful passes more than Wilshere per game.


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NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The dollar rose against the euro Tuesday after a survey showed German investor confidence slumped in May and reports indicated Germany's central bank would back further stimulus from the European Central Bank in June, if needed to fight low inflation.
The euro EURUSD, -0.0176% fell to $1.3703 from $1.3758 late Monday, trading at levels last seen on April 4, according to FactSet.
The Bundesbank is ready to support stimulus measures, including a negative deposit rate and purchases of packaged bank loans, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the matter. On Thursday, ECB President Mario Draghi surprised market participants by saying he would be "comfortable" with easing in June, adding that he would first need to see the updated staff forecasts on inflation.
The reported willingness to support further easing is significant because Germany is the euro zone's largest economy. "The Bundesbank has the most sway," said Christopher Vecchio, a currency analyst at DailyFX, adding that the ECB interest-rate cut in November came after consumer prices in Germany fell 0.2% in October 2013 from September.
"What the Bundesbank says, goes," he said.
The Center for European Economic Research, or ZEW institute, on Tuesday said economic expectations for Germany fell for the fifth straight month in May, touching the lowest level in more than a year.
ECB officials have voiced their concern about the strength of the euro and how it can weigh on the region's already-low inflation over the past few months, adding to speculation that the bank could be forced to act soon. The ECB targets inflation of just under 2% in the medium term. Read: Euro-zone data to give ECB food for thought
A move below the $1.37 level "might indicate that the dollar has more legs to this recent move," said John Doyle, director of markets at Tempus, Inc, adding that the longer-term direction depends on the ECB. A lack of action at the ECB's June meeting could push the euro back up to $1.40, he said. "I think we're all waiting on the ECB at this point," said Doyle.
The ICE dollar index DXY, -0.06% which measures the greenback against six rivals, rose to 80.118 from 79.890 late Monday. The euro makes more than 50% of the basket. The WSJ Dollar Index BUXX, -0.06% an alternate gauge of dollar strength, rose to 73.00 from 72.89.
U.S. retail sales inched up 0.1% in April versus a revised 1.5% gain in March. Economists had expected a seasonally adjusted increase of 0.4% last month, according to a MarketWatch poll.
The dollar USDJPY, +0.10% moved up to ¥102.26 from ¥102.13 late Monday.
In other action, the British pound GBPUSD, +0.8852% fell to $1.6829 from $1.6869 late Monday. The Australian dollar AUDUSD, +0.4604% was at 93.56 U.S. cents versus 93.61 U.S. cents.
Read more on MarketWatch:
7 places where home prices are falling
Sales at U.S. retailers barely rise in April
Corporate bond rally is next to bust, some fear
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