Choking

The other day I had an interesting experience: for the first time in my life I choked. I know everyone occasionally coughs on chips that get stuck sideways or water that goes down the wrong way, but this choking experience was unlike anything I've ever had before.
The sun was going down. I was sitting on my parent's deck with a friend, watching the varnished wood gleam like gold in the evening light and feeling content and satisfied. I had a cup of tea and we had been eating stale chips and ice cream. I know what you're thinking, it must have been the chips. If only life were that simple.
I've been sick for the last two weeks and have been coughing a lot, uncontrollably at times, which makes it a bit difficult to drink anything as you might imagine. Well, I was taking a sip of tea from my cup. At that very moment my friend Forest was telling me a story of how that day at work a customer had flipped out at him and had been swearing at him. I know you should never laugh at another's misfortune, but it somehow struck me as funny and I started to laugh.
It was as if my epiglottis completely failed to do it's job and the tea all poured down into my lungs and suddenly it was like drowning. My face turned purple (okay, I didn't see it but I think it probably turned purple) and I couldn't breathe. I sprayed tea all over the table and began to cough and sputter and struggle for breath in between. To no avail. I jumped up from my chair and tried to cough. And then, my friends, I ran out of the room.
My motivation was simple: I was gagging and coughing and worried that I was about to vomit and that is not an attractive thing to look at. I wanted to maintain my dignity. They say you should never leave the room when choking and now I know why they need to say it. Well, anyway, I ran into the bathroom and gagged and coughed over the sink. Then I ran back into the kitchen and my friend was looking worried cause I could still barely breathe. I thought, maybe if I turn upside down the tea will drain out of my lungs. (Hello, anyone have any better suggestions?) I turned upside down and my friend whacked my back for about three minutes. It wasn't really super helpful, but eventually I was able to breathe again.
I spent the rest of the evening coughing and feeling like something the dog dragged in. But it got me thinking about all those people who routinely suffer from choking. People with pneumonia and collapsed lungs and no gag reflex and strokes and paralysis. Not being able to breathe is possibly the most terrifying feeling in the world. We are programmed to fight to breathe no matter what happens.
I remember as a younger girl desperately wanting to be able to faint (how romantic!) I remember holding my breath hoping that I would pass out, but inevitably, I would breathe. I just liked breathing too much to sacrifice it for being able to faint. Thank God.
But even though it was a horrible experience, I'm glad I know what it feels like to really choke now. Now when I'm working in the hospital and one of my patients chokes, and I see that panicked look on their face and after I get them breathing again they have that red-eyed exhausted look of someone who stared fear and death in the face, I'll be able to empathize with them. We don't always have to experience someone's pain to be able to suffer with them, but sometimes it adds the immediacy and the urgency to our response that would otherwise be lacking.

What goes around comes around

Well, this last week was a bit of a gong show. I got back from Europe and was desperately trying to recover from jet lag, when guess what happened! I got sick. And not just any kind of sickness. (Although I did have almost every symptom: nausea, headaches, fever, cough, cold, sore throat, fatigue, aches and pains from head to toe, etc.) The real problem was this: I lost my voice.
For some people that might not be a problem. But of course if you know me well (actually if you know me at all!) you can probably understand why losing my voice would be so devastating. My voice is my lifeline to the world. It is my mode of communication. It is the way I express myself. It is the way I make myself heard and stay on top of things and a bunch of other really important functions. I can't think very well with this headache.
But anyway, it was totally gone. Not only that, but I had driven to our church family camp where I was supposed to be..... leading worship and speaking. Ha ha. Now I am convinced God has a sense of humor.
My voice stayed gone for three days. It's back now, deeper than ever. Unfortunately it's not really a sexy sultry bedroom voice. No, it is hoarse and scratchy and it occasionally goes into falsetto. There's nothing I can do about it.
But I did manage to speak at the camp after all. A dear friend reminded me that God gives us enough words to say what he wants us to say, nothing more and nothing less. So I stood up on a bucket next to my very tall friend Christoph and whispered in his ear and he translated for me and we spoke! Actually, God spoke! It was pretty powerful, but not in the sense of loud and authoritative. (Especially since I was speaking about being weak.) The second night I was supposed to speak again, and I had been suffering from uncontrollable coughing. I couldn't stop it no matter what I did. Again I believed in that promise from God. I coughed and coughed and coughed..... and spoke for 20 wonderful minutes without a single cough..... and then immediately started coughing again!
I wish I could say that I'm better now. It's been a week and I'm still really sick. But I am learning the truth that God gives us exactly what we need to accomplish his purposes. Nothing more, nothing less. That way we stay dependent on him and his beauty and strength shine through us. When we're weak, he is strong.

