Laura Eamon was a few months into her first semester at Carleton University in 2011 when she was taken from a residence party to hospital by paramedics.
Embarrassed by being carried out in front of her fellow students, her mindset changed when she was discharged and returned to campus in Ottawa.
“People are cheering and chanting, and like, ‘Oh, my God. You’re the girl that got taken by ambulance. You drink as much as I do,'” said Eamon. “It was almost like a badge of honour.”
It wasn’t the only time Eamon, originally from Hammonds Plains, N.S., went to hospital because of excessive drinking.
From 2008 to 2013, alcohol was a big part of Eamon’s life. Her struggles with alcohol eventually led her to drop out of university.
Prestigious scholarship
But Eamon is now back at university, this time at Saint Mary’s in Halifax. Sober for more than eight years, the 28-year-old just landed a prestigious Frank H. Sobey scholarship worth $35,000, one of nine given out annually to undergraduate business students in Atlantic Canada. She has a year left in her studies.
As part of her application for the scholarship, which included reference letters, written essays and an interview process, Eamon talked about her sobriety.
“I wanted to show that it is a possibility for people to change, for people to grow, for people to survive substance-use disorder,” she said.
Eamon started drinking when she went to C.P. Allen High School in Bedford, N.S., and liked the confidence it gave her. She believed alcohol was part of the package that included new friends, big parties and adventure.
‘The alcohol sort of took over’
Even though Eamon skipped a lot of classes, she kept her grades up. She graduated in 2011, and wanting to go somewhere bigger than Halifax, she decided on Ottawa.
“And when I got into university, the alcohol sort of took over,” said Eamon.
Eamon is shown in a photo from her time at Carleton University. Students in residence would wear these red sweaters and they could have their nicknames printed on the sleeve. ‘Naturally everyone agreed on my nickname, and I paid actual money to have that branded on my sweater,’ she says. (Submitted by Laura Eamon)
In her first year, she lived in residence. She failed a few classes and barely scraped by in the others, missing a lot of instruction time along the way.
Eamon headed home for the summer with a friend, Kassie Nadler. The two split a place in downtown Halifax, but Nadler left after about a month.
“She packed up all of her stuff and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore. It’s impossible to live with you and you’re ruining my time here. You are sick and this is too much. Something’s got to change. And I’ll see you in Ottawa in September,'” said Eamon. “And she left.”
The experience was a first for Eamon. No one had told her that her drinking was problematic.
Nadler told CBC News this was actually the second time she had a conversation like that with her best friend. The previous time was during their first year of university.
Then 18, the pair would often head to nearby Gatineau, Que., where the legal drinking age is 18, so they could go to clubs. Eamon would often black out from drinking.
“I can’t take care of you in those moments where you need me to,” Nadler told Eamon at the time. “And I’m not physically capable and I can’t make sure that you’re safe, and it puts me in an uncomfortable position.”
For their second year of university, the pair lived off-campus and had other roommates.
Eamon said she knew something was wrong when her roommates were able to balance their studies, work and maintain a social life, but she couldn’t.
“They were thriving, and I was sad and lonely and sick,” said Eamon.
Within a week, she dropped out. She got a job and worked to pay for her rent and alcohol.
Early the following year, Eamon moved home. She continued drinking, couch-surfed and worked a series of jobs in retail and reception when she wasn’t calling in sick for the day.
“I feel bad for all the customers who I dealt with … I was pretty haggard-looking and rough around the edges, probably cranky all the time,” said Eamon.
Eamon bikes on P.E.I.’s Confederation Trail in the summer of 2021. (Submitted by Laura Eamon)
One day that summer in 2013, she woke up in a hotel room and didn’t know where she was.
She went to her first AA meeting that night and cried the entire time. At the end of the meeting, she had a realization.
