Well, hi there, I'm Sandy Alnok, and today I'm going to show you how to color this cute pie bakery card, and I'm going to show you 12 other cards that I made with the new Ellen Hudson release. Do not be afraid of this picture. I know there's a lot of Christmas in it, and some people break out into hives already, but the season is coming, so this is your warning. I'm making a non-Christmas card today, and I'll show you a couple here that are non-Christmas. This one uses the woodgrain background, which I stamped over almost the whole thing. I barely did any masking other than the latte love cups. Those are from an older release, but I colored right over top of the grout gray ink from MFT in order to color that background. For Halloween, there are going to be a couple of things. There's the spiders, and then this cute little stamp set with ghosties and pumpkins and stuff in it, and of course everything comes with dyes. There's two sentiment sets. One is a little mini set, if you like smaller sentiments, and then one that has larger sentiments, and all of that is linked in the doobly-doo as well as over on the blog. One of my favorite sets in this one is the Christmas characters, and there's these little floating heads, and I came up with fun ways that you can use floating heads and make a scene out of them. There's the elves in bed, and then of course the stockings aren't floating heads, but I used two of them with a fireplace, and then added the Santa Claus with the reindeer, and then colored the whole background, and added everything down to the house. Over on Ellen's channel later this month, not right now, but make sure you're subscribed over there, is going to be my little snowman card, and so if you want to go see that, then go sign up and subscribe. Next up is the amaryllis, Mondo amaryllis, which I know a lot of the team is going to be using in this hop, so I'm not coloring that one today, but I did one with just a splash of color around the back, and then one with color across the whole thing, because that's what makes things look white if you color the background behind it, or put some kind of color back there. My favorite is this one, and I love the window. I'm going to be doing a winter indoor scenes kind of class in September, I think, so stay tuned to maybe get that one. Next up is the tags, which I'll use later this winter as well, and then this is the set that I'm going to use for the cards today, actually this is not it, just a little bear is from a very old release, but he's been getting lots of things to wear, so I colored him there, and you'll see why I'm showing you that summer card in just a minute. This is a wagon that comes with the new bear wear set, and the packages are from the Christmas characters set, so I combined them there, and then the sentiment is from a set that has all kinds of, if I can even speak, cool retro sentiments. Here's the wagon again, but I used the chicken from last month's Good Egg Set, which I thought was hilarious when combined with the KFC sign. I'm not even sure who I'll send that card to, it was just fun to do. And then, of course, the pumpkins can be in the wagon, and I added the little bear, give him pumpkin to talk about stamp, and colored a background, which I will link you to a background that's similar to that that I did in another video. But this is the card I'm going to make today, and I added the apron onto the bear, and I made an apron for the little bear, and we've got the wagon and the whole pie thing, but I wanted to do this one because of the background on another card. I did this one last month, and I just showed people on the blog, and they said, how did you make the background? I don't show you how easy that is by putting pies in the background on this card. So I started with my masking, and I used the little bear, the little beach bear for a mask placement. I wanted the bear in the same place. So first I put the wagon where I knew it would line up with him. I lined up my apron where I knew that was going to be and masked it out, and then I ended up cutting a mask out for the apron, and then I stamped the bear on top of that. Now his hands are going to disappear there. His hands are not going to be in front because I didn't choose to mask them out that way. I did add the little pie on there once I had everything together in my MISTI, but what I am going to end up doing is stamping the bear on a separate piece of paper and gluing the arms on. You'll see how that works in a little bit. But I'm going to do the background first, and I'm going to stamp it in grout gray. It's the same gray that I used for the wood grain in that first card with the coffee cups. It's a very light color. You can color right over top of it, as long as your colors are darker than the grout gray. So when I'm stamping this background, and I'm just sliding my paper along so I end up with the pie on the same shelf across the whole card, then all I have to do is color right over top of it. I'm not masking out those guys any further than I had needed. I'm actually looking to see if there's anything white in the area, and that kind of thing I would have to mask out. But everything's going to be darker than this grout gray, so I'm not really worried about it. So just keep moving my paper and even hanging it outside of the MISTI. Just be careful your MISTI is not dirty on that edge because you'll get ink on it. And then I'll move the pie up and make another shelf. Now when I did it with mixed items, I did them by hand. So I drew a little light line with a light marker and I stamped them by hand rather than using the MISTI. It's easier to do if you have just one big, big scene you're doing like this and do the same image. So to complete the shelf, I took a W1 to do the darkest areas right in between the pies. And then you can use a W0 or a W00 to just add some flicking above it. And that's really it. It's like super, super easy to just give them enough background that the pies pop out of the background just slightly. Next up is the floor. And I've done these floors before, so I'll just kind of zip through this really quick. Using a light color to sketch it in. If I did it with pencil, I would end up with lines in there. And you know, there's all that trapping of lines. If you're using a dark color like this, then you don't necessarily need to worry about trapping lines. But you can also just, you know, do a floor in another color. I had considered actually doing a pink, pink squared floor. And then I decided I needed the contrast of it. And over here on the right hand side, I actually goofed up and my lines got a little wonky. But I knew I was going to trim this out anyway. So I just kind of threw in an extra stroke there.  Then comes the very simple, you know, I guess comparatively simple coloring of the bears. And you can see I've got my secondary bear stamped so that I can just do the arms. And then I will cut them out. Somehow the footage disappeared for the rest of the apron. However, you're going to see the apron on the other bear. So don't worry about that. To put the arms in here, I gave really dark shadows under where the arms are going to be glued down. I'm only going to use that really dark color in there. And then I'm moving to a lighter dark brown and then a medium tone brown to finish out the roundedness of the bear. And then I'll move to the lightest color to do that final blending. I left a little lighter color around the snout to make it look like it's popping forward a little bit. And then on the arms, I'm not using the darkest brown, just using that, the not so darkest brown, the mid tone, and then going over it one more time with the light. Since we're going to be doing some branding on our little pie bakery here, I decided to make the wagon pink to match the little aprons they're wearing. And here's an apron for the other bear because I was disappointed at first. I thought that was going to be an apron for the little bear because there is a little bear in this bear wear set, so the bear has a little friend. And I thought, oh no, the little bear has to wear one, too, so I made my own. I just basically drew in what I saw on the other one and I colored right over top of it, just the same way that I stamped right over top of things. I colored right over top of it because the brown was going to cover over the pink. And I have thicker pink stripes with inner orange stripes in between them just to add detail because that's how I roll. I add weird things in there that aren't necessary, but they sure are cute. So then I'll do the same coloring on the little bear as I did on the big bear. Now you could add a Christmas or a Thanksgiving sentiment to something like this. They're carrying pie, but you could also make this a cherry pie, make it a summer card, that kind of thing. And then I'm just kind of putting in my finishing details on this. I decided that I was just seeing too much of the floor. The floor was becoming too important. And I went over the whole thing with a light coat of a C3. And that just dulled the importance of the floor down just a little bit so that the emphasis is still on the bears and the wagon. And I darkened up the wagon a little bit because I wanted the word delivery to show up on there since they're going to use that as a delivery wagon for their pies. And I just, this card is one of those that makes me laugh and it kind of makes me laugh because a lot of Ellen Hudson's stamps do. Julie is the genius behind a lot of the hilarity. And her and the sentiments are just a kick in the pants fit to be tied. Seems like it would be a good name for an actual bakery. Just really enjoyed making this card. I enjoyed making all of them because now I have a head start on some Christmas cards. Finally, everybody else is rolling with them. I make like 200 a year. So I need to get started. So I'm kind of glad that there are some Christmas stamps already coming out. Alright, I will see you guys later on. Have a wonderful day. Don't forget to go to the blog hop because there's lots more inspiration. And I will see you next time. Bye bye.


