Thoughts on a Rainy Afternoon

It's a rare rainy weekend in Texas. Unfortuately, it happens on my rare weekend off. Now, I'm inclined to just stay inside and won't be walking the dog, to my chagrin.

My Dad called me on Valentine's Day to say, "happy Valentine's day." He's never done that before! I proceeded to tell him Valentine's Day is no big deal and I'm working anyways, but he said yes it was and I shouldn't let work encroach on having a life. I suppose he's gotten sentimental with age. I was on call that day in the hospital and Paul texted me "happy Valentine's," which I thought was sweet of him. There were chocolates, cookie and cakes every where in the hospital and I gorged plenty on Valentine goodness.

If Feb 14th passed without much fanfare this year, then Chinese New Year did with even less. It's the Year of the Rat!! Again, my parents were aghast at the fact that hubby and I had no celebration plans nor holiday spirit. Holiday traditions are super important to my parents from the Christmas tree every year to the right auspicious food to eat on Chinese New Year's. One day I shall be like that, too, but at this point in my life, it just can't be done.

Certain patients leave an indelible mark on me and I continue to think about them way after my need to. It was this way with this patient of mine that was discharged yesterday. I woke up this morning wondering how she is faring in her new nursing home. In her demented state, she's become like a child, a very cantankerous one, outright indecent, and sometimes bordering on being violent. From knowing her in the past several days, I know she needs just the right type of cajoling and coaxing for her to be properly cared for. I hope it is the way with her at the nursing home. In the process of caring for her in the hospital, I've gotten to know her, her unsavory past, her undesirable present, the bridges she's burned with her family and friends, and her utter lack of insight into her situation. She yelled unprovoked expletives at me and I pitied her even more with a deeper drive to help her which is perhaps only a small bandage to her gaping wound.

On my day off, the going-ons of the hospital is last thing I want on my mind, but sometimes I encounter people who's journey and paths are so drastically different from those of my own life that I can't stop thinking about them. I suppose it makes me extra grateful for my own given life. I realize I'm remarkably normal and functional. This leads to think about the issue of mental health and how disorders like schizophrenia and bipolor wreck havoc on people's wellbeing and their capacity for a meaningful life. I could never be a psychiatrist and be in the middle of these people's broken situations and more often than not, there are no good answers to why or how to "fix" them. My patient is who she is today because of the series of poor decisions she made due to her mental health and its left her in the decrepit state she is in now. Truly, who's to blame, who's responsible? As healthcare workers, we can only do so much. I think about the recent college shooting in North Illinois and the predicable relationship to the mental health of the shooter, or the Virginia Tech shooter and his disturbed mind. I think the nation as a whole is at a lost for answers for how to prevent another tragedy such as these. Is it more gun control? Is it more aggressive or mandatory treatment of people with mental health disorders? Or should we take the lassie fair attitude of one commentator, "we can't change the weather, we can only change our sail."

Medicine and Religion

Should Doctors Pray for their Patients?

I haven’t read much on this topic to know the consensus agreement or the schools of thought on this out there, but this issue was brought up to me recently and I have some thoughts on it.

Someone at Bible Study wanted to know if I prayed for my patients? I said no, it is not my habit to do so. He proceeded to say something along the line of “well, you can only act in accordance with your conscience. . . without our conscience, then we have nothing.” I didn’t answer him back but just nodded, but now I am a wee bit incensed. Here’s my response to this.

While I don’t pray for my patients in the strict sense, I do have compassion and think about my patients often, many times long after I’ve come home and it is not just because my beeper from the hospital goes off. So to the best of my “conscience,” I feel like this is the right thing to do, praying or not. I am still at the beginning of my medical training, while having compassion for my patients come naturally to me, having a comprehensive arsenal of medical knowledge and know-how doesn’t and it is that latter tool I seek to sharpen everyday. I don’t doubt prayers for patients are important but I don’t believe it is my role as a doctor. There are chaplains for every religion and denomination in the hospital, there are community resources just for the spiritual needs of the sick. And of course there are family members and friends. If it was me on the other side of the sick bed, I would ask and expect all my friends to pray for my loved one. But as a doctor, what I do pray about regularly is that I don’t hurt people under my care and that God would give me the strength to do what I need to do to become the doctor the patients need. So, no I don’t pray for my patients directly. I believe what they need from me is competent medical practice and advice. Prayers help people but they don’t always treat or cure diseases, medicine and surgery do. If prayers had the track records that cardiac catherization has on heart attacks or surgery has on an infected gallbladder, then medical professionals would be taught on the mechanisms and practice of praying along with pharmacology and pathology. The fact remains, God chooses to answer very few of the human prayers for delivering people from illness. That is simply not His way. Our limited human-ness can’t understand why but that is just the way it is. What praying lacks, medicine picks up with drugs and technology. No, medical science does not cure spiritual ills, but then again it wasn’t meant to do that nor was I trained to so. I’m glad there are special gifted people who become chaplains or prayer warriors that tend to patients' spiritual needs which arguably is on par with a person’s physical needs.

Unlike my friend at Bible study, I don’t look at everyone I meet or every situation I encounter through spiritually-colored lenses. Perhaps I should, perhaps this is a mark of my spiritual immaturity, but nevertheless, it is my station in life now. Perhaps one day I will reach new heights spiritually and have a completely different view but right now I’m just not there yet.

