Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: Bioethics

It’s about time I added a category for my field of study, eh?

Out with the Old,…

...and everything else, Academics, Bioethics, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

It’s 2007. My instinctive response is “good fucking riddance to 2006, and here’s hoping the next one is better” (but I know better than to taunt the universe by making it any sort of challenge). But Discardian had an interesting tip up a day or two ago that suggested we – and I assume she meant social we, and not just you and me we – have a bit of a binary, black/white, good/bad way of looking at life. We see the highs and lows, and not miss the rest.

Now while I have often told friends that the nice things about the lows is that you can’t see the highs without them, I am often guilty of overlooking that in the middle – the not extraordinary, the not horrible, but that which moves us forward in life. Or holds us back, if we let it.

2006 is always going to be a hard year to look at, even when memory takes the edge off the sharpness of Mom’s cancer, or the loneliness and difficulties my first semester of graduate school brought. And it will round the edges off those highs, too – my letters of acceptance, teaching my first class on my own, reading my first feedback reports that were just about me, writing something as big as my thesis (and finishing on time!), graduating, the fun things I’ve done in NYC and people I’ve met and so on.

But 2006, I think, will also be remembered as a year where I made a lot of forward movement in my life. I see a lot more clearly where I want to be, down the road, and the things I’ll need to do in order to get there, and I’m on my way doing most of them. Yes, life keeps throwing challenges in my path… but Phillip told me something, once – it must have been three years ago? My husband had left me, my best friend had died a horrible death, and I simply could not get my act together. I couldn’t juggle all the balls I had in the air, and I let them all drop. I was sitting in his office, telling him that just as soon as life calmed down I’d have it all together, I’d be better. And with his typical bemused expression, he glanced over the haphazard stacks of books between us and told me that life just keeps coming, it never calms down and never gets better. It’s always one thing after another, and we all juggle; what matters is how we do it.

I learned to juggle, and I did pretty well. But now it’s a new game; the ante has been upped, and the stakes are higher. My sneaking suspicion, though, is that I’ll learn the rules to this game soon enough, and then I’ll shine as brightly as a I did before.

2006 was a bitch of a year, dragging me all over the map, not just emotionally but literally. But if I was pressed to admit it, I would admit that I’ve probably grown more this last year than the past few combined – and that’s saying a lot. I might not look fondly back on the year, but I suspect I will eventually be very grateful for the contributions it has made to who I am.

And so I raise a glass to 2006, and to all of you. May 2007 be everything you wish for, and more.

Urbi et Orbi

Bioethics

In this year’s Urbi et Orbi, Il Papa has said something rather startling:

In his address, the Pope also made a reference to the controversial case of Piergiorgio Welby, a paralyzed Italian man who was denied a Catholic service because he had asked to die.

“What are we to think of those who choose death in the belief that they are celebrating life?” he said.

The Catholic Church falling in line behind some form of physican-assisted suicide would be a startling (and welcomed, at least by me) thing. It would be well out of line for a Pope in the Ratz’s position to make a sweeping doctrinal change like that – typically, after the reign of a Pope like John Paul II, the next Pope is a short-timer who’s just there to tide over until the next long-term candidate can be groomed. Few changes are ever really made, especially at such a core level – this is definitely something to keep your eye on.

a sad and cryptic state

...and everything else, Bioethics

Is it a sad state of affairs, or what, that I have an easier time getting an appointment to see a professor at Penn than here? (And I find it funny, in that sort of laugh because what else can I do way, that my sister bitches she can never get in to see said Penn professor, because she’s a student. Maybe the key is that students never get in, but visiting students do?)

questionable to anyone else?

...and everything else, Bioethics

Let’s dissect this advertisement, shall we?

1) Do you have a a specific diagnosed mental disorder?
2) Do you have a drinking problem on top of it?
3) Are you willing to go off your medication for 12 weeks, during which time you’ll be seen up to 10 times by the study? Even though you have a diagnosed disorder that could be very bad to have unmedicated?
4) Want up to $600? Call us!

Please tell me I’m not the only person who sees glowing bright problems here. There’s got to be a better way to do clinical trials like this, than remove people from their needed medications!