I ♥ Hagrid

My sister just started law school. It is only Day 4, but this is her assessment of the situation.

Law school sucks. It's like a death eater, slowly zapping the happiness from the world and sucking out your soul."

Lessons of the Day:
1. There's a Harry Potter analogy for everything in life. Thank you, JK Rowling.
2. My soul is intact. Thank god for pass/fail during the first 18 months of medical school.
3. Death eaters are scary. I'm also scared of the dark.

[Addendum: This is my sister's email to me later the same day. "Dear God, Please give me wings so I can fly far far away from here." Clearly, melodrama runs in the pham-ily.]

(500) days of summer

It's almost Labor Day but I feel like summer just began. A few reasons why it mustn't end:

1. Sensation of hot sunshine on bare shoulders
2. Blasting Beyonce's "Halo" every morning on morning commute
3. Grilled peaches and vanilla bean ice cream for dessert
4. Summer ale on my patio
5. Summer ale on any restaurant/bar outdoor patio
6. Grilled meat
8. Impromptu poolside lounging
9. Impromptu shopping sprees
10. Anticipation of fall right 'round the corner
11. Seeing sunlight when I wake up and when I leave clinic/hospital
12. Sleeping in a muggy apartment with only a whirring fan on bare skin
13. Driving with the windows down and blasting Beyonce's "Halo" (sorry, I just ♥ that song)

Clearly, the list wasn't going to continue until 500 nor are there actually 500 days in a summer (what a silly but lovely movie). And besides, summer is a state of being, not a season defined by a solstice and an equinox. It ain't over til it's over, son. And in a week, I'm off to reunite with J-Yun and to return to the city I so dearly love and adore: Chicago. Chi-city in the summer is a magical and wondrous place.

Do you think about me now and then? Because I'm comin' home again, comin' home again.

(Kanye, your ego may be larger than some Pacific islands but a part of me doesn't give a damn.)

Food for thought

What has belligerANT been up to for the past 1/2 year? I went to East Africa (hujambo rafiki!). I started clinical rotations. I went to Puerto Rico (hola amigo!). I watched yet another childhood friend walk down the aisle and saw a different childhood friend undergo a protracted 30+ hour labor (for her second child). I even delivered a few babies myself. A lot has happened.

And in June, I spent a week in rural southwest Georgia providing free health care to migrant farm workers as a part of my family medicine rotation with the South Georgia Farmworker Health Project.

Did you know that approx 85% of fruits and vegetables produced in the US are still hand-harvested and/or cultivated?

Did you know that there are more than 100,000 migrant and seasonal farm workers in Georgia? 

Did you know that the life expectancy of migrant farmworkers is 49 years, compared to the nation’s average of 75 years?

The project was started in 1996 by Tom Himelick, an Emory PA, and is a collaborative project between Emory’s Physician Assistant Program, Emory’s Dept of Family and Preventive Medicine, the Southwest Georgia Area Health Education Center and community partners in Valdosta and Bainbridge, GA. Every spring, students (both PA and medical), medical residents, faculty and volunteer interpreters spend two weeks providing free basic health care and routine dental care along with clothes & food donations.

We worked in migrant camps, packing sheds, apartment parking lots, fields, essentially any empty space. Typical clinic setting: 2 lawn chairs, patch of grass in the middle of a field or lot, medical tools in dirt beside chair. End scene.

In its first year, the project served about 100 patients. Fast forward to 2009, over 1700 patients were seen… in over 100 degree weather.

It was a humbling experience and yet another reminder that I love what I’m doing.
——-

“The hands that feed us are often invisible hands, hands of people who work in the shadows of a multibillion-dollar industry without enjoying its rewards.” – The Human Cost of Food

[originally posted at Emory "The Second Opinion"]

Lately, I've been lamenting the fact that I barely journaled during my first two years of medical school. Too busy, too tired, too whatever. When I'm traveling, I fill up pages and pages of my moleskin - some of it soul-baring, some of it mundane, lots of it embarrassing - but the process is usually therapeutic and cathartic.

It's been a mere five months since I started my year of core clinical rotations, but oftentimes, I find myself floored and slightly untethered by what my patients are facing, what I'm feeling, and the aftermath of what happens when pathology & poverty mix...

After six weeks of OB/Gyn, I'm currently on my week of palliative care. Think of it as the-cradle-to-the-grave rotation. Literally.

pal·li·a·tive
adj.
1.Tending or serving to palliate
2. Relieving or soothing the symptoms of a disease or disorder without effecting a cure.

n. One that palliates, especially a palliative drug or medicine

Today, I choked back tears about four times during a family meeting with the adult children of a dying Ghanaian woman. (Note: my tears cost negative cents; they're that cheap.) The family reminded me so much of my own immigrant family that while my heart was aching for their pain, I was also projecting into the future, imagining what my own family will inevitably experience when my grandparents pass. I thank that family for sharing their private suffering with me.

It's not about dying. It's about how to live until you die.