One of life's little updates

So the reason I have that great picture on the side is because I'm seriously considering moving to the Caribbean. I applied to a medical school on that very island in the picture and I'll find out soon if I'm accepted or not. On the other hand, I was offered a pretty good job in Vancouver if I stay here, teaching chemistry and math part time at a high school (and then nursing on the side). So really, either option sounds good.

It's hard to know what to do with one's life. I met a man in Oxford a couple of days ago that really helped me see the light. I've struggled with disillusionment with God, wondering why it seemed God spoke really clearly to me about something, but then the opposite thing happened. (This has happened a few times!) This man said to me, perhaps I wasn't misinterpreting God, perhaps I really heard all those things he spoke to me- but they were like pieces in a puzzle and I just assembled them wrongly, and came to the wrong conclusion. In other words, I asked the wrong question ("Okay God, should I do A, B or C"? and thought I heard him say "A", but actually he was just saying "not B or C" and still had option D in mind) It's not that I have this egotistical need to always hear God correctly, but if I spend my life trying to get close to him and hear him clearly, it is very disheartening to think that I've been getting it all wrong after all.
The good news is that Jesus is still on the throne. He still has definite ideas about what I should do and not do, and I am not left alone struggling in the dark. Someday I'll look back and laugh.
For example, I have already started to look back at some of my experiences in Europe and laugh. (I arrived home in Vancouver last night so it's not really looking back that far.) For example, something funny happened yesterday. Okay, not funny, but ironic, which is almost as good if one can still laugh about it. Since I've been getting so sick in transit I decided that was it, I was going to do whatever I could to keep from getting sick on the plane ride back home to Vancouver. The plane took off and I felt pretty good. I decided to take a gravol to prevent any nausea from coming later on. I took the gravol. Within a few minutes I was completely nauseaus. I couldn't eat dinner. The funny thing is that it was an anti-nausea pill that made me sick.
So I spent the whole 9 hours on the plane sitting and staring into space because I couldn't read without getting sick. I watched a movie, but the best scene in the entire movie was censored out (where James Bond is poisoned and has a cardiac arrest and tries to defibrillate himself). I suppose these days it is more of a problem for children to watch a life being saved, than to see gory violence and graphic sex.

Blech

I'm not sure, but I think that is the sound of someone being sick. That has unfortunately been a large theme of my life lately. First of all, I have been spending an inordinate amount of time in transit between places. In the last ten days I have taken 2 planes, 1 boat, 15 or so trains, 6 buses, countless escalators, 3 cars and 1 truck ride. Not to mention I have eaten and drank strange things, including the official sweetest breakfast cereal I have ever had in my life (believe it or not there was oil floating on the top of my milk), strange alcohol like Pastisse, Vodka, Wine, wine, wine, beer, Port, Sambuka and some other strange ones (don't worry, I didn't have them all at once), and enough chocolate covered waffles for a lifetime. Add to that not enough sleep every night.
Sum it all together and you guessed it, a pretty much constant feeling of Blech, necessitating the use of airplane gagbags, garbage cans and toilets. A couple of weeks ago I even had to use two pillowcases stuffed together.
I'm sorry if this is grossing anyone out, but it is life. At least part of my life right now. I am being challenged to rejoice despite circumstances, even though most of the time it makes me feel like crying. And crying, you guessed it- makes me want to eat more chocolate.
So just one piece of advice: no matter how hungry you feel, never ever wolf down a burger, a pop and a bag of onion rings just before getting on a three-hour bus ride on British roads. They're not like Canadian roads that go straight and turn once in a while. The turn all the time and once in a while, if you're lucky, they go straight.
But enough said. I intend my blog to entertain and educate, so I will close with one last wonderful educational and entertaining fact.
In cathedrals and churches across Europe, thousand-year old stones get dirty and occasionally need cleaning while at the same time minimizing degradation and avoiding movement. Guess what they use to clean them!!!!! Yes, a polymer! Latex, actually, which comes from the Indian rubber tree hevea brasilienis, but is now synthetically produced. It is applied to the stone and then carefully stripped off, along with all the grease and grime. It is cost effective, gentle and it does the job beautifully.
lots of love

