Confessions

I don’t like Mark Driscoll.

I like Rob Bell including his new book. (not that new any more.)

Although I don’t think either of them are heretics or the end all of preachers.

I don’t really love Campus Crusade in fact it makes me cringe.

I don’t like George Bush all that much.

Although I don’t think Obama is the end all and be all.

I think women can be ministers. In fact some of the most influential ministers of my life are women.

I dont hate gay people.

I actually have very little in common with other white middle class 20 year olds who grew up in evangelical homes. Who Knew?

Growing up looking different makes you think different. Living in the lowest caste in society for periods of time (Eastern Europe) makes you realize most of us dont get a lot of choice in the cards we get dealt socioeconomically.   Trying to pretend like this didn’t happen to me is like being in high school and trying to fit in. I just can’t do it anymore.

I am not sure what I was thinking when I moved here and joined my current church but I think I was high on the novelty of a new adventure and didn’t read the fine print.  But now 18 months in, I realize, what the heck was I was thinking?

The timing is insane….I am in the mist of applying to mission agencies.  I need references. But I can’t live the lie any more.

So Monday, I am going to try something different, something very similar to the direction the community in NC I was a part of was going.  Its just dinner.  Near my home with people who like Jesus.  People from all walks of life, I can promise you I will be the only doctor although perhaps not the only disabled person.

And I am hoping that I can be a part of a faith community and have some integrity.

As for my references….Im not sure what to do yet. I am praying about it.

Pray for me.

No really, I want to leave and by leave I mean…oh snark it

So its here the first global health application….

and I panicked.  I am also ill with some RSV like illness.

Suddenly in the last week, I have looked around realized I have it made.

I have a brilliant mentor who has actually succeeded in founding a clinic in one of the most violent neighborhoods in America that is celebrating nearly 20 years.  Not to mention his work in Africa. Not to mention, he actually seems to think I am great.  He is sending me to Malawi this July.

I work at the best childrens hospital in the world. No really….people come from EVERYWHERE to be here.  Every day we have applicants who are interviewing dying to come here. The learning here is amazing, the teaching opportunities are amazing.

Today I went to see my uber boss, to ask about writing a program director letter for me for my fellowship applications.  He hugged me and said “I brought you here….of course I will write you a letter for whatever you want.”

Yes its cold here, yes its on the wrong side of my beloved mountains, yes people here look at me funny when I say “yll” but by golly I don’t think leaving is what I want.

I want to go to Africa but I think if I could have my cake and eat it too. I want to be a fellow from here.  This is where I want to represent.

…..never mind that the fellowship only exists on paper.  And there is no actual money set aside.

I can dream, can’t I…

Evangelical FAIL

The other day we were doing what residents do best. Fantasize about having a better schedule.  Our colleague BOB seemed to have won the jackpot, he had the last two weeks of Dec off and then an extra five days including News Years for a family wedding.

JANE, another colleague says, “I think BOB got that schedule because he had JESUS on his side.”

I laugh and said, well I go to the same church and it didn’t work for me.

JANE and JOAN stare for a moment.

JANE says, “I didn’t know you were an evangelical”  But she said it in such a way that it was like I didn’t know you smoked or I didn’t know you throw rocks at puppies on the weekends…..

“UM, well yeah….maybe a bit more laid back.” I flounder wanting desperately to explain I didn’t love BUSH, Im a pacifist, I haven’t bombed any abortion clinics, I watch trashy TV sometimes, I read Harry Potter and yes in my less thoughtful moments I use off color words I learned from my naval heritage.

JANE smiles, “Yeah, well I love Bob, I was just joking around.”

Then one of us got paged.

….two weeks latter….

Two weeks later I am out with GABI who I have been friends with for a while but whom I find myself having a series of deep and more personal conversations with.  GABI tells me she is something akin to gnostic. She impressed I know what that means and we start talking world religions. I am holding my own.  Then she comes right out and says it:

“So you love Jesus? You’re a Christian?”

I explain that in all my studies what impressed me the most was the incarnation that God would come down and live as we do to provide a vehicle to get us out of a spiritual life the equivalent of a TO DO LIST which we could never complete  and that its all about the relationship with GOD that we can have through knowing and believing in Christ.

This question was easy.

It was the series of next questions that I found myself sweating a bit.

