The view from ZSR 6th floor on the eve of the rest of my life…

7 years is a long time.

I am sitting curled up in one of my favorite places in the world. The ZSR library on the Wake Forest ugrad campus. Its nooks and crannies and huge windows and high callings have facilitated my studies, my imagination and my dreams for the past 7 years.  It was here I studied for my first real exam EVER, memorized latin poetry, poured over novels, drew out organic mechanisms, took MCAT practice tests, discovered libreation theology, painstaking dissected the New Testament and the Koran and eastern European folklore. I learned EKGs and neuroanatomy on the 6th floor. I learned Rheumatology and Endocrinology over in the new wing.  I dreamed of traveling and medical school and later medical missions.  And like most young women day dreamed occasionally about boys and the future and all that is to come.  This place is full of friendly ghosts that remind me of where I have been, who I am and where I am going. Its not just nostalgia and books that live here but a sliver of my identity and the woman I have become will always find a home here.  Of all the places on the Wake Forest campus I think its the place i will miss the most when I finally physically leave Winston in May.

And that is about to come to a head. Tomorrow it begins.  I submit to the powers that be my residency application. Countless cups of tea, late nights, long hours, books, papers, notebooks, itunes, sutures, progress notes and surgeries.  seven years, six pages of resume and essay, five agonizing standardized board/admission exams, four summers loving Eastern Europe and four babies delivered, three years of med school (1 to go), 1.5 degrees, it all been for tomorrow so I can go get a job somewhere in the United States that wants a gimpy pediatrician to be with a strange love for all things from the Black Sea to the North Pole, a more than passionate obsession with disability rights who is in love with children, Jesus and comparative religion.

up, up and away.

Why the world is messed up Part 1

I love this country and only God knows why.

I walked into the pediatric oncology ward today and the first patient I met had a brain abscess of unknown pathogen origin but since she has cancer it could be a very, very bad bug. She was in a room with two other leukemia children one who was questionably neutropenic (no immune system). I was really, really upset. I get the whole limited resources concept. I get the whole this is not America concept but I can’t turn off the little doctor in my head that says this is a way to kill three children for the price of one. We painted their faces and make necklaces and bracelets and it was the only child life (hosp playroom) time these kids get. Their parents make their meals, give them all of their oral meds, wash them, clothe them and do all beside care that does not involve the IV pump. There are no portacaths so the kids get IVs perpetually. I was pretty saddened by the whole thing.

Especially in light of story number two. So ‘Mike’ is 16 and was my bosses’ first patient here back 1994. He has a stricture (a narrowing) of his esophagus. He needed surgery to fix it but he had to grow and there were no surgeons in Romania any way. Finally they found someone to do it after a more than a decade of suffering and being told that there was nothing to be done but wait for death, they found someone. Health care is supposed to be FREE for all children under the age of 18. And by FREE they mean that if you want your child to live the hospital alive after major surgery try a 3000 dollar bribe. That’s more than most families make here a year. And it needs to be in cash and by the way it’s all under the table so the doc will never pay taxes. The missionaries, the boy’s community and his parents have scrimped and saved and raised the funds. The boy survived the procedure and is in the ICU. The only words the surgeon told the mom was the esophagus was dilated before the stricture, we should have done this years ago. The mom has to pay a bribe every time she wants to see her son. 3000 under the table? And the mother can’t even be with her son???? 3000 untaxed dollars in a country where children with treatable cancer die because they can’t pay bribes for isolation rooms.

Don’t get me wrong I know America’s health care system is broken. But at least it is mostly honest. I mean insurance companies are evil but they are upfront about it. I would take truth even it means capitiolism runs health care over corruption running health care any day.

Also this http://www.wxii12.com/video/19854698/index.html watch it… and count the number of time they use the word inspiration or something similar. I know this girl, she is a friend of mine, and she is extremely kind and generous with herself. But I post this because it’s such a good example of America’s idea of disability. I can be a cursed beggar/prisoner of an institution or I can be a poster child for a Disney movie.

God Bless America……and Romania

Good grief. Dear God please tell me there is some happy medium in the world where gimpy people are not martyrs but rather teachers, parents, doctors, lawyers or whatever they want to be when they grow up. And no one finds it extraordinary that they managed but rather find it extraordinary that anyone would think otherwise.

….there are many kinds of freedom, and even more kinds of slavery.

End Rant.

 It is a lovely Tuesday night in Bucharest. Emily and I have settled in well. We got our clearance for the baby hospital today, we start on Thursday. Emily has been busy with school, I have been busy with clinic. I already know at least one reason why God has brought me here this time. One of the new social workers at the clinic has a 22 yo sister with Cerebral Palsy who is brilliant but is stuck in the complicated system of being disabled in Romania. We will go visit her in a rural village on Sunday. I have done lots of physicals on missionary families, Romanians, Turkish, Dutch, English diplomats. Tomorrow we will do the whole Mormon missionary force in Romania. Its fun work. I assisted on a small surgery today. The only sadness is I cannot get clearance to go work with the disabled children from last time. The one child who I had a special relationship with though has been moved to a private Catholic orphanage and I am hoping to get clearance to go see him at least.

