the glory and the horror

The topic has returned, this time over at This Classical Life.

I refer you to my previous post on September 3, 2004.

I still contend that people are not morally complicit in the original abortions by using vaccines derived from stem cell lines harvested from those fetuses. My comments can be found on This Classical Life.

I think we’ve settled into a groove here, now that over half of our time at the hospital is over, of course. Hopefully, the things we have learned and figured out will be useful to future students here, as we pass on the knowledge, maps, addresses of businesses, etc.

It’s been fun interacting with different parts of the hospital. The other day, I was giving one of the surgery senior house officers (something like a resident) a hard time because the nurse in the outpatient clinic was telling him how to incise and drain a patient’s abscess. We always have the same aides and nurses in clinic, so we have all developed quite a jovial relationship.

Healthwise, we’ve both settled down some, although we take turns feeling less well at times. Today is Kathleen’s turn. Earlier this morning was my turn. It’s quite odd, because I usually feel fine, and then suddenly feel light-headed, get a headache and abdominal pain, run to the bathroom, evacuate some less-than-solid bowel contents, and then generally feel much better. But it’s basically random. It can happen anytime, including in the OT (like it did today – thankfully, we were at the end of a case).

We also got to see Dr. Joy and Leela aunty this past weekend, our friends from the ACA. We went to church with them and had lunch with them and a pastor from New York. His church is literally across the street from Carnegie Hall. That’s pretty sweet. We told him we’d visit his church if we’re ever in NY, and that we’d also get tickets to whatever Carnegie Hall had going on. Anyway, back to the point of this paragraph. We got to see the Georges, and it was such an encouraging and refreshing time. Seeing them again gave us a sense of comfort and familiarity, almost like we were back with family. Now, it’s not that we haven’t enjoyed our time at this other hospital, but it just hasn’t been the same, in terms of some untangibles. The atmosphere just feels different with the Georges (and at ACA) than it does here. We’re not sure what it is, but we have some ideas, which go back to theology, and how we perceive God has called His covenant people to live and love in the world.

We ate at Pizza Hut last night. They have all sorts of Indian flavored pies, like tandoori murg, gosht, paneer, and more. It is very good pizza.

One thing I’ve noticed – ice is optional, with a default to none, in your soft drinks at restaurants. Additionally, they have bottled Sprite, Coca-cola, and Fanta at the little stand outside of the hospital. Yum – bottled Cokes. And all for less than a quarter a drink.

We also saw a movie this weekend, at what is supposed to be the coolest mall in town. They were showing movies in many languages, including Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil. However, we watched Arahan, an urban Korean martial arts flick, dubbed over in Indian-accented English. We had wanted to watch another film, Mangal Pandey, but it was only in Hindi, and did not have subtitles. It was actually quite a nice fun and simple movie. There was a bit of romantic comedy between the cute martial arts chick and dopey-unususpecting-hero-who-wants-to-learn-the-moves-to-get-revenge-but-finds-a-larger-purpose-and-saves-the-world, mixed in with some pretty eye candy special effects (although nothing groundbreaking) and the good guys triumphing over a misguided master from ages past. Great fight scenes in a downtown somewhere in Korea. If you get a chance to see it, it might be worth it just for some of the fight scenes.

Lutherans Air Views on Gay Clergy, Unions – Yahoo! News

Here we go again.

Call is slow. I’ve been putzing around on the computer for hours now. My resident is asleep, I think. He told me he’d call me if anything interesting comes in. Suffice it to say I think he’s been asleep for a long time. I think Saturday nights are supposed to be the really cooking nights.

I’ve been comparing prices of economy vs. business vs. first class tickets to various places in the world, just for fun, since I’ve realized that if I ever become super-rich (ha!) I would like to shell out for the good seats for those long plane flights (anything over 8 hours). Until then, though, I’m just happy to travel.

The hospital has had a series of lectures at lunch for World Breastfeeding Week, and the team from the hospital won some city-wide quiz bowl-type thing for it, and are quite proud of the achievement. Yay for breastfeeding! It’s such a good way to love your child. Kathleen and I talked about it, and we’re big fans of breast milk. I’m sure our children will be as well.

So anyway, that’s about it from the library at 4 am on my call night.