Hello, Gareth. What's up? Good day, Brian. I need to get to Coulthard School urgently. Can you give me a lift? Oh, sure. Just come on down and I'll give you a ride over there. Oh, buddy. Thanks for the lift. My pleasure. How come you're sitting here? Haven't you got a university to run? Oh, no, Gareth.  Your position description includes driving for everybody around the campus? Is this the kind of new taxi service we're developing? You remember when you signed the contract with me, you said there were other duties as required. ANU Vice Chancellor at the community's service. Okay. So, Gareth, why don't you pick out a song to play? Okay. Let's go. Oh, good choice, Gareth. Come on, Gareth. I want to see your head banging through. No choice. All the girls in the wheelchair can't find a flag. If that don't suit you, that's the drag suit. Forever. Oh, that was so intense. Yeah, it was. Maybe we need something just a little chirpier. Got any ideas? Look, I love this song. See what you think. Summer holiday. No one working part of the week or two. Summer holiday. No more worries for me and you. For a week or two. We're going where the sun shines brightly. We're going where the sea is blue. We'll see if it's true. Summer holiday. To make a dream come true. For me and you. Are you meant to buckle up? Please.  No. I'm getting buckled up. Excellent. No? Yeah, you're there. It's very fast. How's my blood pressure? It's always higher when I'm in the car. You're not supposed to agree. Staying alive? Staying alive. See why we can't play that. Staying alive.


Life is good all this month at Appalachian Wireless. Get the LG G5 for just one penny with sign-up or renewal of a two-year service agreement. That's almost $100 off the regular price. Better service, bigger savings. That's today's Appalachian Wireless. The Pikeville Police Department is teaming up with area businesses in order to work together to stop shoplifters. Today, law enforcement met with those in retail to discuss the new initiative, Business Alert. The Business Alert group is to allow local businesses to be able to share information on shoplifting crimes with police and other businesses in hope of combating shoplifting crimes. All these other stores that's getting hit by these people can relay this information to a central hub. That way we can see them, maybe we can identify them, if we can't identify them, someone else that's been victimized by them can identify them. Chief Edmund says over the last three years shoplifting has become an epidemic that keeps growing. He says he wants to stop it now before it gets worse.  These people are coming in from what we're seeing. They're feeling buggies full of not food, but they're putting our conditions by three or four or five on a buggy and trying to get out the doors with them. The business alert system is not a replacement for crimes in progress. The goal is for businesses to share information with other businesses such as pictures, videos or current trends and hopefully other businesses who receive the alerts can become familiar with those trends and identify those who frequently shoplift. If something happens at my store or if it happens at another retailer where there will be a Walmart or Lowe's or whoever it would be, if we can get the information down and get them stopped, we might not just get them charged just for what happened at our store, get them charged also for these other incidents as well. For more information or to sign up for business alerts, contact Paul Maynard by the number listed on your screen. In Pikeville, I'm Shelby Still for EKB News.


Welcome to Digital Asset News to get top stories in crypto and break them out of bite-sized pieces. So today we've got, I think this is one of the biggest stories that really goes unnoticed because people glance it over and it's massive and really what it comes down to is Brian Armstrong just met with the Fed Chair Jerome Powell and he says US needs to be a major crypto player to stay relevant and he talks about a lot of different things.  We'll take a look at what he says there. Also, we're going to take a look at how the Bitcoin money difficulty dropped 28%, which is the largest drop ever. On top of that, we'll take a look at some a little bit of pain that is coming up as far as the grayscale Bitcoin trust being unlocked. On top of that, that's going to go in conjunction with what CEO of Celsius, Alex Moschinski, said as he gives his price prediction and he talks about a couple of pain points, one of those being the unlock part of grayscale and gives his price prediction for Bitcoin. So we'll go over all those things and finally, at the very end, after the end of this premiere, just so you know, we're going to have a live viewing of what I call the final predictions with my friend Jerry Hall. So after this premiere, stop on over on the live stream and we're going to go over all the different predictions that we have and then the new ones that are put into my portfolio that I picked up lately and we'll go over everything that I have in my portfolio. So that'll be after this live premiere. But first, let's take a look at what's going on the market. So right now, it is the 4th of July. Great day for Americans. There's nothing really going on for me right now. I'm just waiting to go to a cookout. So I'll do that later tonight and then I'll watch some fireworks and all that stuff and probably eat a little bit too much and maybe drink a little bit too much. But hey, America. So anyhow, the market cap today, it's looking good. Usually we have a Sunday dump, but it seems like after everything that happened with China, we don't see too many of those Sunday dumps and those Asian markets just, you know, poo-pooing all over the place. And like I hope it continues, but it seems like Sunday isn't the dump day. It seems like sometimes it's like a Monday or Tuesday, but we're at $1.48 trillion. That's pretty good. And then Bitcoin price is about $35,000. And over the last 24 hours, I mean, we've seen some pretty good numbers. Anything fantastically blow this up so you can see on the C, 24 hours. Yeah, Bitcoin 5%, 3% for XRP. Watch out. XRP 3.9, 11% for Uniswap. Man, on a massive tear. Good for that. Three points. So look, everything's up primarily. And that's great. We'll see if it holds up.  I'm more really about long-term. And this story that we're going to talk about right now, this one, the Coinbase and the Fed, this is probably the biggest story out there. And I know people just glance over it because it's regulation. Nobody cares about regulation because it's boring. But let me tell you right now, this is what's going to shape this entire industry, entire cryptos and digital assets. This is where things are made or broken. And if we get this right, it could be moonshot for a lot of different things. It was the same thing with the Internet. They got regulation with the Internet correct, which was a little bit of regulation and mostly hands-off. And if they don't screw this up, America, we could do some great things. So Brian Armstrong, I got to tell you, I haven't been a fan of him in Coinbase, as you know, on this channel. But he has made some great points. And the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So Brian Armstrong meets with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Not that Jerome's an enemy. He's just Fed Chairman. What are you going to do? Anyhow, this meeting's details are unclear. But most of the discussions revolved around the construction of an American Central Bank digital currency, a CBDC, and countries that are already ahead of the game, China. China is crushing it right now with that digital yuan. They've already rolled it out. They've already had some big things happen. They've actually put it into the hands of commerce industry. And they're going to beat the tar of everybody because they've got it going on. There's not a great thing about it. I mean, it can really do some damage as far as the world economy. You could see the US dollar being overtaken as the world reserve currency. You may laugh now. But in this article, it's been talked about to a lot of heads of state. So anyhow, Brian here has met with a couple of high ranking people. One of those, you've got Nancy Pelosi. You've got Ryan here. He used to be a big congressman. I think he was head of Congress for a little bit, and probably just took a nice little job in the private industry. So he's a mover and a shaker. And this is what happened. Brian states, I spent most of this week in DC, meeting with members of Congress and heads of various federal agencies. The goal was to establish relationships and help answer questions about crypto and to see what we can do to help the US get more regulatory clarity in this space as part of the newly formed crypto council for innovation. He goes on to further talk about crypto is as important as the birth of the internet in terms of jobs, GDP growth, and innovation it can create. The US will need to be a major player in crypto to stay relevant long term. And I got to tell you, this is a perfect way to phrase it to Congress, because if you just go in there and just talk about, we're going to make a lot of money and it's going to be great. They're like, we don't care. But if you sort of say this is a national security issue, and if you guys don't get on board, you're going to see all the different other countries just pass us by. So we need to take the bull by the horns now or get left behind. And we saw that as we leapfrogged everybody after World War II, and we just caught up with everything, became the World Reserve currency, and we became a national or a global dominant force. If you want to lose that, here's one of the ways you do it. And that will make Congress and people in power sit up and go, hmm, maybe we should look in this. I personally believe that there's a couple of things that's going to lead to global domination. One of those is artificial intelligence. The next one is, of course, commerce. The third one is blockchain, crypto, and digital assets. So to finish this up, Armstrong says, legal uncertainty is a major problem. And I have to 100% agree with Brian Armstrong on this. I know people are shouting at their screens and now saying, crypto doesn't need any regulation. Let's just keep going. Forget everybody. We don't need anybody. We'll just get there on our own. That's true. If you want to wait 50 years, 30 years or something like that. Right now, it's best to play a little bit nice and get into the game as a Trojan horse and then take over everything. It's a lot easier to get in that way than just to bludgeon yourself and try to just overtake everything. Trust me. And as we talk about regulation, it'll make sense. Armstrong further said that he thinks China's digital yuan advances could be a threat to the US dollar. Absolutely. I mean, look, if you had a digital yuan, CBDC, I think a lot of people could pick it up. I don't think Americans will.  