Psalm 145

The Lord is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth.
He fulfills the desires of those who fear him;
he hears their cry and saves them.

I suppose I've staked my life on these verses. If it isn't true, then none of Christianity makes the least bit of sense.
About a year and a half ago I asked God for two things. I told him what they were, I told him they were the only two things I needed. I felt like I was talking to a brick wall, there was not even a whisper of an answer.
And then I had this deep sense inside me, that the two things I was asking for were not what I really needed. What I really needed was God, himself. Not what he could give me but who he is as a person.
I asked God to give me himself.
It's been a journey of faith. Those two things, one of them I am still waiting for. The other one has begun to fall into place. But really, I learned how little that mattered. What matters is that I've come to know a person.
In Antigua one day while I was jogging in the heat of the day, Brendan asked me, Heather, why do you read the bible? Do you just read the stories for interest sake or do you try to follow the rules?
I thought about for a second and I said to him, I read it because it reveals a person. All those pages, they can be taken as a good rule book or an interesting historical collection, and honestly, it's a bit boring if you read if like that. But what the bible was really designed to do is to reveal the person of Jesus. And that's why I read it, because I am in love with him.
Love is complicated. I should know since I've been in love so many times. Confusing, up and down, ridiculous, but totally worth it.

Zaza breezes through the airport

I have officially discovered why it is better to have a man check your bags at the airport. (If you're a girl, that is.)
You see, when I left Antigua, my suitcase was 14.7 kilograms overweight. Normally that would mean a $50 charge. When I checked in at the airport, groggy and tired as it was about 6:00 in the morning, I chatted with the guy behind the counter for a minute. He looked at my tickets and asked if I'd like him to reroute my 4 flights at no extra charge so that I arrived in Seattle 4 hours earlier. Well, of course, I said. Then he proceeded to tell me my bag was overweight but that he would waive the charge this time. He carried it for me to the conveyor belt and wished me a pleasant journey.
I got to Puerto Rico hours later and lugged my suitcase to the security check. I waited nervously while the man behind the counter looked at my ticket and weighed my bag. He gave me a charming smile and told me he wouldn't charge me for the extra weight and would I like it checked all the way to Seattle? Did I need help with directions to my gate?
I got off the plane in Dallas and waited a couple of hours, then flew to Seattle. I spent the night with a friend and then early the next morning went to the airport again. As I lined up to check in, I scanned the people at the desk for someone of the male gender. Not one.... I knew it was coming. The lady who ended up serving me looked at me with one of those don't-mess-with-me looks.
"Your bag is 14.7 kilograms overweight." She said blankly.
"I know." I put on my sweetest smile. "It's because of all the textbooks I have in there."
"Well, that will be $47."
I clasped my heart and tried to look horrified.
"Is there anyway you could waive that?" I asked hopefully.
"Sorry, no." She didn't sound sorry at all.
I handed her my visa card reluctantly.
After I'd paid for my bag, I went to line up to go through security. It was a long line to the first check, and by the time I got to the end of it, I realized suddenly that I couldn't find my passport anywhere.
"I can't find my passport." I said to the uniformed man in a bit of a panic.
"Don't worry, honey, it's around here somewhere."
He led me back to the counter I'd been at and I asked the lady there if she still had my passport.
"I gave it back to you." She said coldly. "And you won't be able to get on the plane without it."
"I know." I said sheepishly. Seriously, how dumb is it to lose your passport in another country?
I looked for ages, and then finally found it in an obscure pocket of my purse, although I have no clue which idiot put it there. I went back to the security line-up, but the man saw me and waved me to come to the front.
"You're going to have to go through a special security check." He explained to me. "The name on your ticket was spelled wrong and the woman who checked you in made a note that you have to go through it. But don't worry, it shouldn't take to long."
He led me down a long hallway, passed the line-ups of hundreds of people waiting to go through. Past all the security machines to a little roped-off area where three officers were waiting, smiling. They put my carry-on luggage through the machine, asked me to take off my shoes, and then searched me efficiently and quickly. They swabbed down all my belongings with some kind of tester device (It's a specialized chemical weapons detector, if you are interested I can explain more) and then handed everything back to me.
"You're good to go!"
Later while I was waiting for my flight a strange woman stopped me in the restrooms.
"Why did you get to skip all the lines and go straight through security?" She demanded, washing her hands in the sink next to me.
"Oh, there was a little misunderstanding." I explained to her about the ticket.
Afterwards I thought about it. One person can make your life very difficult, or one person can make your life very easy. It doesn't cost a lot to give an extra smile or waive a silly fee or help someone find something that's lost, but it can sure be a tremendous blessing.
When I got to Canadian customs in Vancouver, the immigration officer was very friendly and didn't give me any trouble despite the large pieces of coral and bottle of rum I had in my bag. (The fact that he wanted my phone number was totally coincidental.)
I got home safely and am enjoying about three days off before I start studying and working again. I'll be doing a practicum one day a week, and doing assignments to send in the rest of the time, before going back to Antigua in January. I'm not sure what the next two months will hold, but I'm sure they will be full of surprises and adventures, so keep reading Happy Heather's Hullaballoo!

