Close Call

Spanish clones of penicillin-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae are the most common clones recovered in recent cases of meningitis in Spain. international multiresistant Streptococcus pneumoniae clone resistant to fluoroquinolones and other families of antibiotics. Increasing resistance of Streptococcus pneumoniae to fluoro-quinolones: results of a Hong Kong multicentre study in 2000. Streptococcus pneumoniae isolates with reduced susceptibility to ciprofloxacin in Spain: clonal diversity and appearance of ciprofloxacin-resistant epidemic clones. Identification of three major clones of multiply antibiotic-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae in Taiwanese hospitals by multilocus sequence typing. susceptibility breakpoints and first-step parC mutation in Streptococcus pneumoniae: redefining fluoroquinolone resistance. A ll my life my father refused to talk about his boyhood in Norway. "No," he'd say when I cajoled him for details. "I'm an American now." The only thing he'd ever talk about was how he'd ended up in Minneapolis at Augsburg Seminary, the story of his "close call," as he referred to it. He was the only one of his three brothers and sister who emigrated. "He broke our mother's heart," my aunt told me when I visited her in Norway many years later. She gave me the picture she'd taken the day he left, the day after Christmas, 1920. He's impossibly young, already wearing his lifelong uniform-black suit, vest, white shirt, tie, ready to go off to America, even if his mother's heart is breaking, because he had to fulfill a promise he made when he got the Spanish Flu, summer of 1918. "Twenty two million people died," he was fond of telling me, "twice as many as died in World War I, but I didn't die. When I was choking and close to death, my mother called the village doctor who performed a tracheotomy right on our kitchen table and I promised then I'd serve God forever if He wouldn't let me die. It was a close call." Close call, I say, echoing my father, now dead these 20 years. How close he came to being one of the 22 million, how he almost didn't make it to America, almost didn't spend a summer in Duluth, preaching at the Norwegian Seaman's Mission, almost didn't meet my mother whose youth group was serving coffee and cake after the service, almost didn't marry her, almost didn't make love with her that warm June evening of 1927, the night I was conceived, in the white frame parsonage in Bagley, Minnesota. Close call. Close call.