growing cartilage…

There are a lot of places in my body where I would not mind a spare chondrocyte or two. Seriously, my left hip could use whatever it can get. My left wrist isn’t doing so well either. Nor is my left shoulder. But guess where I have cartilage growth
my NOSE! For some unknown reason for the first time in my life my nose can’t not be smooshed flat aganist my face. I noticed it over Christmas break, Emily my sister went for it affectionately and I yelped in pain. Emily recoiled and exclaimed: “Your nose is hard.” I go to rub my sore nose and find out she is entirely correct. My nasal bone may be flat as a pancake but I have new cartilage in my nose. The real deal. Now I have always liked my nose little snub nose. My parents used to tell me when I was little I could get a nose job if I wanted and have a nose like everyone else. I may have gone through phases where I wanted hips or knees or elbows like everyone else. But I have always liked my nose. The nose looks the same, it is just harder and every so slightly more inclined now. I suppose I am growing out of my one party trick.
oh well. it was fun while it lasted.

So much to do, so few spoons

I have been babbling a lot about community of late. This weekend I had another lesson in it. I always had disabled friends and average friends. But most of the time I live in the average world. I don’t quite comfortably fit the mold but I can scrunch here and twist my feet so they point straight and I can do it. And most of time partly out of necessity and partly out learned habit I twist myself into that mold.

There are exceptions. When I was in pre-school I was the only kid in my class with a normal IQ (as in the only one who did not have below average IQ). I never remember it being weird. I never remember struggling to explain myself. My best friend had Downs’ Syndrome, I didn’t know what that was then. But I have a picture of her that she gave to me when I moved to MD at the end of that year. I look at it now and know that she has Downs. I do remember knowing the answers to the questions a little more than my friends and loving recess (ironic I hated it in elementary school) and going on a field trip to the zoo.  My grandfather says I sang the following song when I left: I am sorry for myself/I am sorry for myself/I have to leave my school/I have to leave my friends/because that is what the navy is all about.

The other time was in Romania/Belarus and it really shouldn’t count. Because to truly live with the disabled in Romania would mean to check myself into an institution. But I lived a life of isolation in the sense my host family was terrified of letting me out the of house or leaving me without supervision. I ached for those children and for a few short months I endured the taunts, lack of access and opportunity they did. But not really because my experience was much more like a sociology experiment  than real life.

I have never though except in books and not even truly there sat around a table with other disabled people who wanted to pursue medicine. Much less were successfully in medical school.  It was surreal experience as we sat there with balsamic rice and hummus in a cafe in the middle of NC and squealed things like: “Are certain technical requirements really legal? and “I know was the only one in the room who was thinking ‘What a beautiful baby…’”…”Lesch Nhylan’s….” and “Patient or Medical Student…YES!” and “I am running out spoons.”  We spent the rest of the night pulling books off the shelves and even though we barley knew each other (as in had only previously met online) shared intensely personal fears, life experiences and frustrations. It was amazing and intense all at the same time.

I feel almost guilty for how good I have it. Not only did get into medical school without any major legal or moral battles. I am also at Wake which is far from perfect but at least has an administration whose attitude toward disabilities is sane and mostly helpful/harmless. Furthermore I have two older students who have already invented the wheel. For example, thanks to a late night reconnaissance mission to the Duke Labor/Delivery floor, I have solved the surgery rotation problem nearly entirely (minus the staying up for 3 days straight part) with the simple addition of a modified stool.

There was a sense of urgency though running through the whole 48 hours. It is working for us, we are making it work. But what about everyone else?  We have at least a skeleton of a profession organization for disabled medical students/physicians. In time we might at least have an informative website something I desperately searched for last year.

At first, I was keenly aware of the awkwardness with two wheelchairs in my small not ideal car, my own air-headness and clumsiness and the general insanity that seems to follow disabled people when they get together. It was not shame or embarrassment just an awareness that I crossed the line from the average world to the disabled one. Perhaps from the land of doctor to the land of patient as Bethany is fond of saying. But as the two days wore on, I began to realize that despite all of quirks, complications and mishaps. These were my people and this was my calling to be among them and share this strange, insane medical world that we are traveling in. It was a bit like coming home. In the same way that when I see the  first hints of Blue Ridges in Southern Franklin Co, I am at peace with the world or when I walk into my two study/favorite nooks on the undergrad campus or when I am sitting at a coffee shop with BE and/or LK.

When it comes down to it, I think that is the bottom line about building and enjoying true community. It’s building a home for yourself and other weary travelers.

