An impressively bad day

When my alarm clock went off this morning after only 5 hours of tormented sleep, I should have just turned it off and kept sleeping. In fact, if I’d known what the day might hold I may have done just so.
I’m too exhausted to write beautiful sentences so I’ll just make this blog entry in point form and you can construct your own story of my day.

1. Lay in bed too long and got up late with a kink in my neck making it impossible to turn to the right.
2. Had an argument with Burton at breakfast that ended up making us both late for school.
3. The power went out halfway through my first morning class. I hung around with some classmates until we were sure it wasn’t coming back on. I had to pee and decided to feel my way into the pitch black ladies room. I found the toilet fine but as I squatted over it suddenly felt myself getting sprayed all over and realized that the lid was down and I was peeing all over the toilet, the floor and myself. Washed my arms and legs and just walked right out of the bathroom.
4. Discovered that Burton had left without me and I could not find him anywhere or get hold of him on the phone.
5. Hitched a ride to my house on the back of Vem’s motorbike, very nearly crashing into a goat on the way.
6. Arrived at home to realize Burton was not there and he had the house keys.
7. Went back to school and still could not find him. Power was still off, air conditioning was off, and internet was off.
8. Got another ride back home on the back of Vem’s bike and almost crashed in a large pothole and then into an oncoming van.
9. Managed to dislodge a screen off one of the ground-floor windows, and after standing on top of stacked cinder blocks, attempted to slide between the horizontal panes of glass. Amazingly it worked and I broke into my own house for the second time, landing on my housemate’s bed.
10. Burton arrived home from having been at the beach. Had another large argument. He wisely decided to pacify me by driving me back to the beach for half an hour before our next class.
11. At the beach I decided to climb out on some rocks jutting out onto the water. While standing there, a massive wave came and threw me up in the air and down against the rocks. I got gashes all over both legs and feet, right thigh and butt, right arm and hand and the kink in the neck got way worse. Drove home very quickly but since we had class, did not have time to suture them up and just covered everything with bandages and went to school.
12. During a break was told by a classmate that I could never make it as a model.
13. Sat in class on my left hip with blood pooling all over my feet and suddenly felt my stomach begin to cramp. (I’ve had a stomach problem for a few years- my stomach will suddenly start having excruciating pain that is so bad it usually makes me throw up. I’ve been for tests and nothing turned up. Sometimes it lasts a few hours, sometimes a day or two.)
14. Left class early, came home and washed my war wounds and realized it was too late to put stitches in as they had already started to coagulate a bit. Realized both sinks were full of dishes. Lay down on the couch but couldn't sleep.
    
15. Did I mention I have pms? And that I haven’t slept a full night since I got to Antigua?
16. God, are you trying to say something to me? Whatever it is, I’m listening.

The fast and the furious

Saturday night Burton and I had a disagreement. We had planned to go the beach on Sunday, and were trying to decide what beach to go to. By a long shot my favorite beach on the island is Half moon Bay. It is a wide empty beach without a reef to break the waves, so they roll into shore about 6 or 8 feet high and when they crash the spray goes forever. The wind is so strong it kicks up the sand and its impossible to read or sleep. The wind howls. If you venture into the water you will be turned upside down by the waves and thrown into the ground like a matchstick. I had climbed onto rocks on the sides of the beach and when the waves hit the bottom and spray up 10 meters or so, you get soaked. It is wild and glorious and fierce and it’s like standing in the middle of a hurricane.
Burton likes Turner beach. It is in a little bay and is calm with gentle waves lapping at the shore. The water is clear and you can snorkel, or lay in the sun with palm trees above you and read or sleep. It is peaceful and still and is like sitting in a quiet garden.
We had a fundamental clash of personalities and the argument finally ended with me agreeing to go to Turner beach.
The beach was so beautiful it took my breath away. I lay in the sun and read, and swam in the clear water, and tried snorkeling for the first time. Under the water it was like a whole new world. I saw little blue and yellow fish, striped clown fish, long skinny silver ones, fat white ones, crabs and corals and beautiful seaweed. I could have stayed under there all day.
Then I was walking along the beach and saw a little gaff-rigged sailboat. I found the owner and offered him $10 to let me take it out. We pushed it out with Burton at the rudder. Out from shore it was gusty and there was a stiff breeze and pretty soon we were scooting along the waves with a spray coming up. Burton hadn’t really sailed before and was a bit nervous and was trying to keep the boat flat and kept steering into the wind to slow down. I think the best part of sailing is at the fastest speed, getting soaked by the spray and hiked out as far as possible. So I was pulling in the sail as tight as it would go and shouting for Burton to steer right. To make a long story short, the sail ended with us shouting at each other and turning on a jibe and the boat capsizing and Burton falling off and electing to swim back to shore rather than sail with me.

