savoy096

Exams have come to an end. After what seems like an eternal hamster-wheel of screen/books/coffee/notes, it is time to get off the treadmill. Stretch our legs, work the kinks out of our backs, and adjust our eyes to the sunshine awaiting us outside. It was a little weird explaining to a friend back home over Skype why I still have my distinctly Middle Canada skin tone while living in the desert. After ranting about actinic keratosis and potential skin issues that arise from sun exposure, I realized he had a point. It is easy to get on the gerbil-drum and start pumping our intellectual muscles as hard as we can. Days run into weeks, weeks run into months and suddenly one might find themselves outside of the university gym trying to get in, having forgotten the strange hours they keep on Sunday (Forgetting that it was actually Sunday, to be honest, for a third time). A symptom of studying enough that everyday begins to follow a similar pattern, the days becoming less and less viscous run...

This little statue is called "The Thinking Man."  My (future) mother-in-law bought it in Uganda, then passed it over to me as a present, before I joined the rest of this inimitable group here in the Desert. Now, he sits on my desk, eyes half-shut, staring at me. He never stops staring, this “Thinking Man.”  He certainly is consistent; I’ll give him that. As we spend considerable hours together, trying to find our way through a waterfall of information, he has become a constant reminder to stop and think. To pause, shake my head, and work through the intricacies of acid-base metabolism, the autonomic nervous system drugs, and what feels like a black-hole of microbiology “Slow it down there sparky, and use your head.” Or something to that effect. A classmate of mine, a sort of philosopher-king, quoted me a short line from a letter Oscar Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas (complicated relationship). “Education is  the ability to play gracefully with ideas.”  What a grea...

  Last week was Purim in Israel. I won’t dive into a Talmudic parsing of what Purim is (we do have Google for a reason) but suffice to say everywhere I looked, there were costumes. Little wizards, firemen, animals, and assorted superheroes. Regardless of your religion, ethnicity, or cultural background, the sight of people, young and old, going about their day decked out in costume should bring a smile to your face. It certainly did on mine. As I walked across the hospital campus to a morning “hands-on” class on the internal medicine ward, I saw a young girl, dressed in a lab coat. Upon closer inspection, I saw a stethoscope around her neck, and those ubiquitous off-grey surgical scrubs that are found in hospitals the world over. There was no doubt what this young lady, who couldn’t have been older than 8, was dressed as. A doctor. Out of all the possible costumes a child can choose, this palpably excited little girl had chosen to dress as a member of the medical community. ...