Things are slightly better accessibility wise here. There is a van with a lift to help one get off the plane and lift into the terminal. I actually rode down the whole street today by myself in the green machine, curb cuts the whole way. I almost had tears in my eyes. Such freedom, my people here have never known such physical freedom. I learn so much of spiritual freedom from these simple things. God wants to free us from our sin and our own selfish selves but we have to let him tear down the walls (the curbs) in our life. I think often of my friend who was my initial introduction to the plight of my people who died soon after I met her. I am sad she did not live to see these days but happy to know she is with the Lord. We still have a long way to go education and health care wise, but enviromentally they are making an effort.

God is doing interesting things in my heart. I love this land and I love Eastern Europe. But Romania is chaning rapidly. Romania will need less and less missionary doctors over time. The medical missionaries who run the clinic are thinking about retiring. There is still much work to be done here but I am not sure if this is where God has me to come for the long term. So where Russia? Ukraine? Africa? I recently received an e-mail from one of my future supervisors in Africa he is asking for pediatricians with a passion for the disabled to run a rehab center in Tanzania, they want to start a series of these throughout the continent.  I am going to work in one of them in Kenya in Jan. They were very clear, that my elective is a window to employment, they are almost recruiting me 5 years early it seems. Also on my way here, I ran into a guy who works for Samarthian’s Purse who gave me his card and wants me to e-mail their medical missions dept. It seems possible jobs are growing on trees at the moment…

 

,.,,,there is so much to tell about being back here and about Spain and Italy and France…but it will take me a while to get back to speed with my blog. I am also writing my reisdency personal statement wich is a painful endless process.

why freedom matters in Belarus…Georgia…Romania and Beyond

There was an article about Belarus in The Wall Street Journal this weekend!!! I am pleased to hear that people care. Because it really does matter and its not just the principal of thing.  The article talks about how what happens with Russia’s future is an inside and outside political game.  The outside is the former soviet republics and satellite nations like Romania.  These countries are what separate Russia from Europe and really from the rest of the western world.  These countries are small and most Americans probably couldn’t pick them out on a map but their freedom is essential to peace and stability in the region and really the world.    Russia has cut down on religious freedom and freedom of the press in recent years, all NGO (charities, churches, human rights groups) have to register with the government, prominent journalists have been killed in the dead of the night. This may not make the evening news 7000 miles away in Washington but it matters.

Why you ask? The usual reasons things matter in foreign policy: oil, power and blood.  Russia controls a big part of Europe’s oil supply and the oil passes through many of the former soviet republics.  Russia has friends like Iran and China.  Russia is becoming better armed all time and already has increasingly bad human rights record.  I am not suggesting that we as the west should go in and try to mess around with the region and play police or micromanger for these  corrupt, struggling infant democracies but we shouldn’t take them for granted.

Let’s all remember that it was our indifference after helping the Afghans win against the soviets that brought us the Taliban…

not the same situation, but the same principal. The battle for a free whole Europe is not over, its really only just begun.

I LOVE TRAFFIC

When my sister and I were in Romania two years ago we had a running joke about how much I (we) LOVE TRAFFIC!!!  Bucharest is filled with traffic. In the communist era there were quotas on cars and folks would sign up years in advance before being allowed a car. Now in the new Romania everyone who is anyone is buying a car because anyone can now.  The result is constant traffic everywhere  even on public it takes hours at times to get any where.  The buses/trams are incredibly crowed and hot. It frustrated and worried us terribly (of getting mugged, being late and dying of heat stroke) at first  but then we stepped away from it and realized that this is what we had right now. We started to look at all the things we could do with it.  Our daily commutes became our chance to pray, catch up with each other, dream, people watch, minster to the beggars who rode beside us at times  and journal.  It became one of our favorite times of the day. And we made the best of it and not entirely cynically  we would say on particularly long trips or crazy crossings of a big street on foot I LOVE TRAFFIC.

Contentment is something I struggle with.  Being content with waiting on God or wait on public transport or simply being happy with I have at that given moment. Its so easy to give into complaining or whining about what I wish could happen faster or what I wish I had or what I wish could be different.  There are so many things I want and so few things that I don’t have that I actually I need.  You go to any book store and you will find oodles of books about finding peace and contentment.  And there are a great variety of such books in the religion section alone from prosperity gospel to physics to magic formulas, but no ONE HAS AN ANSWER….

God provides in his own time, his own season and his own way or so we are taught in church.   But how do we learn to wait, to trust. Oswald Chambers says the most important word Christ ever spoke to his disciples was abandon.

What does abandon truly look like?  Can we truly be joyful and grateful for what we have and live in the moment? Can we drop everything and truly live with abandon? Reckless abandon??

So different from what our culture tells us…and in the end I think thats the key. Its recklass abandon of what wer are told to worry about, told we should want and need for instead embracing what we have and what God has for us.

I am not sure what that looks like exactly but I am praying God coninutes to show me.