But I had a scripture shared with me on Sunday. I Kings 19:11-13 is the story of Elijah hearing God speak.
“The Lord said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?”
Last night I was lying in bed and outside was a terrific storm pounding against my windows and the wind howling. I felt my heart racing and I wanted to get out of bed and go be part of the storm. I kept thinking about the story of Elijah. He was listening to hear God, and he expected God to be in a wild storm or an earthquake or a fire. But God actually waited for silence and calm before he spoke to Elijah. It’s probably partly due to the way I was raised and the way my family is, but I’ve always looked for the wildest and most exciting and fastest things. I want to climb to the very top or go to the very edge. I love storms and I love competing and fighting.
But God was not in the wild, fierce, angry storm. He came in the silence, when there was nothing to hear but him. He spoke when Elijah stopped trying so hard.
In many ways our lives are completely chaotic. Yet somewhere in the middle, if we still and quiet our hearts like little children, when we listen to the silence instead of trying to fill it with shouting, God speaks to us.
So who knows. I was looking for the wildness at Half moon bay to grab hold of my heart and fight with me. Yet in the quiet at Turner beach I heard God speak to me. I would’ve missed seeing little blue and yellow fish and sleeping under a palm tree and sailing on a little boat. I would have missed learning how to hear God in the silence.

Down in the depths

The last few days have been an exhausting mixture of studying, adventure, surprising new developments and a very steep learning curve. Sometimes that learning curve is exponential.
Several days ago I paid another visit to the bat cave. Dr. Gilbert, one of my professors, had met a man who is one of the owners of St. James Club, the most exclusive resort in the Caribbean. They got to talking about historical sites and Dr. Gilbert invited to take Arnold to the bat cave. Then in a panic Dr. Gilbert came to me for help, since I was the only person he knew who had actually been there.
I got flashlights and face masks and we met late one afternoon and headed for the bat cave. Dr. Koepsell, my ethics professor, and Burton also came with us. We waded down the overgrown trail and it was the funniest thing ever to see Dr. Gilbert, Dr. Koepsell and Arnold in their white slacks and shirts, mopping their foreheads and struggling to pick through the thorn bushes.
We got to the cave, put on our masks and began to ascend. Dr. Gilbert and Dr. Koepsell stayed at the entrance to the cave, but Arnold was intrepid and wanted to go in farther. Him and Burton and I picked our way through the mounds of bat waste and goat skeletons and took pictures, shining our weak lights into the inky blackness. There were too many thousands of bats to count and they hung in rows on the roof of the cave, fluttering up and screeching when we shone light on them. I picked my way through the cave, trying to step on rocks and not sink a foot into the bat poop. Arnold was entranced by the cave and wanted to go farther, which of course meant Burton and I had to follow. We went deep into the darkness….. Finally we found our way to a narrow crevasse in the rocks, and shining our flashlights down the crevasse I could see that it opened up into another large space. The tunnel itself looked about 15 feet long and I thought I could make it.
Our entire bodies were slippery with sweat and caked in filth. Burton and Arnold shone their lights and I slid down the rocks into the crevasse and began to go down the tunnel. It was hard to breathe through my mask. Ahead of me I could hear bats screaming and there was a waver of a breeze. I made it through the tunnel and it opened up into a large cavern. I shone my dim flashlight and as far as I could see the cave went on, and there were hundreds of thousands of bats hanging off the ceiling and fluttering around. I felt like I was in a horror movie.
“How does it look?” I heard a faint voice.
“It’s fine.” I called. “Come on through.”
Arnold is a little man, about my size, and he slipped through the tunnel into the cavern with me. The bats were stirring. Burton started to come through the tunnel and I shone the flashlight down the tunnel so he could see the way. Burton is a big guy- 6’3”, 200 pounds, wide shoulders. Suddenly he stopped, there was sweat glistening on his face and his eyes had a wild look.
“I think I’m stuck”. He said.
He got down onto his hands and knees. It is amazing what panic will do for you. He got through that tunnel into the cavern and he was coated in bat poop and collapsed on a rock and shone his light into the darkness.
“Good Lord.”
You had to have been there, pictures just aren’t enough. We stayed in the cavern for a while but then figured we’d been in the cave long enough and it was time to get out. The bats were becoming more lively and I was starting to feel nervous. I started back down the tunnel. I was halfway through, hunkered down. Suddenly I felt something hit me on the head. I screamed. Another one hit me. I screamed. A third bat hit me on the head and I started to hyperventilate. My light was dying and all around me was inky blackness. There was no way to tell what was up or down, backwards or forwards. I have never experienced darkness like that before. I had to make it out of that tunnel.
“Are you okay?” Burton shouted.
“Yes!” I shouted back, gasping for breath. I started to scramble through the tunnel and I hauled myself up out of the crevasse into the first cavern. The guys followed. I struggled to find footing on the rocks and suddenly I saw something skittering at my feet. I gave a little squeal and jumped. There were tons of them.
“Cockroaches.” Burton said grimly. “Hundreds of them. Just don’t look.”
We made it out of the cave and climbed up into the daylight and stood there, filthy and soaked with sweat. Arnold looked radiant.
Our trip to the bat cave actually turned out to be quite profitable. Arnold gave Dr. Koepsell a room number at the resort and invited him to take out his sailboats whenever he wanted. Yesterday I got out of class early so I went with Dr. Koepsell and took out a Hobie Catamaran around the bay for an hour, surf spraying up and the wind filling our sail.
I’ve done other adventurous things this week- driving into town on an empty gas tank with six people in the car, the island out of power and a rain storm so bad I couldn’t see three or four feet ahead in the road. Volunteering to take blood pressures at a community outreach and finding myself assigned to the counseling station with a sick patient sitting in front of me, and realizing that I was the doctor and had to interpret their lab results and tell them what to do with themselves. Realizing just before school that my roommate’s car tire was flat, and getting down in the dirt with her and struggling to change the tire on the side of the road with a monkey wrench. Putting my shorts on in the morning and discovering a giant cockroach in them. You better believe those shorts came off real fast.
Actually the cockroaches are getting to me. Yesterday we had a guest over and we were all standing by the door and I opened a cupboard and a huge one came out at me (about 4 inches long, including his antennas). I was hardly aware of what I was doing, but suddenly found myself having literally climbed over two big men and was standing on top of the washing machine. My only consolation was that the cockroach attacked them too and seeing a football player dance is pretty funny.
At any rate, there is plenty of adventure here. I’m thankful it’s Saturday because I desperately need a chance to sleep, think, pray and catch up on homework, and tomorrow we have a day off. I know God does not send things our way without giving us grace to handle it, but sometimes the sum of everything feels overwhelming. At least I’m not bored.