leaving home, going home

Last night I was in a pensive mood and I wrote this crazy blog entry, full of emotional descriptions of what it feels like to say goodbye to a place I’ve come to love.
I wrote, “When I come home late at night after being out, there are a row of lights all the way down the mile-long driveway, and I can make out the palm trees swaying in the breeze overhead. The moon is always shimmery and ringed with a golden halo, and the scent of the flowers is overpowering.
The first of my classmates left today. We know we’ll be back together in January, but there was still this strange sense of incompleteness after he’d gone. We’ve all shared everything this last month and we’ve become so close.”
The best line was near the end and it said “But eternity is in our hearts, we are told, and that is why there is that ache there that doesn’t go away. It just waxes and wanes as we journey through life, drawing us inexorably towards something more, something deeper that will draw together the strands of reality and make sense of our lives.”
Pretty deep, huh?
I went to bed last night and it was raining softly. I awoke sometime in the night to the sound of claps of thunder and then the unmistakable roar as a hurricane-force gust of rain hammered on our tin roof. Shomaila and I both sat up in bed and looked at each other in the dim light. Another sleepless night. We tossed and turned for hours and then at 5:30 there was the sound of a truck outside and voices and we got up and stood on the porch. Nikki was leaving and we waved goodbye before climbing back into bed.
At 6:30 I was woken again by another truck honking. I climbed out of bed and it had finally stopped raining and there was a taxi driver outside who had come to pick up Nikki. I explained to him groggily that they must have made a mistake, Nikki was already gone.
What about Dr. Rust? He asked. She was gone, too, I said. As I watched him pull away I thought, oh dear, I’d better check on that. I wrapped myself in a sweater and stumbled across the campus to Dr. Rust’s house. I knocked on the door twice, and there was no answer. As I turned to go back to bed, I looked up and the sky was streaked with pale pink and the soft light of the morning. I got back into bed and struggled to fall asleep.
My dreams were twisted and crazy. I dreamt of past relationships that hadn’t worked out and there was a lot of saying goodbye, but there was also a lot of hellos and new, changed things.
Yanira woke us up again past nine and I lay in bed, thinking about it all. I feel ready to come home now. I know that I’m going to step off the plane wearing a sundress and flip-flops, and it’s going to be rainy and cold. Things will have changed at home, they always do when I go away. And when I come back here in January, things will have changed in this home. It won’t be the same. I won’t be living in the same bungalow with my class of 7 and catching rides to the beach and having to hang my laundry up inside because it’s always raining. Some things will stay the same, but some things will have changed. I don’t like change, I never have. It takes courage to face it.
But it’s an adventure. Living a life that God directs is not always fun, and it’s not always simple, but it’s always an adventure. Days like today when I haven’t slept much because of storms and noisy trucks, I’d rather do without the adventure. But if I look at the big picture, I know it’s worth it all.

Living in two worlds

Yesterday I experienced such a diverse set of circumstances. I lay in bed at night trying to figure out which one was real and which one I preferred.
We had an exam in the morning and for some reason had agreed to start it at 7 am so we could get out of class early. We stumbled out of our rooms at 6:58 and into the dark classroom. We’ve nicknamed this one hallway ‘mosquito alley’ because of the clouds of blood suckers that await around each door. We sat in the flickering light, hoping the electricity wouldn’t go out, swatting mosquitoes and trying to pay attention to our exam. After the exam and a long exhausting class, we went back to our rooms. It was hot out and because of all the recent rain, butterflies had hatched and they were swarming all through the gardens. One of my classmates and I decided to go for a run and we jogged along the potholed road for a couple of miles, dodging goats and spiny cacti and the occasional pothole that was bigger than a car.
When we got back I lay on the floor of my room trying to cool down, and wishing that the air conditioner would work.
Our professor, Dr. Gilbert, is the only person on campus who has a car, and we’d arranged to catch a ride to the beach with him instead of having to walk the 8 kilometers in the heat. Brendan and I had studied furiously all week so that we could go on Friday afternoon.
The closest beach to the university is a public beach, but it is surrounded by an exclusive resort called ‘St. James club.’ In all my life, even in pictures, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a place quite so exotically beautiful. Dr. Rust had given us some towel cards that allowed us privilege to trade in for free towels and sit on the beach chairs under thatched umbrellas. The sand is white and the water greeny-blue and the palm trees sway overhead in the breeze. There are hot pink hibiscus and bougainvillea everywhere and you can smell the scent of the flowers mingled with the salt of the ocean.
We lay in the sun with our histology textbooks and took breaks to jump in the waves or pick up pink shells along the beach. Later in the afternoon, the club served a free tea, and Brendan and I sat on a balcony overlooking the whole bay and ate little sandwiches and scones and drank tea. It was ridiculously luxuriant. We hadn’t had anything that tasted that good in about a month. We watched the sun go down across the water, the sky streaked with pink and purple, and when it was too dark to see our textbooks anymore we packed up to go. (I know it sounds impossible, but we did actually get lots of quality studying done.)
When we drove out of the club we entered a different world again. We were hungry and stopped to eat at a little restaurant run by some local people. It is an open-walled shack and in the light of propane lanterns we could barely make out the chicken sizzling over coals. The people were friendly and warm and we talked to some other customers and they poured us their homemade rum punch. (Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson and I got the girl version.) On the two walls that were still standing there were faded photographs of years past and advertisements for cheap taxis. Every now and again a bat would fly in and then out again, and although I couldn’t see them I’m positive that there were cockroaches scuttling underfoot. The food was amazingly good and we sat in the cracked plastic chairs, swatting mosquitoes and talking to the owners and laughing together.
We drove home and studied until far too early in the morning, and then woke up this morning to find another torrential downpour soaking all my laundry on the line. When I ran out to get it I got soaked just opening the door.
It is two different worlds. It is hard to reconcile the two together. One of the most unfortunate parts of it is the sharp delineation between the lives of the black people who live here, and the lives of the white people who live here. This is one of my first experiences with racism, and I find it uncomfortable to deal with. Sure, there are wealthy black people here. But for the majority of the island’s residents, they live in poverty while the rich white tourists enjoy the fruits of the land. I hate the fact that I am different, not because I’m wealthy (I’m not!), not because I’m Canadian, not because I’m a Christian, but simply because I’m white.
But I feel blessed that I have been able to experience both worlds here. Lying on the beach and watching the sun go down was heaven on earth. But sitting in a dingy hole-in-the-wall and laughing about the market’s best fish prices with a happy couple was also wonderful. And staying up late studying with my roommate and taking breaks to talk and laugh is also pretty special. Running in the hot sun, dodging potholes and goat crap and that feeling at the end of finally being able to stop, well, that’s pretty good too.
I’m looking forward to coming home in a few days and seeing everyone I missed and eating donuts and pizza and sleeping in a comfy bed and feeling cold for a change, but I think I’m really going to miss this place.

