the glory and the horror

I wasn’t sure this was actually happening, but it was. There was a guy texting while standing at the urinal.

Really? It can’t wait 20 seconds?

This CNN article highlights a continuing question in the realm of medical ethics and philosophy of medicine. The basic question is whether or not parents have complete and inalienable rights to decide what is in their child’s best interest in terms of their health care. In this case, the child has Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a very treatable condition, although chemotherapy is never easy.

However, compared to many other malignancies, the prognosis is very good, and the treatment regimens are well-understood with significant data to support current treatment regimens.

But it appears that the family does not believe that pursuing futher allopathic medical treatment (conventional western medicine) is in the child’s best interest, and instead have chosen to pursue other treatment courses, namely a Native American modality (or so says the article).

So does the State (or Society) have a compelling case in “protecting” the child from his parents wishes? Where, if at all, do the parents’ rights to make decisions for the minor end?

This has been debated in the ethics literature in the past, and there are arguments that go back and forth. However, this is the real thing, with a real child’s life and well-being at stake.

Do you invoke the authority of the state and force the family to return the child for treatment?

Kathleen’s sturdy Honda Civic may have met its demise. She was in a car accident this past week (not at all her fault) and someone hit her from behind, causing her to hit the car in front of her, causing that car to hit the car in front of him. So when it was all said and done 4 cars were involved. She’s just fine, but it was a bit scary, especially since this is the car I see:

She’s had this car since high school, and it’s really been a reliable and trusty vehicle. We’ve driven it all over Texas, back up to Wyoming a few times, and generally had great experiences in this car. Even with all that, it only has about 130,000 miles on it. The engine probably still had another 100,000 miles to go! Oh well. We haven’t heard back from the estimator, but when we took it to the body shop, they weren’t optimistic. The other thing I didn’t mention is that there was a pool of blue-green fluid accumulating under the front of the car – radiator fluid!

So if that’s it for little Syzygy, so be it. We will miss her great gas mileage (still getting 30+ mpg on the freeway, 25+ in the city) right up until the last tank.

So I get to go to my first professional meeting later this year, as a presenter no less. Thankfully, the program will subsidize the trip, but the total is probably going to be more than the amount the program will provide. Oh well.

So this conference is in Florida in mid-May. I’ve never been to Florida (except for Key West on the cruise a couple years ago, which doesn’t count). I’ve never been much of a lay out on the beach sort of person, and I’m only going to be there for a few days, since I’m still technically on a rotation at the time. It’ll be nice to see what it’s like, though.

Yup. A boy!

So we’ve already received our first baby presents – in particular, a nice red envelope from Kathleen’s parents for Chinese New Year. It’s the first deposit into the Baby’s college fund. There were also those presents we gave to our family members to announce the presence of in utero Baby.

The Baby says: “Gung Hay Fat Choy,” or as we used to say growing up, “Gung Ho, Fat Boy.”

We can’t wait to meet you on the outside, Baby.

This unauthorized commercial says it all.

So Kathleen said something quite amusing in the car the other day in reference to her inner Asian, which we joke about, as she loves Chinese food and Indian food, and is of course, married to a Chinese guy.

Now, however, that phrase means so much more, since she has both a figurative and literal inner Asian.

That’s right. She’s pregnant, and we’re right at the 12 week mark. The above ultrasound is from a few weeks ago, and I’ll post a few more recent ones when I get the chance. Yay for the baby!

I know it’s been a long time since I last wrote anything of significance, so here come a few things.

Christmas/New Years was a lot of fun. My parents and siblings came out for a week, and it was the first time the whole family had come together to visit us in Houston. Everyone has come separately in the past, but this was a real treat because everyone came together for the holiday. It was a little bit crowded upstairs, but we put my parents in the guest room, quite comfortably, and my siblings in the office with inflatable mattresses. Of course, that meant that my brother actually slept downstairs most of the week. He did complain of Buddy waking him up when Buddy woke up and wanted to be let out.

It was very nice to have the whole family together again, one more time. It was nice because just about everyone was on some sort of vacation/break. Granted, Kathleen and I were both working, but because of scheduling, she had Christmas Day off, and was post-call on Christmas Eve, allowing her some good family time and the chance to go to the Christmas Eve service at church.

Anyway, it’s been weeks since then, and the tree and decorations are all put away, and we’re well into the new year with new rotations, and the next big step, moving to Denver. That means cleaning up the house, getting it ready to sell, and then buying a new place. If anyone is interested in buying our house in Houston, let us know!

So when we were growing up, we’d make trips to Hong Kong to visit family and friends, and it was always quite the trip for us kids. It was such a different world for us, especially a few things like the subway system that actually worked, and was practical to use all the time. During rush hour in Hong Kong, there were additional platform attendants whose job it was to push people into the trains as well as prevent overcrowding. We called them “sardine packers” and they did their job well.

However, this video seems to take it to a new level. I think it’s from Japan, but I’m not absolutely certain.

This is sadly funny, and borderline dangerous. I can’t imagine there are a lot of people in Japan with agoraphobia who ride the public transportation. I can’t imagine anyone who rides public transportation in a high density area like Japan or Hong Kong could have agoraphobia.