Do you think digital yuan? Look, America banned TikTok for a little bit because they didn't like what was going on with the industry as far as telecommunications and what was going on with these, whatever was in the program itself. So do you really think they're going to do a lot of things with their digital yuan and monetary policy? Yeah, right. But other countries could and that could be a problem. He says it is real digital yuan. They are moving quickly and I believe it represents a threat to US reserve currency status. Let me say that again. I believe it threatens the US reserve currency status long term if the US doesn't move quickly to create their own. The CEO of Coinbase stressed that the bureaucrats and agency heads he met with were all thoughtful and committed individuals and some cryptos might be securities as regulated by the SEC. Some are commodities and should be regulated by the CFTC and some are currencies or property and should be regulated by the Treasury or the IRS and some are none of the above. And this is really what it comes down to. This means fewer startups who are able to brave the legal uncertainty, they're going to be the ones that are going to be caught in the crosshairs. Some of them wind up founding their companies abroad or not at all. That's a major problem and that really is what it comes down to. Regulatory clarity. If you're a startup industry, why would you start anything in America as far as crypto and digital assets? You're going to go to Singapore. You're going to go to the EU, not UK. You're going to go to a lot of different places because in America you can't even do a private sale for these digital assets. Why would you do that? And on top of that, let's say you do launch something and then you get hit with like a billion dollar fine by the SEC like EOS, but you're not EOS and you're just starting up good luck covering that expense. Now you just got crushed. So all the people that say we want to do something in crypto and blockchain, we have this great idea glued to innovation. It could lead to jobs. It could lead to national security, whatever. They're not doing that here. They're going someplace else. So just like we see with Wyoming, just like we see with Texas and just like we see with Florida, as they open things up to the crypto and digital asset market, people start flooding in, jobs start being created and a lot of different things that are supposed to be done actually get done. Just let the free market work. This, I believe, I don't really care so much about the short term stuff. TA is great if you're looking at a very small finite amount of time, but for the longevity of this entire industry, it all starts with regulation. If we screw this up, it's going to take a heck of a lot longer, a heck of a lot more money, a heck of a lot more time to get where we want to go. This is super important because of that, just because of that. I'll reach out to any senator or congressman that I can, just to get this going. Also, one of the reasons why I'm going to follow Brian Armstrong on Twitter because, again, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Brian Armstrong, I think, is doing a pretty great job. Now, if he could just drop those fees on Coinbase and then maybe get some more customer support, I'd love them to death, but that is what it is. Let me know what you think in the comment section, but I truly believe this is the biggest issue we're facing right now. All right, so that is that piece. Let's move on to just a little quick one. So the Bitcoin mining difficulty dropped 28%. And this, just as we've, let me comb over here, just as we've seen it before, the Bitcoin difficulty, the reason why it dropped, well, on-chain market analysis, Glassnode, there was a 28% decline, biggest adjustment in the history for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's total hash rate at roughly 86 tera-hashes, our total hash rate is now at a 19-month low, or they might say, some might say, it's not tera-hashes, it's ex-hashes, whatever. It went down 28%. That's all I care about. So why is that? And the rest of this is kind of boring. So I'll just sum it up like this. With all the Bitcoin miners that are in China, they shut down all their rigs, and they are moving it over. The thing is, and we've talked to a couple of different CEOs of Bitcoin mining companies, they can't just start right up away. It has to be built with infrastructure. And one of them told us that they said, hey, if you want to start this up, we're looking at 2023 for you guys to come over here, get the infrastructure in place, get all the electricity, get all the things that you need, and set it up correctly.  Yeah, it takes that long. So when we see this Bitcoin mining difficulty drop, it's because those miners that were churning and burning for all that time, those football fields, rows of Bitcoin miners that were 30 feet high, and just these huge warehouses, they're all stopped. And they're all trying to relocate. And they should have done their due diligence. They should have done their own research and said, look, maybe China isn't a great place to do this. Maybe we should get out of here a little bit quicker. And they didn't. And now, good luck. They can move to Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, I think I said it but they even just put a law in that is raising electricity specifically for Bitcoin miners. Again, we won't do that here. Come on down to Texas. We love you. We'd love to have you. Wyoming, love to have you too. Florida, same thing. Maryland, love to have you. So just come over to America. It's great here. All right. So let me know what you think about that in the comments section. But yeah, as those Bitcoin miners drop off, the difficulty drops, you're down almost a third. And of course, it's a lot less difficult for these home miners to do everything. And that's just a difficulty level. So great, I'm happy. And guess what? Network is still secure. I'll take it better than having it all in China. Just my two cents. Speaking of which, well, I guess not speaking of which, our next piece, the grayscale unlock. And this was actually sent to me from First Coast Crypto. First Coast Crypto, thank you so much. I have to follow you for this. Thanks. So what this is, is that the grayscale Bitcoin trust. As you know, people are not like us, right? Some people, all they want to do is they say, we don't want to deal with exchanges or do deal OTC or whatever else. We just want to pay somebody like the traditional way. And then for them to invest us into Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever kind of trust that you have. And then you guys custody it, we don't want to deal with, we don't lose it. And then if the appreciates, great. And we'll cash out later. Or, you know, you can give us the Bitcoin. And that's what's happening. So after so much timeframe, whether that be six months, eight months, 12 months, 18 months, there is a unlock period where that Bitcoin that the people have actually given their money into for the trust, now they can sell all that Bitcoin. So just so you know, this is potentially, and this may be priced in, I'm not for sure, but look around these dates. This is one about 4,000, 10,000, 6,000, up to 16,000 in one day. That looks to be about 18 July. All the way to 27 July, there's going to be an unlock period when all these people are going to be able to get their Bitcoin and sell off massively. And if they got it before, you know, a while ago, and it wasn't worth too much, and now it's worth 35, 40,000, probably going to sell. So just so you know, just like I've talked about before, July is not going to be a great month for crypto. And it's nothing's going to really happen until August. Ethereum will go up because of EIP 1559. And that'll happen in mid July. But after that, I don't see a lot of things happening. I think it'll just go sideways. And for me, I just dollar cost average. This is a great accumulation time. And it's where I make most of my money. Not when it goes up and it's all exciting. That's for rookies. I just invest when it's boring. And that's it. And I'll sell later. So just be aware, that's about what's going to happen. And this one was interesting because right after I saw that, I saw this from Alex Machinese, the CEO of Celsius. And he gave a nice price prediction. And he says, we have seen two capitulation selling events for Bitcoin in the past two months. Retail FOMO bought the run up to 65k and then sold 33 billions worth. Flash selling last week of three billion that include miners in China retail and some FUD selling and people just got scared. And we're about to see the third and last wave. He says we're about to get one more wave of selling mostly from the FOMO 20 billion worth of grayscale Bitcoin, institutional trades, hedge funds use leveraged loans from Genesis Trading and others to buy Bitcoin in January, February. And oh, wow, it's only in January, February. That will become unlocked for the first time starting next week. So January, February, March, April, May, June.  Like six months. So at least five billion will have to be unwound off grayscale Bitcoin, which may take Bitcoin prices back to the 29k levels. And I've said this before, I think it was always going to go to 28k. It was either 28 or 26k. I thought it was going to be somewhere around there.  But that's what I got. But he did say after this July sell off, we should see smooth sailing for the rest of the year as we break new all time highs on our way to the 140 to 160k price range. I like what Alex says these things because Alex actually said that in January 16th of 2020, he says Bitcoin will finish the year above 30k. Well, he was wrong by like 500 bucks. So check this out. This is actually from CoinGecko. Here is the price from, I just pulled up for January 2020. It was $7,300, $7,300 bucks. And around that time, what was this? What was this? What was this? What was this? January 16th. So when Bitcoin was below 10k, it's going to hit 30k.  And then of course, it just kind of goes sideways for a while. This is when I accumulated matter of fact, dollar cost average. And then what happened at the very end of the year? On 31st December 2020, I hit $29,022. So excuse me, he was off by about 900 bucks, $980, 978 bucks. So not too bad of a prediction for last year. Let's hope he's right this year. And that is it and brings us to the last point, which is after this premiere, that you're sitting here watching with me and I'm typing away, answering everybody's questions. Come on down and chat with me and my friend Jerry Hall as we go over the price predictions for everything from Bitcoin to Ethereum and to Cardano into the new ones that I bought just recently. Basic attention token, Solana, Polygon, BTT, Mana, Mana, Mana, Mana, Digibytes. And I'm going to talk about Melden World Mobile Token. So that'll be right after this premiere. And that's it. So look, if you liked the video, first of all, thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end. I appreciate it. Give it a thumbs up, give it a like. Also consider subscribing. A lot of things we talk about on this channel are very time sensitive. And that's it. So after this, I will see you at the live premiere and the link will be in the description or we'll just send you there automatically. Hopefully I can see that up right. And that's so much for today. So thanks so much. Appreciate it. See you in the next one.