Zaza gets pimped

Today I had my first experience with pimping. In case you’re unsure of my meaning, I will explain. Pimping is what doctors do to medical students or residents working with them: While doing a procedure or examining a patient, or even just while they happen to be walking by a random medical student, they will ask obscure questions on just about anything slightly related to the case and expect you to immediately give the right answer, and if you don’t, they will either yell at you or haul you in front of the other doctors to chew you out and laugh at you, and then proceed to ask you more questions about things you couldn’t possibly know.
The only way to stop pimping is to answer back with a better and more detailed answer than they were expecting, and after a while they’ll hopefully stop badgering you. Pimping exists to make sure that medical students go home from the hospital and spend the evening frantically looking up things in their textbooks so the next day they can answer intelligently and not make fools of themselves. It ensures that we learn our stuff well.
Anyway, for one of our classes today, we were split up into groups and sent to clinics in St. Johns where we would be assisting a physician and observing. Brendan and I were assigned to a very pleasant doctor in a dingy little examining room. We sat down after introductions and our first patient came in.
She was a 7-year-old girl with chickenpox, and the doctor started writing a prescription. He was talking to the mother of the child and I was kind of zoning out and suddenly I realized the doctor was talking to me.
“Would you prescribe Acyclovir for this patient or not?”
Oh my goodness, he was actually expecting me to respond. What the heck was Acyclovir? I suddenly remembered it was an anti-viral drug used for Shingles but as far as I could remember, it wasn’t usually indicated for a simple case of children’s chickenpox.
“Probably not.” I said hesitantly.
He turned back to his prescription. I looked at Brendan across the desk and he nodded, letting me know I had been right.
“So what’s the incubation period for chickenpox?” The doctor asked me again.
I took a deep breath and looking pleadingly at Brendan. Come on, help me out.
“Well….” I started to say slowly.
“14 days.” Brendan jumped in.
“Yes, about 14 days.” The doctor responded. “And how long before it’s contagious again?”
“About a week.” Brendan answered.
“It may be a week, but actually it’s no longer contagious when the lesions scab over and stop itching.”
The doctor then went into a long explanation about the stages of chickenpox and talked to the patient for a moment, and then asked,
“Can you get chickenpox more than once?”
“No.” Brendan said at the same time I said “Yes.”
The doctor swiveled in his chair to look at me.
“Why would you say that?”
“You can get Shingles as an adult.” I said, “Even if you’ve had chickenpox as a child. It’s caused by the herpes…”
“And where does it show up?” He demanded.
“Along your nerve tracts.” I answered, thinking, I sure hope I'm right.
Brendan jumped in. “And it mostly manifests on the trunk- the back and chest area.”
The doctor grunted in affirmation and turned back to the patient. Phew. Passed that round. Across the table Brendan and I gave each other panicked looks and supportive nods.
The next patient had a bad cough.
“Listen to his chest.” The doctor ordered.
“Ummm….”
“You didn’t bring stethoscopes?” The doctor looked from the two of us incredulously. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring stethoscopes. Always bring them with you so you’re prepared.”
Prepared? I thought, I’ll never be prepared for this. There’s way too much to know.
Our next patient had a complex set of symptoms and we struggled to try to understand his vague replies, the doctor’s thick accent, and the jumble of notes and tests that he’d had done.
“What do you think about these hematocrit levels?” The doctor demanded.
I wondered what normal hematocrit levels were and if I could bluff my way out of having to answer.
“Well….”
“They look fairly normal.” Brendan said, and then I noticed next to the column of numbers, anything that was abnormal was labeled as ‘low’ or ‘high’.
I would have to remember that for next time.
Man, oh man. There were more questions over the next couple of hours, and we sat on the edge of our seats desperately hoping to get them right. I learned a lot today, and one of the things I learned was, when it comes to pimping, it’s all about survival. It’s about answering the doctor’s questions and then getting home and searching through my books and hoping that next time I know what the doctor is asking and can give the right answer. We met up with the rest of our class and all of us had been grilled the same way, and on the ride home we laughed about it and filled in the blanks of what we hadn't known. Next time. Good thing there's always a second chance to get it right.

