The New Alarm Clock
Now fortified with hate and spitefulness.
I have nothing to add, besides noting Jen found this, because everything worth saying is already in that link.
It’s Also About Right Thought…
This thread makes me happy. I feel like I was able to do something good today, to really help someone, and I haven’t really at all felt like I’ve been doing anything good or helpful to others in a while. (I’ll whine about this later, after I’ve slept some more.) But, I have to admit that while I think I ‘did good’ in the thread, I didn’t start off with the best frame of mind about it. Originally, I read the thread and I thought “oh geeez, another person making stupid leaps when they don’t know WHAT they’re talking about” and I went to look at my AIM window for a friend I usually paste thread links to when it’s people being religiously dumb, so we could laugh over the dumbness.
And although I had that reaction and still went on to post in the thread, I am ashamed of that reaction. It wasn’t terribly generous of me, and as the development of conversation shows, it was really inaccurate. Not that the accuracy really matters. Ungracious behaviour is ungracious behaviour, no matter the reasoning behind it.
The second of the eightfold path is right thought, and I very much was not practicing that this evening while reading the LJ Buddhist community. The irony of that, and the subject matter of that particular thread, is not lost on me.
CRPS Update
And finally, the last in my spate of early morning/can’t sleep updates: I apologize for not updating as frequently as normal. I typically try to update once a day, for two reasons: to dust off the cobwebs in my brain and become more comfortable writing daily, in preparation for writing my thesis, and because I actually enjoy having a written record of life/school (the two are so much the same at this point). (There is also the side reason that Kanna suggested a while back, in that I use this to work out my feelings on life, specific people, and the idea of leaving Seattle for graduate work.) Given all that, then, my lack of updating is a bit disappointing, but justified.
For those just tuning in, I have a chronic pain problem called chronic regional pain syndrome (descriptive, that). Do you know that feeling you get when you hit your elbow/funny bone really hard? That sharp, shooting pain that races up and down your arm for a moment before the tingling sets in? That sharp pain is what it feels like, 24/7, in my right arm, from fingertips to shoulder, unless I control it with medicine. The tingling feeling is often thrown in on top of it, just to mix it all up.
Sadly, and somewhat frustratingly, CRPS can spread when you injure yourself in other parts of your body, and it did just that, moving in to my left wrist and hand post-December badness. This was not entirely unexpected, but it still sucks.
Anyhow, I stopped being stubborn and changed and upped my medications, and I’m doing much better. But one of the side effects I sort of forgot about, a side effect of the CRPS and not the medications, is that sometimes my arms don’t feel like they belong to my body. It’s the oddest dissociated feeling; I’ll be sitting on the couch or in class with my hands folded in front of me, and it will occur to me that I can’t really feel them, or that I feel my fingers touching my thumb through a very long distance, which is the best way I have to describe it. Like there is miles of saran wrap between my fingers, or that there are simply these odd and sort of fleshy appendages attached to me.
It comes and goes, sometimes worse and other times barely noticable. Like, right now, I feel like they mostly belong to me, but there is this odd numbness from the elbows down on both sides, as if someone had injected lidocaine into me without my noticing. It’s a vaguely unpleasant thing, to feel like bits of my body aren’t really mine – body dismorphism in its mildest form.
I’m having a surgical procedure done on March 14th, something called a stellate ganglion nerve block, and I hope that one of the effects of it will be the return of my arms to me.
UTMB
So what I alluded to in this post is very simple: when I checked email Monday upon waking up (I can’t really say Monday morning, because it was more like Monday early afternoon), I had a letter marked “urgent” from the graduate school coordinator at the University of Texas Medical Branch. It seems that the director wanted to have a phone interview with me the following day (Tuesday, for those keeping track at home)…!
So my Monday afternoon was spent talking with my adviser about what to expect, and trying to stay excited and not slip into nervous. Tuesday afternoon, I called UTMB and spoke with the director…and found out that several professors also wanted to talk with me…!
