Falling in love with Jesus

On Friday night I opened my email to find a message from my Mom saying my Grampa had suddenly died. I read it twice and then I walked slowly onto the verandah and sat down against the wall. Last week we’d had classes about death and dying and the grief response, but what is it like in real life? I didn’t know my grampa as well as I’d liked. Just before I went to Antigua I visited him and we sat and talked together and he had taped photos of my graduation on his wall. I knew he was proud of me. When we said goodbye he’d kissed me and I’d told him, I love you Grampa. I love you too, Heather, he’d said.
My housemate Burton was sitting on the porch and I told him about the email. And then I cried. We talked for a while and prayed together, and after awhile I went for a walk, talked some more to God. I felt so small. What am I doing in this foreign country all alone (well, sort of), studying medicine, cooking pasta in a rice cooker and chasing cockroaches out of my bed? (And yes, I do have cockroaches in my room to add to all the other little animals.)
I was still getting over a stomach upset that lasted three days, and feeling a little stressed about the volume of homework I was behind on. (Not to mention the fact that I’ve developed tendonitis from taking too many notes).
I walked up the hill with grass waving in the breeze, the stars bursting out of the night sky and the sound of cicadas and birds like a growing symphony. I stood on the top of the hill and lifted my arms up to the sky.

O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord. You hem me in- behind and in front. You have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too high for me to attain.

On Sunday morning I drove with Burton and Kingsley into St. John’s (the city) to go to church. The church was a tin-roofed building with no walls, which made it a little cooler in the hot sun. We stood there and sang and worshipped and then sat and listened to the pastor preach about a man in the bible that Jesus gave a new lease in life to. A new year (2008!), a new creation, a new hope. A new purity, a new mission, a new peace.
In the afternoon we took our books to the beach, and in the evening I washed laundry and cooked dinner. I spread a sarong over a little bedside table and made wraps (including some awesome guacamole) and served dinner to my housemates. We’d bought some icecream and we sat in the fading light and tried to eat it quickly before it all melted. What can I say?
It is as if God’s arms have been wrapped around me in a giant hug, and he is saying, I love you too, Heather.
A song we sang on Sunday keeps coming back to me.
You are great, you do miracles so great, there is no one else like you, there is no one else like you.

Photos, finally

Well, just to let you all know that you can view some new pictures of my adventures in Antigua on facebook. (And if you're not on facebook yet, you should be!)

Body donation

Yesterday we had a biochemistry final that ended early, so my class joined another class in the anatomy lab. Although we don’t have an anatomy lab this semester, most of the students in my module loved the whole cadaver experience and so we begged to be let in to the lab. Dr. Rust was more than happy for us to join in.
The new class has a funny looking cadaver. They named her Miss Lady, and she is short and very fat. Despite the thick layer of fat over her abdomen and chest (It was pretty tough to find her breasts, they kind of disappeared into the fat), her thorax (chest cage) was tiny.
We gloved and masked up and found scalpels and joined in the dissection. The other class had opened the thorax (chest cavity) and had begun on the head and neck. They had removed Miss Lady’s skin and were cutting out the veins, arteries and nerves of the face. Miss Lady had been the recipient of a triple bypass (she had additional arteries grafted onto the side of her heart to supply the heart muscle as there had been a blockage.) Dr. Rust held up the heart.
“Would you’all look at this? This poor lady has the biggest heart I’ve ever seen.”

I kid you not, this lady’s heart was the size of a small football. Because of poor blood supply to the heart muscle, the muscle increases in size to compensate, almost closing over one of the chambers of the heart.
“Ma’am, can you take a picture?” Burton had picked up the heart and was holding it like a football.
We took photos (I’m still unsure over how unethical this really is!) and then I picked up a scalpel and started dissecting out one of Miss Lady’s nipples. Most of the mammary (milk) tissue had atrophied (died and shrunk down) and been replaced by fat cells, but I managed to find some of the milk ducts, which appeared as thready white lines in the tissue.
Her right lung looked normal enough, but her left lung had suffered from the overgrowth of her heart and it had been compressed so it was only half the size of the right lung. The skin and fat layers had been taken off of her arms and the tiny muscles stood out starkly. She may have been fat, but she certainly wasn’t strong.
The skin of the hand is very tough (believe it or not!) and on the palms it is held down by a strong fibrous layer, so it is difficult to remove it. Her fingernails had the remnants of a French manicure, and her long slender fingers were curled up against the table.

