savoy096

The goat farm One of the best parts of going to school in Israel is the holiday schedule.  Next week, Passover starts, and we get a ten day break from classes.  I’m hoping to use those ten days to travel to Jordan, catch up on studying and rest up for finals. A few weeks ago, thanks to Purim, we had a three-day weekend.   Purim is the Israeli version of Halloween, only with more alcohol.   It's a chance to wear a fun costume and drink until you can't tell the difference between Mordecai and Haman. Turkish aqueduct It also ended up being a great opportunity for some classmates and me to get out of town and go exploring.  We spent 3 days walking the Jesus Trail, a 60 kilometer footpath that stretches from Nazareth to the Sea of Galilee.   On Thursday we took a bus to Nazareth, spent the night in a convent and started our journey bright and early the next morning. Trail The trail ran through wilderness, fields of wild flowers, construction sites, pasture lands...

Sister Aziza Last weekend I volunteered with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in the West Bank. Early Saturday morning, my friend Julian and I met two Sackler students in Tel Aviv and took a taxi to an Israeli town called Tayibe where we met up with a larger group of about 4-5 doctors, a couple of nurses, a speech therapist and a physical therapist. After introducing ourselves, we all piled into a large van and drove about 45 minutes into the West Bank to a town of about 6000 residents called Qusra. Qusra is in what they call Area C of the West Bank, meaning it is under full Israeli civil and security control. There is no government medical facility in Qusra and when we rolled in at around 9:30am, there were already a few hundred Palestinians gathered in a school parking lot (men on one side, women and children on the other), waiting to receive medical care. We all gathered in a central room where about 9 official-type men spoke to us in Arabic (a female doctor nicely translated for u...

The time has come for me to retire from the game of first-year blogging. I'd like to thank my coaches, my teammates, my fans, and everyone who helped me get to the point I am today. Especially my wife, without her loving support and gracious editing, I would never have been able to write four of these. What am I going to do now? I've always wanted to try to play baseball. Lots of people have made that switch successfully, with all due respect to His Airness, so I'm hoping to sign a minor league contract soon. Maybe I'll save the Looney Tunes from aliens. We'll see. If not, I've been assured MSIH will allow me to come back from retirement multiple times to help boost their ticket sales.             All joking aside, I have been very glad to write these posts, and thankful for everyone (I'm talking to all three of you) who read them. This was helpful for me in considering the things Kate and I have been through in the past few months,...

My classmate Sarah wrote an excellent post on our clinical rotations just last week. If you have time, you should go read it (seriously, go now, this post can wait). The day she is writing about I was in the same group, forced to speak Hebrew with a patient who did not know English. It was kind of a random draw, nobody knew who was going to interview whom, and I ended up with a Bedouin woman who spoke only Arabic and a little Hebrew. During this rotation, and through the course of my Hebrew learning, I have learned a very difficult, but important lesson for all who wish to be medical professionals.             First, a word about my Hebrew speaking proficiency. There are many students at MSIH who grew up with Hebrew speakers in their families, or went to day school and learned when they were younger, or had some type of connection to Israel that caused them to learn the language early. They came in July, and were able to settle in, ...

First-year medical students at Soroka Medical Center Each week, we are divided into groups and dispersed to various settings throughout the city and in Soroka hospital for our clinical and global medicine interview rotations. They were supposed to begin last semester, but as classes were put on hiatus due to Operation Pillar of Defense, we are currently making up for lost time. A couple of weeks ago, I joined my group in the pediatric emergency department where a social worker took us on a tour of the facilities before we convened in a small room to meet our patients and interview their parents.             Oftentimes when we do these interviews, the attending, or whoever our supervisor is that day, cherry picks the few English-speaking patients on the wards so we can talk to them in our native tongue. On this day, the social worker explained, she had been unable to do this, and more to the point, she expected us to interview the pa...