You take a look at the creator space today and really what has happened due to platforms like TikTok, which has really made it all about creativity and the ability for anybody to be a content creator. We're starting to see that those folks are becoming creators and micro-influencers in their own right and they have a lot to say about the brands that they love and the brands that they support. Short-form video content is the way young consumers communicate and so really what you're talking about is a vehicle of communication and relationship between brands and their consumers. A brand's understanding and ownership of their own data and their ability to say that this person moves the needle, that to me is really where true influence lies. It's not just in one's ability to post organic content and then take content. It's really how do you cut in the ability for one to really understand the impact that they have on a brand's bottom line I think today.


As sailors lined up outside the Commodore Matthew C. Perry General Mess at Yacosca Naval Base, food service workers inside were busy getting ready to offer the best possible service when the doors opened. That level of service is about to be tested in an upcoming inspection that will determine the best general messes in the Navy. The Captain Edward F. Ney Memorial Award. Pretty much our Super Bowl, you can call it that because you know we work year round real hard to maintain a high standard of sanitation and also provide high food service here and basically we need to make sure we keep it up year round and looking forward to my first opportunity at winning the Navy this year. Yacosca's General Mess won the Navy Award two years ago and was the runner up last year. Now they look forward to the opportunity to claim the title once again. Petty Officer Nathan Carpenter, Yacosca Naval Base.


This is how narcissists sabotage themselves. This is how narcissists deliberately destroy their own relationships.  Because they know that they obtained it by deceiving them. They know they obtained it by hiding the truth. By deceiving you, by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with particular accomplishments or qualities. And that is why they're so paranoid and hyper-vigilant. That is why they're constantly assessing potential threats around them. Because when they get involved in situations with people, they know they're not being themselves. They know they're not being authentic. They're misleading people, so they have to sabotage their relationships. They have to adjust their false character to keep you under control. To keep you in order and in check. They're coming into the relationship as an imitation of something else. As something that is not true, genuine or honest. As something that is only intended to deceive. So it's a lot easier for them to abandon you. They're not really sabotaging the relationship. They're just abandoning it to avoid something that is bound to happen. To avoid something that would be unavoidable. If they chose to remain in the relationship. Because they know that at some point you're going to discover who they really are. You're going to figure them out. It may seem like they're sabotaging. It may seem like they're deliberately destroying their relationship. But they're just having issues controlling and restraining their false character. They're having problems with containing their false image. Which they have to do in order to further manipulate and trick you. They may fail to take proper care of it. They may not give enough attention to it. Until it's gradually revealed and ceases to function. Which is when you start to see their masks slipping off. You start to see their true character and feelings. And you start to wonder what happened to this perfect character. This person who was exactly right. This person who did everything carefully and completely. They're beginning to neglect the false character that they first showed you. Because they're losing interest. Their interest doesn't last long. So it's only a matter of time until they turn against the very character that they displayed to you in the first place. They act in opposition to it. And show resistance to it. And then they take an interest in something else. Which can look like they're messing up everything that they've just built. But they were just playing a role. They were putting on an act. And at some point they abandoned that false character. Which means they have to abandon everything else that goes along with it. They have to abandon everything that they were trying to hide. They have to abandon the illusion. They have to stop using it. They're abandoning the false character. And the role that the character was supposed to play. Which is everything that they were displaying to you. So it looks like they're sabotaging themselves. It looks like they're destroying their relationship. But really they're abandoning their commitment to the false character. The character that they were using to manipulate you. And now they're changing their position, direction and focus onto something else. Because they have very short attention spans. There's a very short length of time. For which they are able to concentrate on a particular activity or subject. They're easily distracted. So they're constantly going from one thing to the next. It's never stable. And their interest also changes direction and focus very quickly too. Their feelings of wanting to know and learn more about you. Can change at any moment. The moment they feel like they're not getting the supply or power that they should be getting from you. Their attention and interests instantly goes on something else. And then they neglect the character that they use to entice and attract you. They stop acting. They stop performing in the way that they did before. That initially aroused your curiosity and interest. That initially fascinated you. And once they begin to neglect this character. It looks like they're sabotaging themselves. But they're just neglecting the false image that they used to manipulate you with. And then their attention is on something else. But when they lose interest in that. They will come back and get something small from you. It's like first they're going in one direction. But then they will go in the opposite one. It's like an emotional roller coaster. It seems to have wild and unpredictable changes. But they're just going in and out of characters. Which is how they can be completely different depending on their environment. They can change their mood and character around certain people. If you could be a fly on the wall. You would see a completely different person. They have multiple personalities. Because they're always trying to blend in. They're always trying to be whatever they think other people want them to be. They change their opinions and behaviour according to the situation. But when they're not getting a widespread reaction of interest and excitement. They abandon that character. And then they put their interest and attention on something that is more stimulating to them. And once they abandon that character. Everything else goes with it. They no longer try to uphold their false image. And it looks like they're sabotaging themselves. Because they stop caring at all about you. They stop being concerned. They stop considering you as important. When they abandon the character. They stop caring about anything that's associated with that character. And it looks like sabotage. It looks like they're trying to destroy their relationship. But they're just abandoning the character. They're abandoning the character that they were using to entice you and fool you with. Which is how you can see them doing something with someone else. That is completely different and unusual to what they have shown you. Because they've abandoned that character with you. And now they've created a new character with someone else. Which they are now using to fool them. Thank you for watching. I hope this video read it to you. Please like, comment, share and subscribe. If you would like to donate. My PayPal link is in the video description. Coaching Inquiries. You can email me at coaching.nartvivert.uk. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you soon.