“So how do you feel about missionaries?” (which is a big question if you look at historically and currently) (or as I like to say do you mean in the JOSEPH CONRAD’s HEART OF DARKNESS sense?)

I start with HEART OF DARKNESS and colonialism and move on down to my own experiences. I end with saying what I believe in the context of a relationship is quite different than the HEART OF DARKNESS sense.  She nods and talks about how Church NGOs do a lot of good.

“So do you think, Christianity is the only path to heaven? DO you believe in a literal hell?”

(these are loaded questions: If the answer is YES and YES you are condemning 5 billion humans on earth today to hell).

I believe in Christ (note that I separate Christ and the gospel from Christianity which is a human construct) is the truth and the path. However, I don’t really know how it all works out.  Only God truly knows people’s hearts and knowledge.   As for Hell, Milton and Dante seem to know a lot more about it than I do because other than a parable or two in the Gospels and some heavily loaded metaphor in Revelation, Hell is not described in detail in scripture.  I know it will be separate from GOD which sounds terrible but in the spiritual sense not so much the physical sense.

At this point, GABI who is also a physician interrupts me and says “When I think of Hell, I think of homeless schizophrenics at war with their selves and living cast off from any sense of human contact.”

I nod, who knows, maybe HELL is like that.  I continue…

As for who goes to whatever it is, well again GOD only knows.   The party line Billy Graham crusade answer is that its a punch ticket kind of thing, you go through the right prayer, life style change or whatnot and you get the right ticket punch. Over the millennium Christians have  made up all kinds of ideas of  loopholes. Babies for example apparently are innocent so if they die, its OK they get to go without a ticket, developmentally disabled people too (a babe in Arms kind of ticket).  These babe in arms kind of tickets are made up, they are not in scripture, we don’t know what happens.  Now, do I honestly believe that God sends babies to Hell?  My understanding of God is somewhat different than that, so NO I don’t believe that. But I don’t how it works.  So do I believe that folks in some dark jungle who never heard about Dante or JESUS go to hell?  My church peers would say that’s on us to some degree for not going as missionaries.  Do I think God will send them to hell?  Again I do not know.  I don’t know what that looks like.  I also don’t know exactly what will happen to all the people pre-Jesus. I don’t know.  SO do I believe people, go to hell, YES but I don’t know who or where or what exactly it is.

As for Heaven, some believe the Kingdom of God will come to earth over time as we build it, some believe we will go to it.  I think the former is ambitious and maybe a bit impossible but I think the Gospels are pretty clear about trying anyway. While I am interested in hell, I am far more interested in what we do now to mirror heaven and spread its seeds in the mud and mire of the hellish elements of now.

I explain as well that while I believe in things absolutely, I live with mystery in my faith, of unanswered questions and gratitude to a GOD who is big enough to be mysterious to my human mind. I live with unanswered questions, with faith and I am OK with that.

My friend seems impressed.   We drank our tea and then we go home.  I think she expected me to start reading Romans out loud and pray the sinner’s prayer and give her a tract.  Because I am evangelical, right?

As I go home that night, I think what would my friends from church say if they listened to this conversation? What would BOB say? What would they say if they heard me admit that I don’t have all the answers?  Would they have done the same?  Some would have, but I think most would have stayed within safety of the party line where we have the answers.  I think they would think that I lost my religion.

Am I failed evangelical?  Have  I gone native in all my intellectual quests of reading the Koran, the Mormons, the Buddhists, the Baptists, the Skeptics and the Gnostics, dissecting the layers of culture, history, human creativity from the raw text, from what we call religion?  Do I believe in nothing because I “tolerate” and analyze everything?

NO.

I do believe in something, actually its quite akin to what I believed when I told my parents I wanted to be baptized when I was five before I knew about all of the other stuff we tacked on to the truth.  I believe in the love of a GOD who would love me even though I hit my sisters Emily and Tori every day and some times wish I could go back to being three when I was an only child.  A GOD who created the trees, the deer behind our house that left footprints in the snow, my cat, the moon, the stars Daddy taught me the names of, a GOD who created an elaborate plan to love me  me despite the my wrongs. The plan included sending someone he loved like I loved my parents and my paternal grandparents (and mostly Emily and Tori), a piece of himself who suffered through annoying little siblings and stuff and in the end died pretty awfully  and somehow in something that seemed at the time a lot like magic came back alive to get the rest of us before he went ON so we could all still be friends with God.