“How can you go to a bonfire or the beach or, you know, a cottage without drinking?” said Eamon. “I was, like, sobbing to this woman, just so concerned — not that I had woken up downtown in a place where I didn’t even know existed, but because I was worried about going to the beach without alcohol.”
Sober since Nov. 9, 2013
Eamon wasn’t ready to quit drinking, but on Nov. 9, 2013, she went to AA after she was sexually assaulted.
“I knew I didn’t want to ever be in a situation like that again if I could help it, and the only thing that I could control was my own actions,” said Eamon. “And that’s really where my sobriety started.”
Eamon has been sober ever since. She said being surrounded by people who had similar experiences helped her maintain her sobriety. Her father was also an important resource. He was also a recovering alcoholic who had been sober since before Eamon was born.
Growing up, Eamon attended meetings with her father on his sobriety birthdays.
Life without alcohol was different. She didn’t have mysterious bruises and pulled muscles and other injuries. Eamon also noticed she suddenly had extra money. It wasn’t just the money saved from not buying alcohol; it was things like not buying fast food while drinking or the morning after, and not missing work and wages.
Eamon also fell in love.
“All of a sudden, I was experiencing joy,” she said.
Eamon is now a stepmom. Her partner has two kids from a previous marriage.
She also got a diploma in medical office administration and started working in the health-care system, but she longed for a bigger challenge and applied to Saint Mary’s University in 2017 and started attending the school.
Eamon is shown with her partner and her stepdaughters. (Submitted by Laura Eamon)
She’s balanced working in different positions — she’s currently a project co-ordinator with the Sackville Business Association — and going to school while taking less than a full course load.
Since giving up drinking, it hasn’t been all joy for Eamon. Her father died due to cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, and her mother had a brain aneurysm, but has fully recovered.
Finding the money to pay for school has been another challenge. Needing a “Hail Mary,” she learned of the Sobeys scholarship. Looking at the past recipients, she felt intimidated by their success.
“And my partner was just saying, you know, ‘You’re pretty incredible, too. Why don’t you apply?'” said Eamon.
Part of the application process included talking about volunteer experience. Eamon’s volunteer work includes sitting on the board of the Sackville Rivers Association and acting as the communications chair for the organization, which is the community where she now lives. She’s the treasurer of the Saint Mary’s University Environmental Society.
Eamon is also involved with the Halifax Recovery Society, a non-profit focused on breaking down the stigma of mental health and substance-use disorders. For their 2021 Recovery Day event, Eamon told her story.
Breaking the stigma of addiction
Julie Melanson is the society’s founder. She said when people like Eamon tell their stories, it helps break down stigma.
Julie Melanson is the founder of the Halifax Recovery Society. She says success stories, like that of Eamon, help make it easier for people struggling with substance-use disorder to seek help. (Submitted by Julie Melanson)
“People are able to relate,” said Melanson. “They could hear themselves through that story and know that they’re not alone, so it’s incredibly important for stories to be shared, like Laura’s, in a place where it’s public, where it can be viewed, not behind closed doors, because we need to normalize conversations to really break that societal stigma.”
Melanson said the stories also offer hope.
“It really shows that we can recover, we do recover and we do succeed in great ways, so it’s absolutely phenomenal,” said Melanson.
‘Still just funny and outgoing,’ says friend
While on opposite ends of the country, Nadler and Eamon remain friends. They’ve also taken road trips together over the years. While Eamon’s confidence has grown, in other ways she hasn’t changed.
“She was still the same Laura that I met on the first day that I went to Carleton for the group tour, still just funny and outgoing and social and very interested in the world around her and in the people that she surrounds herself with,” said Nadler.
When Eamon learned she had won the scholarship, the celebration was simple: she and her partner got Chinese food.
“I think I’ve turned into a homebody and I’m comfortable with that,” she said. “And it’s the little things that make a difference now.”
There are resources in place for Nova Scotians needing help with addictions. The province’s mental health and addictions line can be reached by phone at 1-855-922-1122.
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
