2003-01-23 - 11:16 p.m.
lot going on on many fronts. reshma is almost in labor and my niece should be rolling in anytime into the world. schools up and running with visits to Lady of Mercy in the bronx every wed. I am learning to take a complete history and physical. i saw a patient yesterday in complete coma with inflamed testicles and both legs amputated. a black man, lying there , intubated with a food tube. made me think of his life before he ended up at this particular hospital bed. the doctor asked me if i wanted to feel his sack. I did, with white gloves and he flinched. you could yell or shake him but certain manipulations of his body caused his face to grimace almost in pain. so many of the physical responses are straight up nerve firings and automated.
he started to hic-up while i was listening to the heart. hiccups without the awareness of hiccuping. a body half way here and half way along and out.
since i want to make this journal more of a process rather than a summing up here is a short email i sent a while back during winter break...
email to a friend-she asked me what i learned while she was gone- for a few months.
yo D LO
1)heres some of what i have learned: nonviolence and fearlessness are more or less interchangeable terms.
2) a much needed merger between the political and the spiritual is required. i have been kicking it with the meditation community whose love outside of their immediate
self is a consistent dedicated undertaking. they have lofty notions of peace and the potential of unabounding love. they tend to be slighty naive and retreat often. we need the coming back.
i have kicked it with the political community too of late and they know so damn much about the hidden evils and consistent betrayals of those in power that the world eats them up sometimes. and their own egos guide them.
i have been reading the autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr, the journals of Thich Nhat Hanh(buddhist monk who dared to fight for a buddhism for the people in Vietnam during the 60's- he is in exile) and been listening to desmond tutu, the south african archbishop. all of them combined a severe belief in truth and were forced to stretch it to take on serious political systems. it seems to me the only way.
well, i am back in school. i am swallowing fears.
i am looking forward to meeting up when you are around
lemme know,
sri