On the whole, it was a very positive experience. I got a sense for the program and professors, enjoyed speaking with them, and felt comfortable in conversation. They largely wanted to know simple things, like what I did between high school and now, my background in medicine (biology, chemistry, hospitals), what I thought the medical humanities was and how I thought I had experience in it (I will admit to answering this question a bit roughly by the third time I was asked, as I tried to not repeat myself too badly/robotically), and so on. I felt like I really hit it off with the theology professor I spoke to, and we had a really great conversation that careened all over the place. He paid me several nice compliments, telling me that I had a very elegant way with words and that I was a quick pick-up on conversations. I think what I liked most was that he backed down and admitted he was wrong over something – he brought up my writing sample and one of the assertions I made in it, and began talking about how I was basically wrong. I was scrambling on that, and explained I had went with what the text read said, and that although I was familiar with the author’s work, I felt as though the professor had a lot more experience and was much more familiar. He denied this, saying it had been a while since he’d read the author, but that he tended to teach a class on death and dying and used the author in that class…and then basically went “oh, yeah, I guess that does mean I’m more familiar with it than you” and apologized for ambushing me on something that I had no time to prepare for, and on a subject where he did have a lot more immediate experience. I thought that was pretty cool.
The downsides? They prefer to accept undergraduates to their MA program, not directly into the PhD program. They do this because they feel the typical undergraduate doesn’t know what they’re getting into for PhD work, especially since they haven’t really lived life, and the chances of a 22 year old knowing what they really want to do is difficult to believe. This tends to be a going trend, and it irritates me – I’m not 22, I have lived life, and I know what I want to do. They acknowledged this, asked if I’d be willing to consider the MA program, and said they would try to arrange the PhD anyhow. (Oh yes, they emphasized several times wanting me as a student.) The other downside is equally pausing – there’s almost no funding. There will be a stipend available next year, but several of us would have to fight over it.
So that’s where things stand. They were going to try to get back to me ASAP with an answer, which I appreciate, although I won’t be making any decisions until I hear from other schools. So far, I’ve received two rejections (Duke and Columbia), an interested from UTMB, and silence from seven other schools. I should be collecting more rejections any day now…
getting comfortable in my own skin
On Monday night, I received the following in a fortune cookie, at the end of my “omg I need protein now SUSHI!” dinner – yes, Japanese restaurant, fortune cookie with the bill. I don’t question these things anymore, I just go with it.
Anyhow, the fortune read:
Use your abilities at this time to stay focused on your goal. You will succeed.
Now, knocking the typical and childish “in bed” stuff that you’re supposed to tack on to the end of these, it was a rather…resonating fortune. You see, I had one of those moments in class earlier Monday night.
Monday’s show had us watching Meridian, the Stargate SG-1 episode where Daniel is, as usual, incredibly noble and heroic -and he “dies” for his efforts. Or to be more precise, he is dying, and instead of doing that, as he flatlines he ascends to a different plane of existence. If you’re not a Stargate SG-1 fan, don’t worry about this – it’s a vaguely Buddhist tone the show took for a while.
I paired this show with some readings on medical ethics as a whole. The two major schools of decision making, deductive and inductive, and readings on death and dying and what it means to have a good death. There was a lot of material to read, and of course we didn’t have time to go over it all. And because of other news, I wasn’t as prepared as I like to be for class, so I ended up asking the kids what they wanted to talk about, and the answer was medical ethics.
I had printed out information on Tirhas Habtegiris for the students to read, and we ended up using this case to discuss ethics, and particularly deductive ethics. I swiped Charles to help write on the board, and we ran down the four principles of medical ethics (autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence and justice) and using deductive logic and Kantian ethics, ran through the case as if we were an ethics committee.
At one point, I was joking with one of the students about…something, I don’t even remember what, and I made a crack about being an ethicist…and then I stopped, and realized and said “well, I guess this is what I’m trained for, isn’t it? I suppose I am an ethicist.”
It doesn’t sound like much to type out, but it simultaneously brought about a significant pause in time, one of those things where time warps and extends itself while my reality shifted and I almost physically snapped into my body/self and awareness. I was hyper-aware of everything, and in that hyper-awareness was a sense of self confidence in my ability, both as an ethicist and a teacher. It was a surreal and awesome moment, one that once time resumed its course, I laughed off with a “how weird is that” and moved class forward. But the feeling has stayed with me, a new poise, and it feels good.