“How come you’re not cutting?” I asked Rachel, who was standing to the side with her gloved hands held away from her body.
“I already did some.” She said.
The look on her face said “You actually expect me to do more than just perfunctory incision with my scalpel?”
Rachel will be a good gynecologist, not a surgeon…..
Later that night I lay in bed and couldn’t stop thinking about Miss Lady. I’ve always intended to donate my body to medical research, and I imagined myself lying on the table in the lab with ten students cutting into me and discussing the amount of hair on my body and the size of my heart and what had happened to my breasts. It wasn’t a fun thought.
But the fact is, I have no use for my body after I die. It’s just going to rot in the ground…. Or rot on a table. Either way it’s not going to last, but the least I can do is provide learning for some inquisitive students somewhere. And hopefully that gift of knowledge will save someone else’s life further down the road.

Elvis, ice shots and thunderstorms

I’ve had such a strange and wonderful weekend all at the same time.
Saturday night after studying all week, I went out with most of my classmates and Dr. Gilbert to let off some steam. We started at Club Havana in Falmouth Bay, and the first crazy thing was a giant block of ice (about 2x3 feet) with a groove cut in it. The idea is to stand with your mouth against it, and someone pours a shot of alcohol into the groove and you have to catch it in your mouth. Well, you guessed it, I couldn’t resist.
I don’t think I swallowed the whole shot, but my mouth and throat were burning just the same for ages.
The next place we went, The Mad Mongoose, was full of bored young male tourists and since our group was mostly girls, they seemed happy to see us. We sat around a round table with our professors and talked and laughed, and lo and behold, Elvis showed up.
He was wearing the whole white spangled suit with the poofy hair and he came and took pictures with some of the girls. Then he invited us to come to a party on his yacht which was moored in the harbor. I actually would have rather gone to bed, of course….. On the way to the yacht Dr. Gilbert gave us a stern lecture.
“Now, there may be some shady characters at this party- drugs and drinking and all that. I want you all to stick together and be very, very careful.”
The yacht was bigger than a hotel. A staff member greeted us as we walked up the fiberoptic-lit gangplank and let us up winding polished pine staircases, until we reached the fourth floor. There was an enormous hot tub shimmering under the stars, and a disco ball casting coloured lights through the huge room. A few people were behind a black and chrome bar and they served us drinks and turned up the music. Everyone started dancing and talking. I walked to the prow of the boat with Rachel (my classmate) and we could see the entire harbor from our vantage point, lit up with lights from the boats and the houses glowing on the hillsides. It was quite majestic. We had a great time on the yacht until we got kicked off about 40 minutes later…..

So that was Saturday….. Sunday morning I went with Burton and Kingsley to take Kingsley to the airport as he had to go back to the States for a couple of days. Kingsley is a wonderful guy, full of the Holy Spirit, although I sometimes have a hard time understanding his thick Nigerian accent. We prayed and sang all the way to the airport (about an hour’s drive) and said goodbye to him. Then Burton and I proceeded to drive around for about two hours, completely lost. When we finally made it back to the campus we packed up our things and went with some of the others to the beach. At the beach it rained on and off, but it was still glorious. I swam about a quarter of a mile out to a tall ship and watched the pelicans swooping and perching on the masts. When we came back later we studied for a bit and then went out to get some groceries, including a bucket of ice cream. I cooked dinner for my housemates and then we invited all the other students and sat and had ice cream in my room. (Rum and raisin, of course)

All night long it rained, and not just rained, it poured. Every few minutes a flash of lightening would light up my whole room. The sound on the tin roofs was deafening, but I was tired enough to sleep most of the night anyway. I got up super early this morning and looked worriedly out my windows. The water level was rising quite high around my house, and it wasn’t letting up. Well, there wasn’t much to do.