January should be excised out…

January is evil for all of us who have osteoarthritis. El Nino, global warming, Al Gore and who knows who else have wrecked the weather in NC. One day it is 60 degrees and then it is 35 and there is freezing rain. And I want to crawl back under my heated blanket until spring. It is the season where I have new joint issue every week. The current joint of the week is my left shoulder…swollen and disagreeable every morning despite heat, ice, prayer and happy images of happy smiling, little ERs and Golgis knitting new collagen fibers… but this never lasts long because I think about protein synthesis ratios and realize my chondrocytes are less efficient than a shoe factory on a technical break in Belarus (imaging therapy is worthless when you are a medical student and yes i realize no one else in the Western hemisphere will understand my Belarus reference).
I spent 20 minutes staring at Cox enzymes and Cox inhibitors yesterday which ironically have been a part of my life longer than any of my actual human friends (at least who aren’t related to me). It is remarkable how something can such a part of your life, yet you know so little about it really (this happens a lot when you are in medical school). Those little, magical rings of allosteric enzyme inhibitor Carbons allow me to function. They got me into medical school as much as anything else. They allowed me to sit through the SAT, MCAT, a myarid of orthopedic mishaps. I feel a strange sense of affection to these little rings. I also feel strangely owned by them. And I shudder when a picture of vioxx flashes across my com screen remebering its betrayal.

Maybe its the cold, maybe its the amount of chai tea I drink, maybe its that lipid metabolism is duller than dirt, maybe its the fact I have been sitting in a classroom for the last 18 years of my life, maybe it is the beginning of Cox inhibitor induced liver/kidney disease…

but January always makes me a little loony and I think it is especially bad this year.

Turn on the Inproability Drive full blast….

Has anyone ever been overwhelmed by the magnitude of something?

Over the past year, I have spent a lot of time to talking to people who are very passionate about social issues. Between my own interests and all my time overseas. It has come up a lot.

I am like a magnet for impossible, unsolvable social and medical problems. Like I don’t think I have single professional or academic interest in something easy or solvable. Sometimes I really wish my life goals were to plant a nice flower garden or vegetable garden, cook excellent food and take long walks. These would be much more achievable and much less impossible when you compare them to my general desire to end injustice particularly in regards to the disabled, the chronically ill and children in addition to being two steps from an activist. I want to be a doctor who works with these same people who in most cases have incurable congenital and or acquired diseases that are hard to diagnose (especially considering I want to do this in the developing world), often hard to manage and basically impossible to treat in many cases.
Every once in a while I have to step back and think about how ridiculous I must appear to most of the rational adult population who encounters me. Gimpy kid who wants to save the world from general evil, injustice and ignorance. Gimpy kid who despite losing the genetic lottery has an impossible faith in what any decent literary critic or anthropologist could write off as a Graceo-Roman myth. Its a miracle no one has set me down yet and tried to talk some sense into my hard little deformed head.

And then I begin think with horror that I am basically one of those beauty pageant contestants who always answer…WORLD PEACE except shorter, less blonde and much more awkward looking.

If you are going to be socially conscious, there is no way you can equally and passionately care about every cause, every justice issue, every war, every detail of your theology/ideology. A. you will never sleep (ok so none of us sleep anyway), B.. you won’t ever know much about anything because you will spend your whole life jumping from one thing to another and C you won’t get anything done.
Ok so that is the practical side, theologically, if we read the New Testament we are sort of off the hook and sort of not. In one way, if we take take scripture in its entirety, there are a lot of demands on us to fight for the helpless, promote peace, justice, Jesus, real relationships, community, food for the hungry, sight for the blind, freedom for the captives, care for widows and orphans, I could go on for another 10 pages… On the other hand, we also told we are gifted for different things which kind makes us all go Woo off the hook…except for our area…or are we? Does every person have an equal responsibility to care about all of that?
I don’t know the answer to that exactly…I am slightly afraid of phrasing an answer at all because I feel like so much of the church in the US outside of couple of crazy people finds a way out of this entirely and that can’t be right. But at the same time we can’t be expected to contribute to everything. It is also impossible to be entirely informed about everything you should care about as a Christian/decent human being/etc. I fear being pelted with a long lecture about the total depravity of humanity and TULIPS and being written off as just another crazy liberally educated heathen.

But even though I don;t know HOW MUCH to care or HOW TO CARE that much. I don’t think Christianity was ever supposed to be about talking about how bad humanity is at least not without dreams and hope that things could be changed and different. I kind of feel like the dreams are dying in so many ways in American Christianity. Much beyond sending people to convert others who may/may not be physically starving, dying of a treatable illness, being oppressed, etc afterwards we sit around and talk about the end of the world and how bad the media/president/church down the street/Duke Basketball/etc is. It easy to not care when you think the world is ending. And frankly you hear a lot more about the end of the world, then the beginning of the kingdom in American churches.

I prefer to focus on the later…as impossible and overwhelming as the task is.

Protected: For 11th time I can’t dance, I can’t ski and I can’t be normal so stop trying to make me so…