Gut reactions

I thought I had finished with gross anatomy when we nailed Nellie May into her coffin and burned our lab clothes. Well, I was wrong. For my neuroscience class we have scheduled lab time and yesterday was our first day. 7:30 in the morning found us outside the anatomy lab.
I took off my clothes and put on an old pair of pants and a top, and then suited up with a paper lab coat, shoe covers, gloves and a mask. Inside the lab the air conditioner unit had sprung a leak and half the floor was flooded.
“Ya’ll don’t slip.” Dr. Rust said in her Southern drawl.
Don’t worry, I thought, I have no intention of contacting this floor with any part of my body.
We spread plastic out on one of the lab benches and I opened up the giant bucket of brains. I lifted them out of the formaldehyde one by one and Vem set them on the table. Whole brains, separate lobes, cerebelli, brain stems, etc. They were slimy and soft and we handled them carefully so as not to damage them.
“All right.” Dr. Rust began. “Now this here is the frontal lobe. These are the temporal lobes, and above them, the parietal lobes. They are separated right here by the Sylvian fissure…”
The formaldehyde was 35% and it began to sting my eyes and burn my throat. It was smoking hot in the lab and after a while I fought to open one of the windows. All of our eyes were watering. The smell had kind of settled and wasn’t too bothersome, but the sight of these mushy gray brains sitting on the table was enough to elicit the gag reflex in the strongest of people. I tried to focus.
We went through all sorts of parts of the brain and poked and prodded, but I hardly remember any of it cause my eyes were stinging. We worked as long as we could and then stumbled outside and took off our clothes. It had been raining outside but it was hot and humid. I walked back to Nikki’s room to wash off and we sat on the porch for a minute, feeling depressed about how gross the lab was.
I know it’s called gross anatomy, but somehow a year ago when I was writing my paper on cadaver research and looking at pictures of sterile labs, I imagined it to be a lot different. But pictures on the internet don’t include the smell. They don’t include the gut reaction you experience when you are holding a scalpel over a body and told to cut out their eyes.
And the gut reaction is really unconscious, uncontrolled, and unexpected. It is not something you plan out, but it is something that you have to plan to deal with. So far I haven’t had any problems dissociating my emotions from working with these dead bodies. Instead of the emotional experience I thought it was going to be, it is glaringly clear that they are not persons- they are just a pile of rotting cells. The only reaction that I’ve experienced has been a visceral reflex due to the smell and the grossness of it. It is not moral repugnance; it is a gut reflex.
But the same feeling- the nausea, the horror- connects to a very different emotion as well. Dr. Rust told us about her 10-month old patient who had been sexually abused. I am beginning to understand my emotions more. It’s not appropriate to wimp out of being in the anatomy lab because I’m grossed out by a slimy brain and putrid flesh. But the rage I feel about a baby who was raped is appropriate. And yes, I need to keep it in while I’m looking after the baby, but afterwards, Dr. Rust told me she has a punching bag that hangs on her porch. It keeps you from having a come apart, she told me. Sometimes you have to do it.