I decided to go for a rain dance. I went outside in my little nightgown and ran out onto the road. There was no one around and I danced and whirled and ran in the rain until I was soaked. The rain was cold and wonderful and I jumped through the puddles and felt it splash everywhere. Suddenly I heard a voice behind me.
“What are you doing in the rain?”
I turned around with a gasp and one of the security guards was standing there with a funny look on his face. I suddenly realized how crazy it must seem to him to see a girl dancing in the rain in the wee hours of the morning in her undergarments. I didn’t stop to talk, I just booked it as fast as I could back to my house. I ran up the long stairway and ran across the verandah but unfortunately the verandah was much slipperier than I’d remembered. I totally wiped out, and as I fell I grabbed at one of the metal chairs on the porch and it came crashing down after me. I hit my head against the railing and landed on my back on the porch in a huge puddle.
I jumped up and ran into my room, slamming the door. Good heavens. Hopefully I wouldn’t run into that security guard again.

Well, I just finished an exam and it is still raining. The thunder is so loud that it’s hard to hear myself think. Parts of the campus look like a lake. We’ve moved our things off the floor in preparation for a flood, but I am hoping it won’t come to that.
Adventure, I told one of my classmates yesterday, this is an adventure.
Whenever we open ourselves up to God to allow him to work in our lives, we can expect surprising things to happen. Sometimes they are mundane, sometimes they are tragic, sometimes they are wonderful.
Oh…. And by the way, I am still suffering from the 90 pushups I did the other night.

A different kind of problem

The wonderful and crazy thing about Antigua is the kind of problems I have here. Back home my problems seemed fairly mundane: I'm worried about money. It's raining so I can't forget my umbrella. I'm sick of studying by myself. I wish we weren't having fish for dinner.

But there is such a different set of problems here. For example, I think I just sat on a pile of goat poop when I lay down in the grass. Uh oh, I forgot to filter a jug of rainwater for tomorrow morning. Can I recall the 20 essential amino acids for my test tomorrow? Oh no, I locked my keys in my room and there are no spares and the maintenance guy is gone for the weekend. (Thankfully one of my housemates is an expert lock picker.)
Last night I had a funny sort of problem. After classes, which ended at 6:30, I went with my classmate Burton to go get some groceries. By the time we got back it was dark and I was hot and sticky and tired. While I put my rice cooker on to boil, I hopped in the shower. I was in the shower, enjoying the cold trickle, when suddenly the water doubled in velocity and just shot out the nozzle. I tried to turn it off. No such luck. I rinsed off and got off, turning the handle as far as I could. That old shower was still going. I knocked on the wall to the room next to me.
"Excuse me Burton, could you come help me turn off my shower?"
"Sure, ma'am."
(These Americans all say ma'am and sir all the time like it's a proper name.)
Burton used to be a football player and he's got guns that would make Chuck Norris jealous. He squeezed into the little 2x2 bathroom and wrestled with the shower fixture for a minute.
"That's about as far as I can get it, ma'am."
The darned shower was still on. How on earth does that happen? So far here in Antigua I've only had the problem of the water not turning on.
Oh well. i lay in bed last night listening to it trickle, but only for a moment. Between the little frog who lives outside my door, the long classes, the heat and a bit of jetlag, I haven't slept a full night since I got here. Which is not necessarily a bad thing- if I don't sleep well for long enough, pretty soon I sleep like a baby cause wherever I put my head down I'm just gone.
Sort of like in Biochemistry class yesterday. Except there I wasn't lying down, I was just sitting there with my mouth hanging open.

Antiguan Randomness

Well, this is just a quick update on how things are going here.