Another lesson in humility

The other day I did particularly well on an exam and was feeling good about myself. Heather, I thought, you’re becoming quite clever and quite mature. I settled down to a focused, disciplined afternoon and evening studying anatomy. We have a big test coming up in a few days, and all of us were a little stressed about learning the huge volume of information in the little time we had left.
Well, I must have sat at my computer for about 5 or 6 hours, cramming my mature little brain full of the geography of the body, and by the end of it, I was feeling a little shattered.
We have a pleasant evening ritual, Vem, Brendan and I. After we’ve finished our evening studying, we sit together and have a drink and watch an episode of a very funny tv show. Sometimes two episodes. And then we all go to bed.
I could tell we’d been studying too long because of the spaced-out looks on everyone’s faces. Vem had been wearing his purple contact lenses and his eyes were bloodshot from staring at the computer and he looked like he’d walked out of a horror movie. Shomaila had collapsed on her bed and was comatose. Rebecca and Yanira were asleep. Brendan hadn’t shaved in I don’t know how many days and was looking like a truck had run over him. I sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to focus on the computer screen with the tv show but my eyes closed while I was sitting up and I just about fell over.
“Let’s play cards.” Someone suggested. (Okay, it might have been me.) “We always watch tv. We should do something else instead.”
I pulled out my deck of cards and we started a game of blackjack.
“What shall we bet?”
Not money, we decided, cause none of us had much of it. Not clothes, either, because the last time we’d played cards I’d lost 6 rounds in a row. We finally decided on push-ups.
The first round, the ante was 5 pushups and Vem raised it to 10 and Brendan folded and I turned up 20 to Vem’s 21. No prob. I did 10 push-ups.
The second round, I was dealt 21 and Vem raised to 15, and I called. Brendan folded at the ante and did his 5 pushups. I turned over my ace and ten and Vem had an ace and a jack. Fifteen pushups.
We poured rum and coke and dealt the third round.
“Are you allowed to bet if you’re already over 21?” Brendan asked.
“Of course!” I answered. “That’s called bluffing. It’s a really good strategy to flush out another player. You just have to keep a poker face.”
Vem was an exceptional card player; he had a poker face like nothing else and he was cool and collected. He’d been bragging about how many pushups he could do and I was itching to make him lose.
I was dealt 14. Brendan asked for another card and I could tell by the look on his face that he was over. Vem raised the bets to ten, and I called and raised it to 20. I asked for another card. He dealt me an eight. I looked at it in my hand and looked up at Brendan’s flushed face and then Vem’s cool and collected one. Well, if they could bluff, so could I.
“Raise to 35.” Vem said confidently.
No way he could win three hands in a row. Brendan threw down his cards. Drat. Now I’d have to bluff against Vem.
“Raise to 50.” I said coolly.
Vem had a funny smile on his face. “Raise to 75.” He said.
I suddenly was overcome with this panicky feeling. What if he wasn’t bluffing after all?
“Call.” I said in a small voice.
We laid down our cards. My 22 and Vem’s 21.
Well, they laughed long and hard.
I got down on the termite infested floor and cranked off 15 pushups. They laughed and laughed. Then another 35. They kept laughing.
I didn’t make it to 75, they agreed to let me finish my pushups the next night. We put away the cards and sat in front of the computer screen, exhausted, and watched tv until some ridiculous hour of the morning.
But I couldn’t get it out of my head, all night.
It wasn’t really about the 75 pushups and my aching pectoralis muscles. It was about my attitude towards life.
I’ve always had an overdeveloped sense of self-confidence and the ability to talk my way in and out of things. If someone asks me a question that I have no idea about, it’s not that I make up an answer, but I just find the best one that I can possibly think of and I deliver it as if it was the 100% guaranteed truth. It’s not lying; it’s being assertive, creative and responding to challenges with a positive attitude. Or so I’ve always thought.
I realized last night what it really is. It’s bluffing, or more accurately, another word that isn’t quite polite to print here but starts with the same letter.
My worst fear is that someday I’ll be at a patient’s bedside and I’ll make a call with their life in the balance and my b.s. answer will cost them their life. I know I’ll make mistakes, I know I’ll have patients die, but I don’t want it to be because I am so overconfident in my abilities to gamble that I can’t say “I don’t know.”
I’m learning to say “I don’t know.” It’s not easy, but it’s important. And I have the feeling that it’s one of the most important lessons I can learn here.
That and how foolish it is to keep betting when I’m over the limit in blackjack. So if you’ll excuse me, I have 25 pushups to go do….