GABI says her husband and I have little girl and boy souls, we still believe the same as we did when we were children.

I would say that’s actually quite biblical and I am OK with that.

What has changed somewhere between church camp and now  is that the religious brainwashing has melted gradually over the Serengeti grasses, my ferocious appetite for books and reading, the wails of orphaned, neglected Romanian babies, long nights of organic chemistry followed by ethics and human rights essays in college and blood dripping off my gloves, sweat and tears running down my face as I beat on a child’s chest trying to save their life, I lost my religion.

And found JESUS.

Peace and Pediatrics

My intern on nights with me this past week was a south spoken Syrian.  He spent two years working to get a visa to come and study pediatrics here. He wants to be a pediatric cardiologist. He will be one of the only in the entire nation and even surrounding nations when he goes home.

He left Syria in the mist of a near civil war where every day there are reports of people dying.  The Arab Spring of 2011 has not ended well in his homeland.

But for now, he is here with me taking care of ward of children who have succumbed to the various demons of winter.

Late one night, we admitted a Somali toddlerl for observation after drinking some cleaner.  When the ED called to tell us about her, both of us got excited. Me because I took care of Somali refugees in Kenya and him because many Somali folks speak Arabic.

After we had her settled in, we found ourselves walking for midnight shack in the cafeteria. We talk about the famine in Somalia  that no one is talking about, the children who are dying. How our pediatrician hearts break for the children who are caught in the crossfire of country at war with self and a divided world who cant seem to understand each other.  The West has turned their back on Somalia because they harbor terrorists. But the terrorists who have friends in high places elsewhere are not dying, its the women and children.

Our conversation turns to the ground that divides us.  How hard it was for him to get a visa because he is from the other half. How many of my countrymen suspect something of this quiet soft spoken pediatrician because of his passport and his religion. They haven’t heard his heart for children who are dying of repairable heart defects or watched him play trains with a terrified 3 yo to soothe him. And how his countrymen suspect something of me as an American, as a Christian, as a Navy brat, as a global health doctor surely, surely she is an imperialist. Surely she wants the whole world to be like America. Surely she must be like that man in FL who burned the Koran (which apparently is a popular viral you tube like video in the Middle East).  They don’t know that I took an Islam class, read the Koran and that my best friend from medical school is a Muslim. They don’t know that in the end I love the diversity of the world and dress like a Kenyan, cover my head in Eastern Europe and am mildly horrified at how viral McDonalds is much less the rest of my culture.

And our conversation stops for a quiet reflective moment.

In the end, we conclude. It all comes down to pediatrics.

No really it does.

We want a better world for our children.  A safer world. A more peaceful world.  A world where our children are not hungry, are not sick, go to school and grow up free.

We smile.  We eat our snacks and rush back to the havoc of the wards in the winter.

If only we could put aside our fear, our pride, put down our guns and realize for a moment just how simple it really is.

It renewed my desire to be a global pediatrician, to be part of the solution.

Joy in the Morning

Three years ago when I was in the mist of my third year of medical school. I went through a 2 month period where I rarely slept more than a few hours at a time. It wasn’t the call schedule, it wasn’t the stress of residency applications or Step 2, it wasnt even entirely the pain that gnawed my left side at times to the point of tears. It was the creeping waves of anxiety of a young doctor to be who knew exactly what was happening to her in exquisite detail. In my minds eye I could see the holes in the cartilage, in which glistening white bone lay naked and scraped. The dying cartilage and wounded bone making something akin to broken glass in a small tight dark space lacking adequate blood supply for even the chance of healing despite my immune system attempts, in the end the immune responders led to an army of inflammation and pain.  I dreamed about this.  Then I would dream of the OR a place that as a med student I always felt like an escaped patient masquerading as a young student doctor to be. I had a recurrent dream that I was found out, carried down the hall, stripped of my scrubs and then rolled back to the OR screaming that I was just not ready but no one heard me.