1. I finally found a tarantula (the biggest, hairiest thing I've ever seen) and actually touched it, but did not catch it to bring home (sorry Alpha).
2. I did get heatstroke but am over it now
3. The reason I am over it is because I decided to pay the extra $200 and get an airconditioned room
4. There are 2 other christians here and one of them has a car and wants to drive to church with me. Yayyyyy!!!
5. The walls between our rooms are so thin I can hear my housemate listen to his ipod, plug in his computer, go pee and get into bed. (and his cellphone ringing at 2:30 in the morning)
6. I was showing off for the class the other day with my little 'I can drop a lightbulb and not break it' trick, and the lightbulb actually broke.
7. I started my running again at 6:30 this morning
8. We have no hot water, but we do finally have electricity, so I'm not complaining.
9. I am officially living in one of the most beautiful places in the world.

lots of love Heather

Ahhhh, Antigua

I forgot how wonderful it is here. Somehow in the interval of the last few months, my mind had been occupied with the hard things- the hurricanes and ant infestations and sunburns and long days studying and sleep deprivation and feeling all alone as the only Christian, all those things.

But when I got off the plane- actually, after I'd made it through the 2 hour line-up in customs, and I got in a taxi headed towards the university, I suddenly remembered.
The evening sun was streaking the horizon with pink and orange and it was warm and beautiful. We came over the crest of a hill near the university and suddenly there was the ocean, blue-green and dotted with sailboats. The hibiscus and oleanders are all in bloom and I feel as if I've walked back into paradise, leaving cold, rainy Vancouver behind. I felt like I'd come home.
Last night I unpacked my bags and sat on the verandah talking with some of my classmates by the light of the stars and a mosquito coil. When I tumbled into bed, it was listening to the sounds of birds and crickets and the breeze in the trees.
This morning the sun woke me up and after we'd done a few things I took my red umbrella and walked to the beach. Halfway there we stopped under an overhang to wait for a temporary shower to pass by, and then we kept on our way. What can I say about the beach? Magnificent. I am pink from head to toe (almost), but it was so worth it.
I feel a little guilty saying it, but it seems easier to worship and praise God when I am surrounded by such stunning beauty. I can look at the crashing waves and say, wow, God, in wisdom you made all this. I can look at the brilliant pink of the oleanders and bouganvilia and say, wow, God, this is such an amazing expression of your love for us.
It is in times of difficulty that our love for God is really tested, but for now I am content to bask in the glory of the paradise around me and just say thank you to him.

Heather Street

As some of you may know, I'm heading back to Antigua this week to continue my studies. The last few days I've been running lots of errands and trying to get organized to go. I found myself, just by chance today, at the very beginning of Heather street.
I've always thought it would be cool to drive down the street that bears my name, from beginning to end. It's on my list of things to do before I die, and I anticipated finding some deep spiritual meaning in the stores and houses that would be found on my street. Well, I looked at the street sign and thought, why not today?
Heather St. begins in Vancouver in a sort of seedy area of town. The first couple of blocks are extremely steep and pass by an auto repair shop, a strip mall and run-down houses. I was surprised how steep it was and how full of potholes. After Broadway it was still uphill, but not quite as much. I'm pleased to announce that Heather st. is a bicycle route almost the whole way, although there were several large detours in the way. I drove past Vancouver General Hospital, a book store, the BC Cancer Agency, and lovely streets with trees drooping over the sidewalk with quaint houses perched behind them.
And it kept going up. I had to take a detour around some construction and nearly got lost in the process, but found Heather st. again and kept going. Speedbumps. School zones. (let me tell you, if I made the road, I would've kept the speed limit at 50 minimum)
I thought about Heather st. as a metaphor for my life. It's amazing how many detours I had to take, and how many potholes there were. So far in my life it has been a series of detours: every time I think I've figured out where I'm going, my plans are changed. And most of the time it seems to be going uphill.
A while ago I complained to my mom, "Does life always go uphill? Is it always this hard, or does it level out?"
It is a strange thing, but as I passed block upon block and was still going up, I began to feel discouraged. Heather St. climbed higher and higher and suddenly at 24th avenue the road leveled a bit and I could see it stretching out as far as the eye could see, gradually climbing upward. I felt tears pooling in my eyes. (Is it a silly thing to cry over a street?)
I guess I always assumed that life would be easy. I thought I would work hard at things and then I'd break through into the 'good life' and everything would be smooth sailing. And yes, there have been days or months or years when it felt like smooth sailing, but a lot of the time I feel like I am fighting to get up a hill that doesn't want to be climbed.
The road climbed until 37th avenue. I passed by two hospitals, the RCMP headquarters, two schools, two lovely parks (one called Heather Park!), beautiful houses and run-down houses, and then finally the road leveled out and even, towards the end, it went down a little.
But the most amazing thing was when I got to the top of the hill. From there, I could see for miles. And it was beautiful.
If life was all downhill, all easy, all fun and games, I would never have a chance to build character. I would never have the opportunity to sit at the top of a hill (with a bunch of cars honking behind me!) and look at how far I've come and see the future stretching before me with so much adventure. Without some difficulty, without some suffering, it is impossible to experience joy. Real joy and real hope and real adventure and real character are all found on the windy, potholed, uphill roads, not the easy ones where you can go as fast as you want. Real beauty is found in the school zones of life- where I'm forced to slow down and wait and in the process my eyes are opened to everything else around me.
At any rate, I'm excited to go back to Antigua, but excited with a certain degree of trepidation. I'm confident that there are some serious challenges awaiting me (Hey, a block of Heather st. was closed and I had to sneak through a construction zone to get by). But also some serious joy awaiting me, just around the corner. And maybe when I get to the top of this hill, maybe I'll be able to see, as far as the eye can see.