Okay, everyone, this is Sarah Burns speaking, and today we're going to have Adrienne Wittall, who's a neuropsychologist with the BrainWorks program with the Kids for Cancer Society. And I've had the pleasure of, Adrienne, probably three or four years ago. It might be 10 years ago, Adrienne, to talk about the HIV-survive cancer treatment and enlightening conversation. We then invited her to speak to the people who used to work with REC. Please be sure your microphone, mute, your microphone will be red, so it just will be red if it's muted. So I'm going to turn this over to Adrienne. And Adrienne, thank you so much for taking time out of your day. She's speaking to us from Toronto and where it's, I believe, 5.30 her time. And thank you, Adrienne, for joining us today. This is my first time doing a presentation this way, so I'm not confident in my volume, but I trust that someone will tell me if you can't hear me, right? So I... Could you speak a little bit louder or a little closer to them? That'd be great. Is this better? Yes. Okay, yeah, my voice often tends to drop when I'm speaking. Okay, so I'm excited to be here. And then I struggled with trying to figure out what I could share with you in just one hour. My friends and colleagues tell me that I'm a bit of a nerd and I can talk about these things for hours. And I always assume everyone is as excited as me in learning all of all of these kinds of things. So I hope that some of this talk is exciting and interesting. And I'd like to share my contact information with you all. If there are ever times that you'd like to know more, if you'd like to consult about a child, as Sarah said, I'm representing the BrainWorks program, which provides this kind of information, liaisons and consultations with families and children with cancer or who have ever been treated for cancer in brain teams to help with educational and academic challenges. So hopefully this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Today, I'd like to share with you just some of the challenges that the children going through cancer treatment and survivors will have returning to school and then talk a bit about what some of the warning signs are that you may pick up as educators or people assessing students that a student may be starting to have some difficulties that might be related to their cancer treatment or the after-effects of cancer. I think every presentation starts with some numbers and some incidents, kinds of information. So I wanted to tell you that in the northern Alberta region, so that's north of Red Deer, approximately 85 children are diagnosed with cancer every year. And that's children 16 and younger, kids over 17 are counted as adults, and yet they're still in grade 11 and 12. So this number is larger. There's also about 20 students in Red Deer north that are also diagnosed with brain tumors, which in many cases are often treated with treatment that's similar to cancer treatment. And we'll be talking about some of the issues that happen with those students. So that's half the province. If you multiply those numbers times two, you'll get a rough idea of what Alberta has in terms of incidence. The most common types of cancer in youth under the age of 19, the number one is is leukemia, which is a blood type of cancer. I think it's probably the one that we all think of. It's the most common one. The next most common one are cancers of the brain and the central nervous system. It's followed by lymphoma, which is another kind of whole body cancer. These three cancers are also the top three cancers that are most likely to cause learning, both short-term and long-term learning problems for students. The estimates are that 75% of students with these types of cancers will at least have short-term learning difficulties related to treatment, and a smaller proportion will struggle with lifelong learning difficulties related to treatment. Some of the reasons for that is the kind of treatment that we use for cancer, and that includes things like chemotherapy, which is giving a drug that impacts your entire body system. Radiation therapy in terms of it can be again anywhere in your body, but here when we're talking about learning issues, it would be radiation treatment to the brain. With the chemotherapy, it's not that it's traveling your whole body, and that's what's causing the learning difficulties. When chemotherapy, it has to include your brain for it to be whole body, so it's the impact that it has on the brain. For students with brain tumors, certain kinds of bone tumors, they will have surgery to their brain, and that can cause immediate learning difficulties or some long-term difficulties as well. Finally, I think many of us have heard of things like stem cell transplants, bone marrow transplants, and those can cause learning difficulties later on for students who fall into a certain high-risk category, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Just as an aside, all the bone marrow transplants happen in Calgary. They don't happen in Northern Alberta, so if you ever are working with a student who has a bone marrow transplant, by force, they're living in Calgary for upwards of three to six months, and that's a lot of school that's being missed on top of everything else. What are some of the common kinds of things that students will talk about when they're going through cancer treatment? One of the things that we say at the hospital and at the kids with cancer society is how important it is for students to continue going to school during treatment. So many of them will say it's the one place that I can feel like everybody else, and you see in this student that talked about some of the difficulties they were having during treatment at the end, at the end, at last sense, I just want to be like everybody else, and that's the power of school. So I think perhaps that's why I'm so passionate and talk so much about the learning challenges that students may have, because if we can adapt the school program, we give all students a gift of being like everybody else during that school day, even if they do have to go home and do treatment, or miss a few days of school each week to do treatment, and that's a precious, I believe that's a precious, precious gift. So what are some of the nuts and bolts, or what are some of the things that can really impact the student from a short-term point of view? There's something called peripheral neuropathy, which is due to, and these are three kinds of chemotherapy drugs, and they're very, very common in the kids with brain tumors will have this drug, children with leukemias will have this drug, and lymphomans will have these drugs, and Christians in Plastin and Cisplastin will, they impact the nerves in your arms, your hands, your feet, and your legs, so your hands and feet become weaker. So students will have, will develop some balance difficulties, but in terms of a more direct impact with school, many students will have difficulty with writing, especially writing for longer periods of time. If a student is starting to learn handwriting and printing skills, they'll often come, they'll learn it more slowly, the complain of pain. One really quick way to notice if this is happening is, take a peek at the underside of the paper of the student who's been writing, because one way they cope to control the hand weakness is they put more pressure from the shoulder and the upper arm into writing, and so you'll see that pencil or pen mark making marks on the underside of the paper, and if that's happening you know that there's some weakness here going on. Another treatment related side effect that causes learning problems are hearing changes. Cisplatin is a drug that can cause loss of hearing in many students. Anywhere from high frequency hearing loss, that's a very common side effect with certain kinds of brain tumors because of this drug, to more pervasive hearing difficulties. And what we're starting to learn is that there are genetic markers where we will hopefully be much better able to predict which students will develop hearing problems because of treatment and then be able to sort of proactively address that more quickly. Radiation treatment can cause hearing problems for students with brain tumors as well, so that's something that needs to be watched all the time. And the hearing changes don't happen immediately, they happen over time. We'll be talking about short-term problems which are difficulties that you might anticipate during treatment, and then long-term or late effect problems which can take up to three to four years after treatment to really show them. So if you have a student whose hearing was fine in the first year after treatment that doesn't mean that it will still be fine two or three years later. And then one very common short-term learning related difficulty is due to steroids. Steroids are used in a lot of treatment protocols to help with inflammation, to help with how to make the chemotherapy more effective. And if they're at doses that are high enough to cause changes in mood, changes in irritability, frustration, they can lighten your sleep, so your sleep is not as restful, so then you have a very fatigued child in the classroom. And for those of you who are teachers you know that the fastest way to cause attention problems is to deprive a student of some sleep. So you'll have a double whammy sense of some irritability and difficulties focusing. And then the steroids themselves, during the treatment with the steroids they have noticed that students develop short-term attention difficulties during steroid treatment, so that's another place to be watching that. So I think we've talked a little bit about some of these some of these things that you'd notice right away. I wanted to talk a bit about the fatigue because I've been working in oncology since about 2001 and I used to think the fatigue was more about my muscles and my body but working here in oncology I've just I really learned that brains gets fatigued and when brains gets fatigued it impacts many many things it impacts a student's ability to their balance becomes worse when they're fatigued their physical body might be might not be fatigued but because their brain's been working all day oh my gosh. So this is a video of all the parts of our brain that are involved in focusing and paying attention. And if you were to turn your head to the side you would be looking at that kind of a cut of your brain.  