Paris or Rome

Today on a long train ride between Paris and Brussels I listened to Michael Buble's song 'home'. (For any travellers, big mistake!) There was nowhere to cry privately except while looking out the window at dismal gray tracks whizzing by and the reflection of my fellow passengers. For the first time in my life (and probably not the last) I had this feeling that I didn't care how many other great wonders of the world I saw, all the statues seemed the same, all the great big buildings were just great big buildings, Paris and Rome and Brussels and London were just one great big foreign city where I didn't know anyone and I walked down streets feeling small and alone. I wanted home.
Not home as in the little blue house in Burnaby, but home as in people- my family, the church, other christians, those loving times we spend together laughing and talking and eating and sharing. I've found home all over the world- in a park in Rome I met a catholic priest that spoke words of comfort and truth- in a village in Uganda I shared dried ants squatting by a coal fire with another christian girl- in Marseille I lay on a beach with another girl after a game, laughing until we cried.
And home as in purpose. I felt at home in the chemistry lab in Langley, struggling to make experiments work, because I knew God's hand was behind it all and I knew he wanted me to do it. It becomes less clear cut when I am wandering around the Louvre Museum trying to take in 6000 fantastic paintings. Is there a purpose behind this?
This morning in a grungy youth hostel I ate breakfast with my sister and another girl we met, and I talked to her about Jesus. I felt alive! I felt home.
So I don't know what will happen in the next week or two. I am expecting adventures. We've had some exciting and not-so-exciting ones in the last week. For example, I was told by one slimy old man that he was sure I had spanish blood in my veins (just before he tried to grope me). And then a group of policemen were sure I had Italian blood in my veins and tried all their best Italian pick-up lines on me. The funniest ones were this morning in a grocery store, two young guys who worked there tried their entire vocabulary of English on me (I love you! Would you like one of us for a boyfriend? What's your phone number? etc). And I was just trying to buy yogurt.
I have also officially eaten one of the best desserts in the world: Belgian waffels. And praise God, there were no bedbugs in the place we stayed last night. I am pretty cool with all sorts of creepy-crawlies, but I have to say that bedbugs keep me from sleeping.
lots and lots of love to you all.
P.S.- If anyone wants PARTICULAR presents let me know. Otherwise you're all getting Eiffel Tower keychains.

photos

Oh, by the way, if you want to see photos of my time in Marseille, go to www.journeywithsteven.blogspot.com and follow the link on the right side of the page to Steven's flickr site. There you'll find about 300+ photos of what we've all been up to!

Of cheese and Mongolians

Wow, just when I was getting used to a French keyboard I have to switch to Flemish! I just arrived in Belgium today with Zoe and I'm trying to get used to the rainy, green scenery and really missing the sunny meditarranean lifestyle of Marseille. Belgium is way way different than France, even though they border each other and French is spoken here. I've done an anthropologic analysis and decided that everyone here has wide-set facial features, large protruding eyes, light-toned skin and eyes and very big mouths. I fit right in. (Ha ha)
Last night I sat in Marseille overlooking the ocean and ate creamy carrot-ginger soup with crunchy baguettes, French cheese, and a glass of rose wine. Dinner is really late here (around 8) so after dinner we just relax and talk and watch the sun go down on the limestone hills and drink tea. At night it is too hot to wear much, so consequently I'm covered with mosquito bites.
What a change in Brussels! All the signs are in Flemish and French and everything smells different and tastes different and it is rainy and a little gloomy here. I had forgotten that Belgium is one of the world leaders in science and technology so I have been pleasantly surprised to see the most fantastic ads for chemical companies all over the place! It's pretty awesome. They've got an atomic center here and headquarters for all the major chemical factories. Today I saw the most amazing chemistry ad ever. I think it was an ad for Bayer, and it was an enormous photo of a Mongolian boy (think National Geographic), and overtop of him was overlayed a chemical symbol (Hu) from the periodic table and it said "Bringing chemistry and humanity together". It almost made me cry, it was so beautiful.
I had a funny episode on saturday. I was at a park with our Marseille team and we had a table set up with refreshments. Barney was standing with some guys and I saw them trying to speak French so I went over to see if I could be of some translating assistance. They introduced themselves to me and I was trying to be polite and I asked one of them (in French) if he wanted a cup of coffee. He leaned over to whisper in my ear and said (in French) "I want your phone number". I almost laughed, it was funny. I told him he'd have to ask my boyfriend first, which took care of the situation nicely.
Well, I'd better be off. There are some girls here watching Pride and Prejudice in French, which sounds like fun.
lots and lots of love.