This same said friend expressed his concern that I was becoming a back-sliding Christian and wanted to know if hubby and I could meet an extra day on a weekday with them (since I can make it on weekends only seldomly), to help me back on track, so to speak. In his usual subtle-ness, he basically said we are all busy people and if we are truly dedicated, then time wouldn’t be an excuse. Yes, I agree we are all busy, I don’t degrade their busy-ness beneath me but I also know myself and what I’m able to do and not do. I agree I don’t always use my time wisely, definitely too much time Googling such non-sense as lop-sided bunnies and watching Cashmere Mafia on-line. However, it is my winding down time and I probably won’t become disciplined enough to change. I whole-hearted am grateful for their concern for my spiritual health. They are wonderful friends to count on and to have. However, I can’t imagine adding on another regularly scheduled activity onto my plate since I’m not evening doing well with the ones already on it! What I’d love is for them to pray for me and of course their understanding for the fact that this is a demanding and exciting time in my life.

You know what else I really need? A maid!! Seriously, I’m looking for one and in the process of deciding whether we can afford one or not.

To be honest, I am most concerned these days with becoming a competent physician, most other things have taken a back burner in life. Such is the season in my life, and like other seasons, it’ll come to pass. I still know too little to be where I need to be one day but I know enough to know medical errors happen and can hurt or kill patients and I never want that to happen to me. One of the many cited drawbacks of medicine by physician themselves is the tremendous liability that we have on my minds and backs. Medical errors kill thousands of patients every year. For me, the issue can’t be overemphasized or overstated. Even as a lowly intern, because I have the power to prescribe, the treatment or medications I order or didn’t order can have detrimental effects on people. We are all human and human errors happen but I hope to never become too jaded or too careless to make such a fatal mistake.


That’s my rant.

Doggone Days

Here's our Sunday excursion to the nearby walking/jogging trail that I discovered yesterday.

Hiro meet the duckies. They are bigger than you!


Hmm, Hiro not as interested in duckies as hubby.

We walked for over a hour.. . and there were still energy left in the little guy!

Hiro, the maltipoo at 7 months old.

Today was also Superbowel Sunday. I was not very invested in it, but go New York Giants!!

One with Many Labels

My first fake nails!

I got my nails done last weekend. The picture is not an actual picture of my real nails as I'm too lazy to get the camera and take a pic, but my nails look just like that. I was convinced I wanted the new gel overlay french manicure but the Vietnamese lady convinced me acrylic tips would be stronger and longer lasting. The truth is, not many people are experienced enough to do gel overlays which takes longer and costs more. After a week, I'm happy to say my nails still look like they were just done, not even a scratch! They really stand up to any activity you put your nails through. Acrylics rule!! It's nice because because only the very tip of every nail is glued on, the rest of the nails are my own, albeit reinforced with a a very strong yet clear layer of acrylic mixture. Ingenious! I love how my nails look so feminine and clean! So, they should last about 3 weeks until new nails grow out after which I have to spend oodles of money again and get them re-filled.

January is gone for good. It's been a good month in the sense I was on Pulmonary and had my weekends off, but the bad side is my days were 12-13 hour days. I rarely saw the sun since I left home in the darkness of dawn and returned to an already darkened sky. Not a schedule I liked at all, but it's over for now. I'm back on wards, yes, I'll have to spend some nights in the hospital but atleast the other days I get to come home at a decent hour.

But boy did I make up for lack of sun today! It was a beautifully sunny day and I took Hiro out for a much needed walk. No amount of begging could deter hubby's resolve to study for his exam on Monday (can you believe it?), so I went out alone with Hiro. I discovered a great walking/jogging trail nestled in a nearby apartment property! How happy I was to get away from the hustle and noise of street cars and enter the sanctuary of quiet squirrels and ducks! A rather unfortunate thing happened, though, I lost my phone along the way. When I found it, it was already ran over by a car!:( Looks like I will be shopping for a new phone tomorrow.

Of course anyone would agree, there are a lot of depressing things in the hospital, but to me, people on dialysis and people on ventilators have to be some of the most depressing. It's just a feeling I get when I step into the hemodialysis quarter or the ICU. Sometimes I step back and think, how far medicine has come to be able to take over the function of a whole organ system, like the kidneys and lungs, when they fail. It's a bit unnatural and awe-inspiring at the same time. Anyways, just some of my random thoughts.

I was warned about Dr. H, the pulmonologist, before I started working with him in January. "He will pimp you to death, " is his reputation. He deeply humbled me into realizing how much I don't know. Most of the time, I had no pride to be hurt because the way I see it, everytime I find out I don't know something is an opportunity to patch up that gap in my medical knowledge. Dr .H is not a natural-born American (he's South American, I believe) so he has a peculiar way of being honest and probing. Like when he talks to patients who are smokers, "so, are you going to stop smoking, or is that too much to ask?", he would say with a straight poker face. To this question, the patient would usually give a laugh and pause. Then Dr. H would continue, " I just want to know because I don't want to waste my time." The other thing he likes to do is to calculate for patients how much their smoking has cost them, monetary-wise. "Oh my, you could have bought a house!" or "for that much money, you could take a vacation in Hawaii. . .with your daughter." Somehow, Dr. H has a way of sizing you up and do it unapologetically. I have only seen that kind of straightforwardness and honesty in foreigners. Americans are very big on political correctness and politeness, a kind of fakeness that we get comfortable with and expect from strangers and professionals. Hmm, just another observation.

Another random observatin of mine: I can't believe skinny jeans are still in!! Makes me want to go and buy another pair! Should I or not? Decisions, decisions. . .

I'm working with another nice resident this month, wohoo!! He is giving us five days off, one extra day than usual!:) My attending, however, is one I would rather not work with, and I will just say that much. But oh will, sometimes we win, sometimes we lose.

I will end this post with this quote:

" Happiness in life is nothing more than a good health

and a bad memory."