Searching for profundity in the commonplace

These last few days have been so jam-packed with information that my brain feels like it's about to crash. Kind of. I still have found time to go running every second day with two other classmates (I think we're getting faster, and we go farther every run). We need to run. Brendan said two weeks ago about everything going wrong, if we don't laugh, we'll cry. And that's why we go running.
The most frustrating thing lately is that our water supply is on and off. We never know if it's going to be on in the morning or in the evening- about half the time there is no water and then we find the maintenance guy (if he's around) and if he's not we fill up buckets of rain water from the spigot behind the house. I've learned to keep buckets of water in the shower and fridge in case we need them. But that puts a cramp on our running a bit, because the guys won't run if they can't shower immediately after. So we finish class, check the water, and if it's still on, we run.
Yesterday we said goodbye to Nellie. The last week we've spent several hours a day with her in order to finish our dissection as fast as possible before she completely disappeared. We had our final lab test yesterday, and then we put her in her coffin. Another sorry corpse named John that had been waiting in a body bag for the coffin to be built was laid to rest with her. We lifted them in, put the lid on and nailed it shut. Then we stacked the coffin on top of another one. There are four coffins stacked in the lab, they've been there for a long time and probably will be for longer. Dr. Rust explained that it takes forever and a lot of money to get a burial permit in Antigua, so the cadavers get to hang around for a while more.
We put on face shields and used bleach to scrub the lab, cleaning our instruments and taking the garbage out. Earlier that day we'd put a bag of lab garbage out to be disposed of, and watched as some of the workers came to take it away. We all stood there looking out the window laughing, because if they had of known where the garbage came from they wouldn't have come near it in 1000 years. It wasn't as if a petrified leg would suddenly pop out of the bag, but that sure would've been funny. (Well, until we had to pay them off with more rum.)
So we laid Nellie to rest. We threw our clothes in the garbage and scrubbed. Nikki mentioned something about saying a prayer for Nellie, but we were tired and glad to be getting out of lab and just left her in her box.
Then last night I was taking my laundry off the line and there was that one shirt I'd worn and got stained in the lab, and there isn't anything that will take human fat out of a t-shirt. Dr. Rust told me that even de-greaser won't work. I'd washed it so many times, but still the smell of Nellie remained.
Nikki came out of her room this morning with a funny look on her face. "I dreamt about Nellie last night." She said. "And I said a prayer for her."
I'd expected my experience with my first cadaver to be profound. I'd thought we would have a solemn goodbye for her and reflect on the gift of life she gave. But it was not so. We'd stripped off our clothes and went for dinner, discussing the upcoming exam and laughing over silly jokes. It was so unemotional.
Sometimes I'm not sure what to write about in my blog. It's not that I don't have plenty of adventures. But some of them are so raw, and some of them are so commonplace. Saying goodbye to Nellie was so devoid of any emotion or profundity that I was left wondering if I'd missed something somehow. Shomaila leaping out of the bathroom shouting because a lizard decided to join her in the shower, so commonplace and every day now. Accidentally slipping on a pool of body fluids in the lab and almost wiping out on top of a cadaver? Commonplace. (Unfortunately). Trying to look through a microscope at a blood smear and having to take a break to kill 17 mosquitoes that were hovering around us? Cold showers with a bucket and a cup? Food poisoning with all its not-so-wonderful symptoms that I've experienced all week? These are just external challenges and they enter a familiar place in my heart and mind and I can deal with them. I've done it before, I'll do it again.
But other things are not so easy to deal with. Talking with Brendan about losing someone you love and how it feels to be helpless to save them? Raw. Dr. Rust teaching about how to identify signs of child abuse and finding myself up until midnight not being able to get it out of my mind? Raw, still raw, and I hope to God that it never becomes commonplace. I emailed my dear friend and mentor Dr. Jan White last week, asking for advice on how to deal with my strong and very emotional reaction to what I was having to learn.
"...the answer you probably don't want to hear", she told me, "keep on letting God break your heart, and keep a daily supply of Holy Spirit super glue on hand."
I've been thinking about it for a long while. It's okay that I react the way I do to some things. God made me this way for a reason, and someday maybe I'll understand. It's not easy to feel my heart being broken over things, but everyone falls apart over something and everyone needs putting back together again. It's okay, and it's normal. Commonplace, even.
And speaking of very upsetting but very common place things, there is the haircut that Nikki just gave me. It is unfortunately upsetting me more than I would like. Let's just say that most of my natural beauty was removed with a pair of scissors. There will be no pictures forthcoming.

More life lessons from sunny Antigua

I suppose you all are wondering how things are over here, after that last depressing blog entry. Our storm kept going for a couple of more days, but the good news is that because the flood damage to our rooms was so severe, we were all evacuated to a new building. My new room has a bigger bathroom and is a bit newer than the last one (although it doesn’t have internet connection, so I am in one of the classrooms right now pretending to study.)
It’s finally stopped raining and my clothes dried out and I even went running again yesterday and almost passed out in the heat. Today is our one day off and I got up pretty early and Nikki and I used an old electric skillet we had found and made pancakes and French toast for the whole class. (Yes, all 7 of us.)
This afternoon some of us are going to walk to the beach, so expect some pictures of a very sunburnt Heather very soon.
I appreciate your encouraging comments on my blog, it reminds me that even though I’m far away from home, we’re all still connected and we can share our lives with each other.
So far, academically, things are great. I’ve aced every exam so far and am enjoying the classes, especially Gross Anatomy. (I don’t know why they don’t call it Disgusting Anatomy, cause that would be way more appropriate.) I’ve also learned a lot of life lessons this last week.
My roommate is a cool girl, but we’re pretty different. I want the air conditioner off, she wants it on. I never lock my door or close the curtains, she’s locked me out like 5 times already. I never call my parents, she calls her parents about 3 or 4 times a day. (Sorry Mom!) I don’t mind creepy crawlies in the slightest, she uses bug spray like it’s going out of style and a massive “Hello Kitty” mosquito net. I’m a Christian, she’s Muslim. When we had to move rooms this week I wanted to be in the room on the end of the building with 6 windows and a brand new shower and no ac. She wanted to be in the room in the middle with 2 windows, ac and a hole in the shower wall that I can look out of and see the yard.
She wasn’t going to budge on the ac, even though it was highly inconveniencing everyone. Anyway, I’m older and had been there longer and was the one making the decisions. We argued. I admit, I was pretty upset. I went into someone else’s room and sat on the bed and sulked. (Wow, how embarrassing can it get?)
After a while I thought, I may be right about which room we should have, but is it a big deal? Here I have this absolutely stellar opportunity, when all my classmates know that Shomaila is being a jerk about the room, and are watching me to see what I’m going to do. I could push for my own way, which was clearly the right way, or I could choose to turn the other cheek and let her have the room she wanted, and be gracious and forgiving about it. I’m embarrassed to say that it took me about 30 minutes to change my attitude, but I finally did. I packed my clothes and moved into our new room.
And you know what? It’s absolutely fine. And you know what else? There were a few people who were blown away by my humble attitude. (One of them was me! I thought, hey, where did that come from? Cause I’m not normally this nice!) The good news is that Shomaila and I get along great, she’s a really nice girl. And I had the opportunity to demonstrate forgiveness and grace and I did.
Another life lesson I learned this week was to never drink three shots of rum on an empty stomach. Without going into any details that might incriminate me, I woke up the next morning and thought, what on earth happened last night? (Don’t worry Mom and Dad, NOTHING happened, WHATSOEVER). But I was given a serious lecture by Brendan about responsible, safe drinking, and I had an even more serious talk with God about it. (A really serious talk involving the words “I’m sorry”, “Please forgive me” and “I’ll never do that again”.) I thought about not telling anyone, keeping the secret between me and my two classmates who had been up with me the night before. (Obviously that was a bad idea of course. Perhaps I err on the side of indiscretion, but I’d rather be transparent about my faults than cover them up so no one knows I have them.)
The truth is that getting drunk is not only stupid, it is dishonoring to God. When I talk to Shomaila and my other classmates about grace and walking in the light and following Jesus, if they don’t see me living the walk I’m preaching, it means nothing.
I don’t have to preach with words. I can show them what grace is by forgiving them for their faults. I can show them love by giving up my time to cook them breakfast. I can show them self-control by having one drink and then calling it a night before I have to be scraped off the floor. I can show them truth by not cheating on my exams and having the integrity to not look at the answer key for assignments. I can show joy by refusing to join in complaining about flooded buildings and lousy cafeteria food.
And I suppose I could also show self-discipline by actually studying right now instead of writing on my blog.
Cheers! Have a great week, everyone.