So a student who's undergoing treatment is very vulnerable to mental fatigue. The good news is that the best way to work on fatigue sorts of things are small mini breaks. With physical fatigue you need to sleep. We needed hours of sleep to deal with the physical fatigue but with the brain fatigue changing activity so you go from one subject to the next that could be enough to give that brain a rest having them go and deliver something to the office just getting out of the classroom for a few minutes that's another rest. Being able to do mindfulness or relaxation kind of exercise those those are the most powerful kinds of rest. 10 minutes of those make a big difference in terms of helping a brain rest. The worst thing for fatigue brain is to let them watch you kind of sit them down in front of the TV or to be in a place where it's very noisy like a recess or a game that's recreation that's super important but in terms of mental fatigue you really want to watch how many things am I being asked to pay attention to focus on and ignore and try to at least for a few minutes cut down on that number. So one of the things I'll talk about with parents when I talk about attention difficulties is I'll say well when you're having trouble focusing you're not available for learning it's the same as if you just aren't physically present in the classroom so and then we start to look we start to talk about all the other kinds of things that might affect attention on a daily basis and a big one is being sick so we often kind of look to see how do we sort of balance the day so that they're at school when they're feeling they're stronger so they're morning person or afternoon person and then I always ask about what kind of medication somebody's on for nausea you know that chemotherapy and nausea go hand in hand and virtually all of the anti-nausea medications and most kids will be on them cause fatigue that's just that's just a huge side effect of that so looking to see what can we do to balance those kinds of things. Mental fatigue doesn't always look like body fatigue it can look like restlessness and it can look agitation a child you could look and see it's where that child is not tired at all so that sometimes you really have to kind of judge it based on the quality of their focus and their ability to come back and pay attention and ignore distractions and if you notice that it's fluctuating and dropping that's I would feel very comfortable calling that mental fatigue so what happens to students who might only have short-term difficulties related to treating due to some of the side effects of the medication that we're talking about in some of the medical um and the brain fatigue treatment can hang up to three years for a child with leukemia um boys treatment is a bit longer than girls treatment so three years of struggling with fatigue or some of these difficulties you would see um you're falling grades are falling just um I often see students who have limited who made limited progress in reading skills um or their fine motor skills so short-term supports the year after treatment in schools can be so powerful in helping that student catch up the other thing that is so powerful is to have consistent expectations for work for the student during treatment because at that point to say well we're not and sometimes that happens too is that we feel we feel concerned about the student we don't want to push too hard and then a student has a lot of catching up when they when they've been through treatment for two years and then on third year everybody's kind of expecting them to bounce back and rebound um I used to do assessments um IQ and academic achievement testing and attention testing um the year after the year that they finished treatment to get a baseline and then retest them one year later and the change a student can make in that first year following treatment as they're building physical resilience skills as they are suddenly much more available for learning than they've been for one two or even three years is remarkable um so if you had a very limited place to add extra intervention that's the place to do it and that in that year um helping healthy students catch up to that if you had more though I'd give it all the way through all the way through if you could see me you know that I'm laughing and I'm teasing you a little bit so why am I pushing school and saying how important it is and saying um let's hold let's let's help kids have um expectations and and and where they can incur you know if they if they can't attend a full day let's do a half day let's do three days a week let's let's really focus on school it's not just for the social piece um the good news about cancer treatment is that the five-year survival rates are now over 85 percent the survival rates for leukemia in most common childhood cancer are are over 90 percent um survival rates for children with with brain tumors that when you collect when you lump them all together is about 75 percent and that's because there's still certain kinds of brain tumors that are much more relevant than the treatment we've been able to um succeed with other kinds of brain tumors so if we're talking about that on average 85 percent of children are surviving pediatric cancer um quality life issues become much more important helping prepare that student for adulthood become much more important um and then the other thing that becomes much more important is recognizing that certain kinds of treatment have long-term side effects that may not show up for five ten or fifteen years later that matters less when you are when you're um 60 years old but when you're five years old and you have leukemia we're talking about what you're helping prepare for someone or or make accommodations for certain side effects when they turn 20 and 25 years old so that's the place where research is really starting to focus on what can we do to minimize the long-term effects and what can we do to help support students so that they're successful in in adulthood so these are some of the again these are some comments that students have made as they were transitioning to being off treatment from off treatment sorry on to on to treatment and the kinds of things that we hear I hear the most are related to um being able to work quickly and being able to um catch up and then making sure that whatever source of help they could get that they could be invisible so just like just pretty much just like any other student in the classroom so late effects we were just talking about that I call them side effects so late effects are side effects that show up anywhere from three to fifteen years following treatment they can affect any part of the body we're going to be talking mostly about the psychological ones and the cognitive ones the ones that affect and thinking memory and learning we've talked a little bit about short-term hearing problems and how hearing difficulties can take can change and develop up across three to several years same thing with vision vision difficulties vision can change as a result of radiation treatment their fertility difficulties are very common especially for boys who receive treatment before puberty um the changes to the bones the heart the lung the growth growth the face are more related to radiation treatment or certain kinds of chemotherapy which may slow which may slow both down and then we were talking about um the peripheral neuropathy and how that can cause difficulties with fine motor skills and gross motor skills and in a small proportion of students those difficulties continue so with cognitive late effects so those are changes in thinking skills you I'm looking at them for students with leukemia up to about four to five years following diagnosis the most common age for leukemia are for children between the ages of three to five years old so I'm doing assessments and I'm watching very carefully tiller anywhere from eight to ten years old at any time those difficulties may arise um late effects for students with brain tumors can happen much more quickly and that's partly because of the radiation treatment if they receive radiation treatment so I'll do an assessment initially after the surgery to remove the brain tumor and then about one year after radiation treatment and then I will continue to do those those assessments till about three years post um the lymph lymphoma follows the same kind of uh assessment protocol as leukemia although the difficulties for students with lymphoma tend to be milder attention difficulties and then after cycloma something we didn't talk about those are the bone cancers those are the cancers where quite often someone has to have a limb removed because of that cancer and students with osteosarcoma also um those difficulties tend to follow more a very slower pace like the leukemia looking at something at four to five years post diagnosis and it's related and those students tend to talk more about having trouble remembering things and they're not um it's rare to see um what I call true memory difficulties in students with leukemia lymphoma and bone cancer what it is is more our difficulties related to the ability to um take information in and work with it that working memory pieces we'll be talking about which is sort of that last step that you go through as you're trying to um learn something and and assign it to to memory some of the difficulties that you'll see with students um I call I mean they're called in the research literature they're called psychological rate effects but you know the really reaction ways of coping with some of the some of the stressors and some of the difficulties um and you could with the exception of depression you could lump them into um ways of coping with stress where I tend to withdraw I tend to pull away um tend to avoid school or avoid others uh there's something called selective mutism which which is children with leukemia are at higher risk for that and that's kind of an anxiety that affects how easy it is and how willing I am to communicate with words with to people particularly people I don't know so these so these students might be described as being mute or very very very quiet and only talking to one or two very trusted people the other side of the coin would be the students who cope with the stress and and and these reactions by becoming um easily frustrated and irritable and more like the fight part of the fight or flight stress response and then I when I'm doing an assessment I always keep in mind that distress includes physical symptoms how how's my body feeling when I'm upset and do I tend to get irritable and more more energized more frustrated or do I tend to pull back and get tired and fatigued and more energy the emotional symptoms which we all kind of look for the sadness the anxiety the irritability and then the cognitive symptoms um someone who's depressed the way um how easily they remember things change um the way the way I focus when I'm feeling anxious change so there's always there's always those three areas where I might find symptoms around distress so some of the things that you might that might be clues for you that you would have a student who would be struggling perhaps with some cognitive light effects if you'd start to see a student who is working more slowly um it it's not a comprehension issue it's an input and output how quickly I can take information in and how quickly I can take input put it out I might look like I'm spacing out more I might have trouble ignoring distractions I might avoid school about two-thirds of survivors will develop some math difficulties so I may my I may rely more and more on the regardless to understand especially when math is starting to stress number lines and uh and and that mental uh manipulation of information I might start to have trouble with the pragmatics of writing um I wish I could um I wish I could that's the part my spacing might not be so good anymore my you might pick that up in math or how I'm spacing in between words another sign of where you'd want to think is this cognitive light effect starting to come up is all of a sudden discovering problems in in those grades where the speed changes or the amount of responsibilities a student is is uh expected to juggle starts to change so maybe it'd be around grade three seven or ten and finally if you've got a first grader or second grader who was treated as a three-year-old and everything was looking great and but they're having trouble learning these skills so that could show up in in terms of reading difficulty Adrienne