Floating in a murky sea

The last couple of weeks have been so busy. I worked a couple of night shifts and a couple of day shifts and between christmas and new year's eve I didn't sleep more than 3 or 4 hours a night for a week. Behind on homework. Low on money so still trying to work. Riding my bike to work in the snow cause I didn't have change for the bus.
I felt like I was floating in a murky sea, some silly little things making me cry and other important things just feeling flat and emotionless. I couldn't stop thinking about how nice it would be to put my head on my pillow and close my eyes and not wake up for a long, long time.
On New year's eve at about 5 in the morning I'd finally been able to get to bed and my brother Austin woke me up.
"Kiara is throwing up and her stomach hurts. I can't find the tylenol."
Never mind the fact that you shouldn't give tylenol for a stomachache, I told him in a garbled voice that it was called acetaminophen and he should only give her a half pill, not a whole. I heard him a little while later trying to convince her to swallow the pill and I thought, I should get up and go tell him to crush it with jam. Oh, she'll probably just throw it back up on him again anyway.
At some ungodly hour in the morning I got up and drove to the hospital to see my close friend Anna who had been in a serious car accident. I came home a few hours later and helped clean up the house and went out for dinner with my family for my mom's birthday. Then back to the hospital, with my pajamas.
I washed blood out of Anna's hair and helped her with the toilet and other things until 1:30 in the morning. I finally could hardly stand up any longer and I found a reclining chair and collapsed onto it. At 4:30 in the morning I woke up cause she was crying, the morphine had worn off and two broken legs and a broken arm take their toll. I looked at her in the dark as if staring at some strange sea creature in the murky sea of mine. I don't even remember what I said (did I say anything?) I sat on the bed with her until she went for surgery at 7, and then at 8 I left and drove home. I felt sick. I slept on my bed for an hour or two and then I had errands to run and homework.
Last night I'd finally had enough. I'd taken enough advil and tried long enough to make sense of the open pages of my textbook. Everything was swimming in my brain. I called it a day at 10:30.
The most amazing thing happened. I woke up this morning at 10:30, after having slept for almost 12 hours. (Which I never ever do). Never mind the fact that I was late for my appointments today. I felt human again, as if I'd been dragged out of that murky sea and left to dry on the bank until I woke up alive again.
I'm only in my first year of medical school. How will I do in a couple of years when it really starts to heat up?
Do you not know, have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak. Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.