p.s. The rum was actually mixed with coke and the coke here isn’t carbonated and it kind of tastes like rum anyway, so if I was making excuses I’d probably use that one.

That's life

I suppose I should have guessed that a ‘down’ would come after that ‘up’ the other day. And it came today. I started off the day without enough sleep, feeling groggy and having to drink a cup of Nikki’s coffee before feeling awake. We had an exam, but I finished early and had time to study. Too much studying. My eyes began to hurt from using the computer too much, making me feel a little sick, so I didn’t eat lunch. Instead I drank some coke and went to lab.
No one was in a particular happy mood with Nellie today. Rebecca was feeling a little unwell and the air conditioner was working too well, so everyone was cold and sniffling underneath our surgical masks. We were working on the thorax and it was back-breaking work, leaning over her for hours with scalpel and forceps, delicately prying apart veins and muscles and nerves and all sorts of things. I’d left my shorts outside when I changed into my lab costume, and halfway through the afternoon it began to rain. I was too covered in slime to go out and get them, anyway, we were running out of gloves and I didn’t want to waste another pair. Vem complained about having to pee, and I suggested he just go and stand in the rain and pee, no one would know. It seemed like a good suggestion to me, but he didn’t find it funny.

We moved onto Nellie’s head. It had to be skinned, and I gritted my teeth and started helping Dr. Rust with the unsavory task. Due to the decomposition, we decided to take off all the skin and cartilage and only study the structures beneath. I began to cut off her right ear. Not many things bother me, but I looked up at Dr. Rust and said, “This is really hard.”
I can’t really explain very well, but there is something very very psychologically difficult about cutting off parts of a person’s body, especially on their face, even if they are very dead. I had to remove part of her nose, and cut around her lips, and it was one of those hours that is very sober and you try not to crack too many jokes but you have to crack a few because you know you’ll spazz out if you don’t.
All of us were exhausted, physically and emotionally, before the end of lab, and I asked Dr. Rust if we could end early. It was pouring rain outside by this time and we de-gowned and scrubbed and stood in the entrance-way, looking out at the rain and not wanting to go into it. My shorts were in a sopping heap outside the door and I struggled into them. We had planned on going shopping as I was out of food, but the man who was supposed to pick us up decided it was raining too hard, so we’d have to wait for another day. Brendan and Vem and I had planned to go running after class, too, but Vem was getting over a cold so they decided not to go. All of this had put me in a foul mood.
I started walking back towards our house, and the rain was pouring down harder now. The road was covered in water and by the time we made it back, we were soaking wet. You know those times when you feel like yelling swear words or hitting something? I decided that I would go run it off, forget about the rain since I was already wet. I put on my running shoes and headed out into the downpour. At first it felt amazing. Within a few minutes I was soaked to the bone and I splashed through the puddles and sprinted down the road. It began to rain harder and for the first time in two weeks, I felt wonderfully cool. Every few minutes the sky would light up and then crash with thunder. I ran and ran and ran, a long way. I ran down to the main road and down it for a mile or so, and finally stopped at the top of a big hill overlooking the ocean. There was no one in sight and I stood there, looking at the bleak grayness.

I had to pee. Of course there were no bathrooms in sight. You probably know what’s coming. My mind flashed back to what I had said to Vem and I thought, hey, that’s not a bad idea. So yes, dear reader, I stood at the side of a deserted road in the sprinkling rain and peed. And it was then that I heard a car engine start beside me. I turned with a gasp to see that the empty car next to me was really full. The couple in the front seat looked at me very coldly, and then they reversed and pulled out onto the road, driving away. I thought I could just die right then and there. I wondered if Antiguans get arrested for public urination, and if they would report me. I wondered if they had turned to each other and said, “Is that girl really peeing right in front of our car?”

