Baby Huey

Lamont and Tonelli announced that Foreigner was added to the Journey and Def Leppard concert at AT&T Park in San Francisco on Friday, September 21st.

The ticket presale is on Thursday, February 1st at Noon, use the code word “triple.”

Tickets will go on sale on Saturday, February 3rd at 10am through: www.livenation.com

A woman born with a huge mole covering her face now has four egg-sized balloons under her skin as part of a drastic op to save her life. Doctors fear Xiao Yan’s birthmark could turn cancerous, if they don’t try to remove it. The 23-year-old was born with the rare mole, a congenital melanocytic nevus – a type of birthmark that affects around one per cent of babies worldwide. Last March, when Xiao began to complain the mole was hurting, medics became concerned. They warned without treatment, which is taking place at the Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital in east China, the birthmark could become cancerous. Doctors said the 23-year-old’s condition will have to get worse before it can get better. So far, they have inserted the four egg-sized balloons under her skin. They are regularly injected with saline, to gently expand them – stretching the skin as they do. The idea is that by stretching Xiao’s skin, when specialists remove the mole, they will have enough skin to replace it with. Xiao, from the rural village of Longjing in Guizhou province in south-western China, would have to face living with the massive mole without the treatment. “Despite the big black mole on my face, I enjoyed my childhood playing with my friends,” she said. “I was carefree. “But as I grew older, the fact that I was ‘different’ became increasingly magnified.” Her mum Yang Xiu’e said she had to “beg” the villagers to stop making fun of her daughter, who became the talk of the town for all the wrong reasons. Following recommendations from doctors last year, Xiao’s poor family managed the wholly improbable task of raising £11,177 for the first stage of her treatment in Shanghai, which began in October. Doctors planted expanders in her face and now still inject saline into the devices twice a week. “During the first month of treatment, my face hurt so much because of the egg-sized expanders and the saline injections that I wanted to slam my face into a wall,” Xiao said. Her treatment will continue for a further five months – and will include five or six more surgeries – ending in June this year. “I used to feel sorry for myself,” the brave young woman admitted, saying: “But I’ve grown up under the support of my family and now I’m much more positive.” Xiao has been dubbed the “Gourd Doll” because the lumps on her face resemble the shape of gourd fruits. Her twin brother and the rest of her family are continuing to raise funds for her follow-up surgeries and have managed about £5,588.

The opioid crisis just keeps getting worse, in part because new types of drugs keep finding their way onto the streets. Fentanyl, heroin’s synthetic cousin, is among the worst offenders.

It’s deadly because it’s so much stronger than heroin, as shown by the photograph above, which was taken at the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory. On the left is a lethal dose of heroin, equivalent to about 30 milligrams; on the right is a 3-milligram dose of fentanyl, enough to kill an average-sized adult male.

Fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is up to 100 times more potent than morphine and many times that of heroin.

Drugs users generally don’t know when their heroin is laced with fentanyl, so when they inject their usual quantity of heroin, they can inadvertently take a deadly dose of the substance. In addition, while dealers try to include fentanyl to improve potency, their measuring equipment usually isn’t fine-tuned enough to ensure they stay below the levels that could cause users to overdose. Plus, the fentanyl sold on the street is almost always made in a clandestine lab; it is less pure than the pharmaceutical version and thus its effect on the body can be more unpredictable.

Heroin and fentanyl look identical, and with drugs purchased on the street, “you don’t know what you’re taking,” Tim Pifer, the director of the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory, told STAT in an interview. “You’re injecting yourself with a loaded gun.”

New Hampshire, like the rest of New England, has been particularly hard hit by the opioid epidemic. The state saw a total of 439 drug overdoses in 2015; most were related to opioids, and about 70 percent of these opioid-related deaths involved fentanyl. The state has seen 200 deadly opioid overdoses this year so far, said Pifer.

Fentanyl was originally used as an anesthetic. Then doctors realized how effective it was at relieving pain in small quantities and started using it for that purpose. In the hands of trained professionals — and with laboratory-grade equipment — fentanyl actually has a pretty wide therapeutic index, or range within which the drug is both effective and safe.

The difference in strength between heroin and fentanyl arises from differences in their chemical structures. The chemicals in both bind to the mu opioid receptor in the brain. But fentanyl gets there faster than morphine — the almost-instantaneous byproduct when the body breaks down heroin — because it more easily passes through the fat that is plentiful in the brain. Fentanyl also hugs the receptor so tightly that a tiny amount is enough to start the molecular chain of events that instigates opioids’ effects on the body.

This tighter affinity for the opioid receptor also means more naloxone — or Narcan — may be needed to combat a fentanyl overdose than a heroin overdose.

“In a fentanyl overdose, you may not be able to totally revive the person with the Narcan dose you have,” said Scott Lukas, director of the Behavioral Psychopharmacology Research Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. “Naloxone easily knocks morphine off of the receptor, but does that less so to fentanyl.”

Breaking News: Journey and Def Leppard are coming to AT&T Park in San Francisco on Friday, September 21st and tickets will go on sale on Saturday, February 3rd at 10am through: www.livenation.com

Breaking news: @JourneyOfficial and @DefLeppard are coming to @ATTPark on Friday, September 21st and tickets are on sale Saturday, February 3rd at 10am! pic.twitter.com/M0b3TZJKGM

— LiveNationSF (@LiveNationSF) January 19, 2018

Look at this x-ray showing the catheter inside Lamont’s weiner that will be pulled out today.