Here I was excelling in medical school, living my dream, planning my first trip to Africa and having no idea if I would be physically able to continue in a few months, years. I finally found the courage to get x-rays, a kind rheumatology fellow who I frankly owe my sanity to paged me and went over the films with me gently. He talked me into a steroid shot in which a the radiologist furthered my anxiety with talk of strange anatomy and bone density.  I made an appointment with the hip surgeon who I had met several years earlier and wrung my hands as I studied for Step 2, started my residency essays. The visit upset me even though I knew what was coming and gave me the strange transition of me explaining to my anxious mother what the doctors were saying. He gave me another steroid shot that was amazingly effective and I lived with denial for a summer, went to Romania and pretended that everything was ok. Perfected my residency essay, then my peds AI hit me like a freight train and my denial started to crumble.  My first patient died of pneumonia related to muscular dystrophy in an all night vigil of wailing parents and I was reminded of my sweet Romanian friend whose similar death had rocked my world in college.  Our parallel diseases differed in two major ways, there was a palliative yet potentially close to curative treatment for the symptoms of mine and even when I had no cartilage left…I wouldn’t die.  Visions of a beloved elderly patient with RA who had movement in her hands, was going blind and couldn’t get out of bed flashed through my brain…could I live with that reality?  Visions of the synthetic hip failing because of my bone density and knowing that once we took my femoral head they was no going back, if the prosthesis failed, I wouldn’t walk again.  After the on call vigil, I drove home to the mountains then onward to get a steroid shot.

Within in weeks, I could no longer deny it, the shot failed. I wasn’t sleeping now because of the pain.  It was everything I could do to keep the facade that I was just another medical student. I called my surgeon’s PA and cried in the child psych copy room and told her I wanted to do the surgery now.  (yes I had a nervous break down on the pysch floor…fun yes). Things fell into place, the surgeon fit me in (I am sure he was shaking his head thinking finally I was ready a year ago, this girl is nuts).  I passed Step 2, got my first residency interview and with tachycardia to the 120s, lectured my anesthesiologist on the decreased number of DVTs with spinals opposed to general as they rolled me into the OR.

I was a neurotic post-operative patient but I went back to medical school three weeks later, line danced at 5 weeks, interviewed for residency at 6 weeks, Kenya at 16 weeks  and by the time match day came I was taking the steps two at a time for the first time in my life.

I went through a similar period of denial and anxiety although much milder, fought to get steroid shots in Cincy( Part II, Part III). Epic fail, telling my  chief resident was near to the copy room incident. This time the PA tried to comfort me that even though there was a boat load of hardware in the hip, they would figure it out and I would be ok. I nearly lost my insurance coverage, took the Step 3 and then spoke in DC the week before.  By the time I got to the OR I found myself in a much better place than the previous time, believing that somehow the hip would work despite the hardware weakened bone and that I would walk out of this better than ever.  I found myself telling everyone (yay versed) my bucket list of things I wanted to do with two shiny hips (I remember this prior to heavier sedation but apparently I kept right on going although I don’t remember it). I woke up to the news that miracles of miracles the hardware had not prevented them from using the best kind of hip as expected and I had a 30 year lease at minimal. I was texting everyone I knew in the PACU and thanking everyone from the jainator to God for my incredible good fortune.  My family and I survived me with five weeks of unplanned toe touch weight bearing while the hardware holes healed despite a funeral, a mild incision infection and general angst on the part of a sibling.

And I find myself at 5 weeks post op sitting in an exam room across the hall from where this all began three years ago with the visit (see above). The PA comes in and asks me when I am going back to Africa?  She hands me the films with a grin. There they are, healing perfectly. Her optimism is infectious and suddenly as I remember how fragile it all seemed three years ago.I think back though to my first pediatric death and of my sweet friend Laura who died of a similar diseases (dying muscles and connective tissue…I have dying cartilage and connective tissue) and how in some strange way of the disability tribe I feel I owe them, they expect me not to waste this, to live with reckless abandon.

I am overcome by gratitude this time sans versed.  Nearly in tears.  The attending comes in  says my name, kisses my cheek and says “You’re Done!”  He grabs his cell and proceeds to call my pediatric ortho to tell him the good news. (yay for transition..although it was kind of a weird move)  He draws me my “life plan”  which includes one more visit at 6 months, then no more visits for 2 years.   It doesn’t seem real. No more hip pain, no more hip precautions, an inch taller (much to my sister’s dismay) I can throw away my crutches, 6 weeks of PT and then welcome to the rest of my life.

Mom and I drive back down the familiar spine of our beloved mountains, a little giddy despite the recent family sorrow, amazed at marvels of modern medicine, of grace and of the incredible joy of sweet relief and the sweet ability to dream.

Praise God.