Well, I turned around and started running home. I ran and ran. The rain grew harder. The wind picked up. Suddenly the road in front of me seemed to disappear. There was nothing but rushing water. I was up to my ankles, no, I was up to my knees. I tried to keep running, but had to slow to a walk. After a while the rain began to pour so hard that it was stinging my body everywhere it hit. I couldn’t see a thing. I turned my back to it and huddled over, praying that it would stop so I could keep going. I still had over a kilometer to go. The wind was so strong I thought it would blow me over. Finally the gust let up a bit and I turned and kept going. The water was rising fast, and it was flowing across the road carrying rocks and mud and roaring down the side of the hill in turbulent rivers.

A few times I wondered if I would make it. I struggled to stay upright in the river churning around my legs, mud splashing up on me. The university campus is up on a hill a bit, so when I finally got there I managed to climb out of the water. I knew that everyone else would be huddled up in their rooms, so I stopped by the cafeteria, looking like a drowned rat, and picked up the food they had ordered for dinner. I hadn’t ordered any because I’d thought we would go shopping.
When I got back to our bungalow the doors were open and everyone was talking. My roommate came out.
“Everyone’s rooms are flooding!” I ran to our doorway and the water had just stopped coursing in the back wall and was puddling everywhere, half of the room was covered. Shomaila had frantically thrown towels and bathmats all over but the brown mud was everywhere. Outside, the rain was still pouring.
“My clothes!” I shouted to Shomaila. “Can you get my clothes out of the closet!” Shomaila had unplugged our computers and had tried to get things off the floor, but she hadn’t known that I kept my clothes folded on the floor in the closet. She ran to get them while I went outside and behind our house to see what I could do.

The workmen who had been repairing our broken pipes had left the earth open and there was mud everywhere, with rivers rushing through it. I got right down in the dirt and wrestled rocks and chunks of grass out of the way to divert the water away from the back of the house and down the side of the house instead. The ground was soft and suddenly I sank up to my knees in the mud. It was like quicksand. I managed to get out and Shomaila was standing under the porch watching.

“Heather, all your clothes are soaked through!” She called. “I’m really sorry!”
I finished throwing mud and rocks around. The rain seemed to be letting up a bit. Apparently the water had stopped coming in through the walls.
I walked a few steps and looked down at my mud-spattered legs and now-brown shoes. I sat down on the stairs of the house, and after Shomaila had gone inside I put my head in my hands and I cried, the rain coursing down my face.
I had no dry clothes. I had no food. I was exhausted and filthy and the skies had opened up and were dumping everything on me. I felt very low.
What can you do? I was shivering with the cold and after a while I thought about how I didn’t want to be a quitter and give up, I wanted to be a finisher and a winner in life. If I let this get me down, what kind of an example would I be setting for everyone else? There was always hope. Hope is not about outside circumstances. Hope is about who God is, and that he never changes. He is always good. He is always there.
I took my clothes off on the porch and went into our room, wrapping up in a sarong. Shomaila and I used our wash basin and mopped up the floor. I rinsed out my clothes and Nikki found something that would work for another clothesline and I hung up all my clothes to dry. I showered all the mud off and found one dry pair of underwear and a sundress and Vem gave me a shirt. I heated up some cold pasta and sat on my bed underneath the hanging clothes. My room looks like a Laundromat, there are clothes and towels everywhere. The roof was leaking down the wall, too, so we moved the furniture away from it and stacked our books on the beds and tried to dry everything off with paper towels.
You know what? It’s okay. This is real life. It’s not always easy, and it’s not always fun. But God is still good. And I’m still hanging on, even though I don’t have anything to wear or eat tomorrow. I know that it will work out, somehow.

Falling in love with Nellie

Well, for starters, Uncle Chris was the only one who got the completely right answer about the plural of Mongoose, so I owe him coffee (sometime in November?)
Now if you could just tell me the plural of giant tarantulas, because that's what we have over here. And not just a plurality of tarantulas, but lizards (I finally caught one today but he left me his wriggling tail and ran off), frogs, purple jellyfish (apparently they don't sting), mosquitos, termites, ants and one cute black kitty that I glimpsed today.
And then there are the maggots on Nellie. One mustn't forget Nellie. Yesterday I leaned to close to her and some of her body fluid soaked through my paper gown and through my tank top and onto my stomach. When I de-gowned after the lab I was horrified. I scrubbed the shirt with plenty of soap and hung it to dry, but the next day the stain was still there, not to mention the smell. Today we spent another several hours with her and while Brendan and I were peeling the skin off her arm, a chunk of flesh flew up and landed right on the spot between my gloved hand and my sleeve, right on my skin.
The whole dissection stopped. Brendan took his forceps and gently lifted it off of my arm. I considered going to wash right away, but then remembered that the water all across campus was shut off that day because of a burst pipe.
"I'll just suck it up." I told Dr. Rust.
She laughed. "I hope you'all don't do that."
Way to ellicit the gag reflex.
"You really like Nellie, don't you?" Vem joked with me.
"No, Nellie really likes me." I answered, thinking about my stained shirt and how I was going to get it clean.
Hours later we were working on the thorax (chest area) and I helped Dr. Rust cut the ribs so we could lift the chest off. Funnily enough, I think I've done the same thing a number of times with ducks, so I was familiar with where to cut. I wondered if all that duck cleaning would ever come in handy, and it certainly has.
There, underneath the rib cage, was the heart inside its pericardial sac, a glistening fat blob that was just waiting to be opened up. I could feel myself getting excited and after a long time of listening to Dr. Rust explain things about the chest I could hold it in no longer.
"Please, please, please can I open it up?"
"All right, Heather." She laughed, "Go on ahead."
I felt like a heart surgeon operating on a patient. I took my forceps and scissors and gently cut through the pericardial membrane, explaining in a calm voice about the different layers to my classmates. We lifted out the heart carefully and poked and prodded and examined the enlarged blood vessels leading to it and other signs that poor Nellie had been a very sick woman indeed. She even had a pacemaker implanted in her chest, and so we carefully worked on extracting it so we could follow the leads into her heart.
By the time we finished for the day the only word to describe it was carnage. We wrapped Nellie up and de-gowned and went outside into the hot sunshine. Behind one of the bungalows I found a water resevoir with a tap on the side of it, so we scrubbed ourselves there before going for dinner.
I know it might seem morbid to some of you, but seeing inside Nellie's chest today and touching her collapsed lung and cutting her heart out gave me the most wonderful feeling in the world. I haven't felt it for a long time, but I remember it well. Four years ago when I was taking my first biology class at TWU I snuck into the lab after it was closed, and I took a pin and poked a hole in my finger. I made my own blood smear and slid the slide under the microscope before focusing the lens. There before my eyes were my own red blood cells, swimming around like little flat donuts. I remember crying.
Over the last few years I've wondered again and again if this is what I was meant to do, to be a doctor. I tried to explain to people why it was different than being a nurse, and inside myself I wondered if it really was, and if I'd really like it.
I have to tell you, despite some lousy moments, I absolutely love it so far. I'm probably just crying because I'm overtired now, but this is one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done in my life. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea, and I'm glad about that, because someone has to fall in love with fixing cars and cooking and working with computers and teaching school and managing businesses. We all have something to do, and thank God it's different for each of us.