yeah I'm just gonna ask you to speak up a little louder or the interpreter's a few feet away and we're we're not I'm great at thank you there we go um I'm going to share with you my model of how I understand the steps we all go through to learn something if you were to imagine a triangle divided into three parts and I'll be showing you this triangle later at the bottom of the triangle is attention that's the first step taking information in that's ignoring distractions and refocusing and that's how quickly I can take information in now all that information is in is at the bottom of that first third of the triangle not the next level is memory not everybody remembers everything I'm going to lose a tremendous amount of that information that just came in it's not important to remember who's out a bit of more of that information goes into the second level of that triangle into my memory I'm now memorizing that information I'm learning it I'm able to use it to solve problems and then the very last piece of that triangle it's and I and I call it the tip of the iceberg it's the part that we look at when we do IQ testing or academic achievement testing that's the problem solving piece that's my ability to understand and explain my world to myself using language using spatial skills how things fit together all that visual imagery and my ability to understand social relationships how my social skills are developing there's a pattern of difficulties that you tend to see with students who have cognitive late effects that develop that for many students looks like a learning disability a learning disability is an average IQ score so the tip of that iceberg that top of the triangle is fine but there's lots of difficulties in the first in the in the first third of that triangle in terms of attention I'm not picking information up well if I've had radiation treatment I will have difficulties possibly in that upper third of that of that triangle but for most and for most students especially the ones who have leukemia and lymphoma we're really talking about the bottom third of that triangle and that's possibly why people like me start to insist that we should do neuropsychological assessments with students because the an IQ test doesn't always pick up those changes the way the other types of tests will do that when you ask students what it feels like they'll tell you things like this the older students will be able to do be able to compare themselves to before and say something's different it feels slower when I get it I got it but I just need a little bit more time and a lot of them will describe feeling anxious about needing more time you know they just sort of do I ask for it or do I try to ignore it so what why are these things happening so we've talked about how these difficulties develop slowly over time and in the first few minutes of the presentation today I talked about how all of the treatments whether it's chemotherapy or radiation therapy or surgery are are affecting the brain in some way there's a chemotherapy and radiation treatment are successful because they affect they kill cancer cells these cells are rapidly dividing and changing but it's not um they're equal opportunity they affect all cells that are equally that that are dividing quickly that's why people lose their hair hair follicles divide quickly that's why you hear about people talking about nausea and stomach upset because the lining of your stomach cells and your gut and your throat all those cells divide and renew quickly at certain times in a child's life brain cells are also dividing and renewing quickly and so under the age of five there's a lot of there's a lot of a certain kind of cell being developed and that's the picture I just shared with you it's called myelin it's this is a this is a a neuron or a brain cell and the myelin are all these these light colored blue lumpy uh uh they look like beads sorry they look like beads um it's an insulation along the parts of the brain cell that communicate to other parts of the brain cell I think about it as um you know if you if you're going to plug something into the wall the electric cord has a white has has a white plastic around it and that's an insulation it's the same thing thanks to that white insulation around the electric cord the electricity goes from one point to the next it goes there quickly there's no there's um there's no interference and that's myelin does too it it lets brain cells communicate more quickly with one another messages transfer much more quickly they don't get lost they don't ricochet to places they shouldn't get to shouldn't go to if you think of the the way a four-year-old's attention is and compare it to what's happened even a year later when they're five you see the impact one of kids learning how to focus and pay attention and wonderful educational systems but you also see the impact of myelin thanks to the myelin that's what's also happening that's why you know it can feel like the night and day between a child being able to sit and listen to a story and not being able to listen to a story these are the things that happen so these are the cells responsible for letting us focus ignore what we need to ignore they help us with working memory which is that place that's temporary place in our brains where we can juggle information and do mental math in our head and figure out that well at least for me that pair of pants is 60 also how much that's what they're responsible for that they there's more of those cells in the right side of my brain than the left side of my brain if you were to divide my brain in half the right side has more myelin in it and the right side for many of us tends to be more involved with understanding the world bring pictures are involved and visual imagery and spatial kinds of things so that's why spatial skills are effective math is very dependent on working memory skills and spatial skills that's why students who have these kinds of myelin related changes due to treatment are at a higher risk for math difficulties so I mentioned that not everybody gets these though it's not just because you have a student in your class that had this kind of treatment we can't assume that they will have these kinds of learning we can assume that they'll have short-term learning problems but we can't assume that they'll have long-term difficulties so how do we predict who's going to need them hopefully in 10 years or so we'll also have genetic markers to be able to predict it a little more accurately but right now what the research is telling us is that girls are at higher risk than boys so one time that's actually not good to be a girl usually boys are at higher risk for early childhood kinds of things but here it's girls children under the age of nine are at higher risk for these kinds of difficulties especially under the age of five so if they were treated under the age of five we're going to watch them carefully if they got radiation treatment under the age of five they're at very very high risk so we're going to watch them very very closely and if they've got a dose it's here it says 24 cgy and that's just a that's the way they measure doses of radiation the average radiation dose for someone with a brain tumor is six weeks of about 50 so if you if you're working with a student who's had radiation treatment chances are that they're at high risk and we want to watch them carefully a student with a brain tumor who immediately following surgery had difficulties isn't at much higher risk for learning problems also a student with a brain tumor who had radiation treatment who had something called a syndrome that makes them very very sleepy for a couple of weeks when after radiation treatment is over they'll sleep 15 18 hours a day and we don't know why that raises the risk of these kinds of difficulties the type of chemotherapy the name of the chemotherapy that impacts this the most is called methotrexate and it's it's the drug that is responsible for really having cured leukemia so every child with leukemia gets this drug and then students who have the bone marrow transplant that we mentioned earlier if they as part of their bone marrow transplant ended up getting body radiation or got a donor stem cells from somebody who's not a family member they tend to have a higher risk of difficulties as well so those are those are the students that we're looking at so what are the risks for students who have stem cell transplants because their pattern is a little bit different than what I've just been talking about their pattern tends to follow of course over several years and doesn't involve changes in spatial skills the way it does with kids who have leukemia and brain tumors so what you'll see is as early as one year after the bone marrow transplant transplant in addition to any kinds of difficulties that they might have because they missed anywhere from three to six months of school is changes in visual in visual motor skills so that's that fine motor skills and short-term memory three years later this group of kids their visual motor skills tend to have improved and their short-term memory has gotten better but they they may be having more difficulties with forgetfulness especially around verbal kinds of information that narrative the kinds of things that I'm doing right now where I'm lecturing or in a classroom those sorts of things and then five years later in a very small group of these students the ones who are most effective we will see a drop in IQ scores so one of the things when you guys are working with students and if you discover that they did have a bone marrow transplant several years ago it's always and if they're not being followed by our program it's always a good thing to refer them back because we can help some of the assessments around that with children with brain tumors I'm not going to talk a lot about the nuts and bolts of this because every person's brain develops a little bit differently and it's hard to draw a lot of comparisons across the students who have with brain tumors because the their early environment makes a difference where the brain tumor is makes a difference as well as the kinds of help that they receive afterwards but if you put your hand on the back of your head and you feel that sort of bump back there that's the posterior-fossil region that's the place for that is the most common area for brain tumors for children and youth and adults it tends to be more just behind your eyes in the in the in the cortex so off the bat if you know adult if what you know about brain tumors is based on adults a lot of it doesn't apply to children with children the kinds of difficulties that they tend to have most related to their brain tumors tend to have a lot to do with attention information processing and if they received a lot of radiation treatment memory and perhaps IQ scores so going back to what kids say and how they describe this these are now comments of students who are having cognitive late effects who have who know who have the ability to kind of look and see what kind of learners they are and know what sort of things help so the student notices that they need more time that part of needing more time is that it affects how quickly they can take notes so being able to have someone else share their notes with them so that they're studying from the same from the same amount of information as everybody else makes a big difference and then having somebody help with the scribe and with the fine motor difficulty