Security guards..... again

2 minutes into the movie I knew that I didn’t want to watch it. I felt bad because my classmate Vem had gone to so much work setting up a movie night for all the students and professors; he had brought snacks and set up chairs and projected the movie on one of the big screens in the classroom. But I realized I didn’t want to watch it.
I got up and walked outside into the cool night air. Of course now I had to wait for my housemate Burton before I could go home, so I decided that in the meantime I would go for a walk.
When I had lived on campus last semester I went for a walk by myself almost every evening, talking to God and looking at the stars and having some alone time. But now that I lived off campus on a narrow deserted road without a security presence, I hadn’t had much of a chance to enjoy the night air.
I meandered down a lane that went behind the school to a yard full of broken-down rusted old trucks and buses, crumbling buildings and buzzing orange lights. It had been my hiding place last semester where I disappeared from the stresses of life. I stood in the overgrown grass for a while and looked up at the shape of the big dipper and the shimmering moon. Suddenly I saw a very interesting looking metal and cement table, about 6 feet high, that was situated right in the middle of the grass and loomed up like an altar under the buzzing orange lights.
I suddenly had the irresistible urge to climb on top of it. I pulled myself up and clambered on top of it, feeling like I was on top of the world. Hey, this was a perfect spot to pray! I knelt down on it and stretched my arms up to the sky and talked to the Lord.
I was deep in prayer when I suddenly happened to open my eyes and glance sideways a bit. There coming down the road directly towards me, to my great surprise, was a security guard. He was walking straight towards me. There seemed to be no good way to pretend I was doing something else. After all, who kneels on top of a giant cement table in the middle of a junkyard in the middle of the night with their arms stretched to the sky?
There was nothing to do but sit there as he approached.
“Hi.” I said when he got close.
“Hi.” He said, looking up at me.
“How are you?” I asked.
“I’m fine.” He answered. In the dark I could only see the whites of his eyes. “I was just wondering how you were, sitting up here?”
“Oh, I’m fine.” I said.
“That’s good.” He answered.
There was an awkward silence.
“Well, I was just checking if you were okay.” He said lamely.
“Yes, thank you.” I answered.
I watched him walk down the road again. He was probably thinking, what a strange girl.
Since I have considerable experience with security guards I have decided to come up with rules for dealing with them. First of all, when doing embarrassing things in front of security guards, try not to do it in front of the same one more than once. Rotate, if you like.
Secondly, never explain what you are doing. If you can, run as fast as you can. Especially if they have just watched you pee in front of their pickup or do a rain dance in your underwear. If you are stuck on top of a six foot cement table and can’t run, remain calm, maintain your dignity, and leave them thinking that there is nothing unusual about your behavior.

And in case you think all I do is watch movies and scare security guards, I am also doing much more important things here, like having to tow a sailboat to another bay using flippers as paddles; climbing a mountain to go foraging in the wild to collect sugar cane, pomegranates, plums and coconuts, and spelunking in underground bat caves with the owner of the most exclusive resort in the Caribbean. And making sure he got covered in guano from head to toe in the process. But of course, that belongs to another blog entry....