Mongoose

I forgot to add..... here's a trivia for you: WITHOUT looking it up in the dictionary, internet or any kind of book, the first person to tell me what the plural of Mongoose is, I'll buy you coffee next time I'm in town. Remember, no looking it up. This is something you have to come up with out of your own gray cells. I can't for the life of me figure it out... Mongeese? Mongooses? Mongi? At any rate, there's a lot of them over here, they live under my house and apparently occasionally get in through the hole under the bathroom sink.

Rolling with the punches

When I started my cadaver lab, my instructor told us how some of her students had become vegetarians after the experience. I didn’t think much of that. It didn’t gross me out very much (aside from the episode where Nellie’s fat landed between my eyes). After a few days the smell wasn’t that bad, and I’m used to cleaning animals that Dad’s hunted, so I could totally handle it.

So we’ve been in the lab every day for hours, becoming intimately acquainted with every little nerve and artery and vein of Nellie’s body. The unfortunate truth is that she is decomposing before our very eyes; faster than we can even dissect. For those of you who aren’t interested in medical things, the only words I can think of to describe it, is horrendously gross, like out of a disgusting horror movie. Tomorrow I’m going to help Dr. Rust amputate her legs to try to stem the spread of mold.

But I was doing fine with it, until I sat down to eat dinner. I had a dish from the cafeteria with rice and cooked beef. As I stirred it around in my bowl I saw a chunk of fat on a piece of meat. Then next to that, a piece of muscular fascia. It looked exactly like the piece of fascia I’d pulled off of Nellie’s thigh. The bones were porous and the sauce the meat was in was nearly the same color as Nellie’s decomposing flesh. I tell you, I’ve never had less of an appetite for something before. But I managed to choke down a bit of it because I was so hungry, before tossing the rest of it into the garbage.

This weekend after a grueling 6-day, 14-hour a day week, I went out with 3 classmates and let off a bit of steam for the evening. (To make a long story short, the end result was throwing up more times in one night than I ever have before). But the next day I slept in and felt fine, then studied inside while hurricane Melissa drenched the island. In the afternoon I took my Sabbath and I walked the 10 kilometers down the muddy dirt roads and back to the nearest beach. I sat watching the surf and the wind bending the palm trees and black clouds rolling in across the ocean, and talked to God.

In the evening we had all been invited to Dr. Gilbert’s house for a BBQ. We sat on the porch of his little verandah and swatted mosquitoes and ate real food for the first time since getting to Antigua. I know it’s just food, but a couple of us were close to tears, we were so blessed. I suppose there’s no way to describe it, but if you ever spend two weeks eating ant-infested rice and moldy bread and greasy chunks of meat that looks like your cadaver, you’ll know what I mean. We ate and laughed and talked as late as was possibly polite.

I thought, it’s good to be alive. It’s hard, and it’s good. You never know what’s going to happen, but it’s always different than expected. I suddenly had a roommate show up yesterday, to my surprise. (She is a new student who has joined our class.) I helped her set up a mosquito net and fell asleep with her still studying late into the night, light on above me. Today I washed laundry and hung it out, then had to rescue it when it started to pour again. Our drains have backed up, so we have to turn the cold shower to a trickle and then wait awhile before flushing the toilet. The water is not drinkable here, but Nikki has a filter and we take turns filling up water bottles and putting them in the fridge.

Dr. Rust, our outrageous Louisianan professor who keeps a shotgun in her truck and told us not to faint in the lab because she wasn’t going to pick us up off the dirty floor, she said to me the other day that the only way to survive here was to learn to “roll with the punches”.

She was absolutely right. Paul said it a little bit differently in the Bible, but the same kind of idea: “…I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength.” (Phil 4:11)

As for the parrot outside my window that’s really a frog, I decided to stop being annoyed by him and I nick-named him Prince. Since I can’t get rid of him, I might as well make him my friend.

I wish I could share my experiences with you, not the bad ones but the beautiful ones like watching the sun come up in the morning from my porch, and seeing little red lizards skitter over the railing, and laughing together at silly jokes in class. I miss you all a lot.