also makes a big difference we've talked about IQ scores and how IQ scores can change so i'm not going to spend a lot of time doing that and if you would like my slides i'm happy to share them with you the last thing i want to talk about before we talk a little bit i'm going to spend a bit more time talking about attention with what we've the time we have left is we've talked a lot about what happens immediately during treatment how those kinds of learning issues are related to fatigue and short-term side effects maybe due to the nausea and the fatigue and the sleepiness that happens from nausea medication or immediate short-term difficulties related to the brain tumor with time three to five years for students with leukemia you can start to see a pattern of changes in information processing speed and working memory and how and in spatial skills and where working memory and spatial skills problems can impact math for younger children it can hurt early early skill acquisition especially around reading but then once they start to really master their reading skills that difficulty seems to disappear so it looks like it's more of a learning to learn difficulty with reading as opposed to the math disability that's due that the that the other group is at risk up we talked about how the bone marrow transplant you tend to you don't see that pattern so much it tends to be changes over time that you want to be watching for change things get better and a couple things get worse then there's something very very rare which is this slide here and it happens in it happens once people are adults we were talking about how side effects or late effects due to cancer treatment can take 20 years afterwards so in a small group of but now they're young adults 20 years post treatment you see difficulties with with headaches and focal what is focal neurologic dysfunction those are pockets of difficulties so different maybe difficult increasing difficulties with fine motor skills increasing difficulties maybe with peripheral vision or increasing difficulties with long-term memory as well so in a very small group of young adults these difficulties can worsen I want to emphasize that it is a very small group but because it is present it is something that students worry about and more than that their parents worry about so are those of you when you're working with high school students who are having difficulties it is something in the back of people's mind and I just wanted to give you that information so that you also know what what people are thinking about when we talk about oh it looks like they're having more difficulties this is something that the people wonder about again we can't at this point we can't predict who that who might have that difficulty so we follow it and all I'm going to say is one more time that it's very rare so there's lots and lots of room for hope that we always have to watch so here's that that triangle I was making you imagine and I apologize for making you imagine it but being the the brain nerd that I am I know that it when you're when you can't see the speaker and you're just looking at a at a a non-moving screen it can be really hard to take what you're listening to and turn it into memories and the more I can engage you as listeners the more likely it is that you will take some of this away and the thing if you remember one thing about my presentation I want you to remember this triangle because it's an it's to me it's an easy way to remember and understand how cognitive late effects can impact someone the bottom you've got a tent well just low at the very bottom of the triangle information about the world how is that getting in where is it going we've got arrows all over the place some of it gets into our memory not everybody remembers everything so some of it flies out and at the very tip of the iceberg we have the problem problem solving piece so where am I what can I access from my brain and from the world in order to give you the best answer I possibly can I'd like to spend the eight minutes I have left to talk to you a bit more about attention because attention matters deeply here so often we think of attention and we think of attend oh the attention span it's how long can somebody focus and then that's the big piece but it really is the first step in learning and critical and knowing how you feel being able to know where to put your attention makes all the difference in the world and we know with children who have cognitive late effects that there are things that we can do to help their brains develop attention skills that have a huge impact on their math skills and their spatial skills there are studies in Toronto where students are doing fun teams sports and exercise several years after being treated for brain tumor and three times a week after three months you can measure the growth in the parts of the brain that are most involved in focus so there are there are definitely things we can do and brain works does will share that information with schools and with with families too and I could come back and talk for two hours Sarah about that so what is attention attention is all these things attention lets you notice things it lets you invite friendships it they say that the sure sign of knowing somebody loves you is how well they focus and pay attention to you and that's perhaps why I can spend hours and hours talking about how important attention is because I think if we can improve students abilities to focus and pay attention it impacts every part of their life but most importantly it impacts their ability to build relationships with others and engage with life the trouble is that attention is a very limited resource there's not enough to go around so the brain directs attention to that which it thinks is most relevant there's always always going to be more information out there than what you can process and so the dilemma is how quickly can you work with the information and the impact that the world on the outside is having and it's in your ability to continue to pay attention as well as the impact that you're having on the inside to be able to pay attention so how how do we know where to direct our attention with this great limited resource I want to leave you guys with a second model I gave you the triangle which is your brain model but I'm going to leave you with a second model of attention and that the the first part of the model is happening right here in this slide it's called bottom-up attention it's the most basic attention there is it's it's it's connected between your eyeballs and the back of your brain the parietal lobe and it's designed to only to focus on what's most important for my survival and it's driven by my senses mostly hearing and vision it pays attention to anything that's shiny that's bright that's um rushing past you as you're trying to cross the street all of those really important things when the makers of iphones and tv commercials use this kind of attention to to grab you over and over again biologically we're designed to pay attention to anything that flashes think of how often a phone flashes right commercials are flashing all the time this is why I I had mentioned to you that the worst thing a student with brain fatigue can do is to watch tv or spend time on their phone is because it this kind of attention is being triggered over and over and over again if you're and so there's no rest there's no brain rest if you're having anxiety this kind of attention takes over your brain you've you've seen that I've said I was so nervous I was running around like a chicken without a head I couldn't focus I was always here I was there I was everywhere that's what this attention is it's designed to be here there and everywhere with very little long-term focus we need it to survive this is where speed comes in when we talked about information processing speed thanks to this kind of bottom-up attention it lets us react quickly and let's us decide on what to do and quickly make that response I'm going to skip this slide because we talked about it all those two a lot but there has to be more to attention if all we had was going from here and there and everywhere there would be no learning because that you just be you'd be like this guy Homer Simpson who we all know who goes from one impulse to the next so there's a part of our brain that lets us focus that let's us take our attention this here there everywhere bottoms up kind of attention and let's us listen to the teacher when there are other things happening in the classroom let's ignore the child behind us and come back to what we're supposed to be focusing on and that happens in two ways the first way is teachers limit the bottom-up hijacking of attention when teachers say look at me look over here they tap on the desk they're directing they're making some kind of visual or sound cue you're you they're stopping this bottom-up attention from hijacking the brain they're also making it easier for a student to process more quickly teachers do this when they take advantage of that wanting to be creative in the novelty seeking part of a child let me see this let me see this let me see this and then gear it to interesting topics that's another way of taking this very normal natural bottom-up kind of attention and using it for learning when you encourage any kind of game that that it focuses on small that an attention to small details that's another way of improving focus by using this kind of innate the ability to just have my attention to hear there and everywhere but that's not enough right that's it then it's always you doing it it's always the environment driving the attention and this is such an important skill to learn as kids are getting older so there's something called top-down attention so if you remember I showed you a brain picture with fatigue at the beginning of this talk and showed you how attention is everywhere in your brain and now you see what because half of your brain is involved in the bottom-up the other half is involved in the top-down and the top-down attention this is your secret weapon in school and it improves with maturity and with practice when I talk to you about the those studies in Toronto where we're able to measure the growth of the brain centers that are involved in attention this is the part of the brain that's grown this is the part of the brain that the brain that develops um through much through probably through your early 20s so there's lots of room and time for hope this is the part of the brain that lets pull your tension back to where it needs to be so this this joke here is bottom-up attention my attention is here there and everywhere and as teachers what we're trying to do is is focus on what can we do to get Bart Simpson using the other part of his brain to learn with children who have cancer and who have the attention difficulties whether they be short-term difficulties or the long-term late effects difficulties everything that we do to help the top-down attention that piece of attention skill that keep the focus that grow the attention span that minimize the impact the negative impact that slow thinking has on learning will do great things to help students be successful and compensate for difficulties with the bottom-up that slow that that the bottom-up attention that slower ability that ability to focus quickly which has become slow whether it's short-term because of medications or fatigue or long-term because of changes to the myelin and that part of the brain