May Invitation for Anyone Who Reads This Blog

Happy Cinco de Mayo! And speaking of May celebrations...

I have a lot of little celebrations ahead in the month of May this year:

-my birthday (THIS WEEK!);

-MY ONE-YEAR OBOE ANNIVERSARY(May 10), which coincides with

-my son's First Communion;

-Mother's Day;

and, believe it or not,

-MY ONE-YEAR BLOG ANNIVERSARY, COMING UP ON MAY 16!

To mark this last happy occasion, I'm asking readers to e-mail me some questions they'd like to ask me, and I'm hoping to put together an "Interview of T. by her readers" type of post for my blogiversary.

So don't be shy! Now's your chance to put me in the hot seat! (Can't guarantee I'll be able to answer everything, but I'll try.)

Please send your "interview" questions to anesthesioboist@gmail.com. Thanks to all who have already sent me questions so far! I have my homework cut out for me!

Arts First

Arts First, an arts festival held at Harvard every spring, is the Boston area's best cultural event. Period.


Hundreds of talented students involved in the visual and performing arts share their (sometimes world-class) gifts with the public during this amazing festival, during which most events are FREE. There is no better deal than that in this city.

I had the pleasure of sharing Arts First 2008 with my children and one of my daughter's friends yesterday, and it was with a bittersweet sense of love and pride that I strolled through campus, visited a number of performance venues, and reminisced about performing in the very first Arts First ever, established by actor John Lithgow in 1994, my senior year. Some of the groups that performed yesterday - like the Harvard Ballet Company and the Harvard Pops Orchestra, which started us off with a rousing selection from the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings - were founded by students who were my contemporaries and friends.



Very often productions by gifted college students have something the flashier professional productions in New York, L.A., and London can't capture. A fearless energy, passion, and raw exhilaration in the midst of costumes put together at home and soundtracks scraped together on laptops. The best production I've ever seen of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and of Arthur Miller's The Crucible have been ones put together by Harvard undergrads, and the best Amahl and the Night Visitors I ever saw took place in a tiny little church in Arlington with simple props but a great deal of musicality and heart. Bigger, more prestigious, and more expensive aren't always better! Then there are the affectionate shouts of support from roommates and buddies in the audience - where else can you get that?



I was thrilled to see that the dance portion of the festival, which still takes place in Lowell Hall as it did when I was a student, was one of the most packed events. The line waiting to get into Lowell Hall stretched halfway down the block. It consisted of various campus dance groups performing ALL AFTERNOON in 20-minute blocs; we stayed for three different segments which included Irish step dance, stunning hip-hop by EXP, energetic numbers by my former company (Mainly Jazz Dance Co.), absolutely gorgeous ballroom dance numbers by the Harvard Ballroom Dance Team, break dancing, Philippine folk dancing (woo hoo!), and modern dance (we missed the ballet, tap, and capoeira segments, unfortunately). As I watched from our seats on the upper balcony I could almost see ghosts of myself and my classmates superimposed on the performers below, diaphanous visitors from our past, moving with the music under the colored lights, reminding me of a life and energy I often forget I had.



One of the most memorable offerings was an outdoor interactive exhibit in Harvard Yard which consisted of lantern-like sculptures made of upside-down tissue boxes containing messages as well as extra-large apples strewn about under the campus's stately trees. There was a sign there that said "Take One," so of course my son scooped up an apple, encouraged by one of the artists of the exhibit, Peter Hedman, class of 2010 (internet research is a wonderful thing!). He's a thoughtful, creative, talented man who will no doubt go far. The other artists who helped create the exhibit were Tom Lee (from the Office for the Arts) and Yichen Feng ('10). I wish I could describe how captivated passersby were with this work, peering into the "lanterns" from below and delightedly taking pictures of the apples under the trees, enthralled just as passersby had been during last year's festival, when Hedman and his colleagues, under the tutelage of local artist and instructor Gary Duehr, put together an interactive exhibit entitled "Ten Red Phones," consisting of red telephones around a central sculpture. What is art but creative work that elicits a strong response from people? In this regard the work by Duehr's students has definitely met with great success.



The great thing was that the art work extended its presence throughout campus and had a life outside its original home in the Yard. ALL AFTERNOON people responded to the giant apple under my son's arm with, "Whoa! Is that REAL?!! It's HUGE!" and asked us questions as we found spots for it at our feet at the concerts, juggling event, and dance performances that we attended. I was happy for the artists, excited that their work had such an extended reach.

We finished up our afternoon listening to my favorite Harvard a cappella group, the Harvard Opportunes. As was true when I was an undergrad, the group today still has some of the strongest voices on campus. I was glad my daughter had a chance to see young adults enjoying their musicianship in an environment in which they were also expected to excel academically.

I envy these undergrads, who like me and my friends probably won't fully realize, till they bring their own children back to Arts First in fifteen years, how precious this opportunity is to pour themselves completely into their arts and to explore their creativity with such abandon. But mostly I am inspired, and I feel that the work of art continues on in us even after some of us leave a more active participation in it, through our continuing love of the arts and the passing-on of its practice and appreciation to our children.

A Wish for Divining

I met a teenage girl who had a devastating familial neurologic disease. She couldn't walk. In fact, she couldn't move any voluntary muscles. She couldn't speak, swallow, wipe away her own drool, protect her airway, or breathe on her own. She was trapped inside her own body but fully aware. This happens to people sometimes, in certain kinds of stroke or trauma, but this poor girl was born to this state of progressive, incurable, unimaginable silent horror. Alive but unable to live. Conscious only of a life-experience filled with sensory input but also the torment of being totally cut off from the world, walled-in, paralyzed.

According to my colleague who gave her anesthesia, her mother had left her and her father after finding out that the condition was genetic, from the father's side.

Her father had been caring for her every need - feedings, tracheal tube changes, diaper changes, wheelchair adjustments, ventilator maintenance - and bringing her to all her medical appointments, until he developed the condition and died.

Now she is cared for by visiting nurses who shuttle her to doctor visits and minor hospital procedures and perform all the tasks for which she had been entirely dependent on her father.

I have a heroic friend (yes, another one!) - she has visited here on occasion: speducatorlvc - who has spent her career courageously and lovingly serving devastated children like this girl. I don't know how she does what she does, but I long to have that kind of open-hearted, brave, unselfish spiritual energy.

The nurse that brought her to one of our hospitals for a tracheal tube change under anesthesia claimed that the girl could communicate with her by telekinetically manipulating a dowsing rod. I wanted it to be true. Doesn't everyone wish for superpowers? Invisibility? Flight? Telepathy or telekinesis? I went to visit the girl and her nurse in the recovery room to learn more, trying to keep an open mind, but knowing that the possibility of there being any observable truth to this assertion was remote at best.

"Her spirit, her energy, fills this whole room," the nurse said, "Whereas yours and mine are much smaller, much closer to our own bodies. She'll move this and make it turn when she means 'yes,' " explained the nurse, holding up an upside-down-L-shaped brass thing, "and makes it stop when she means 'no.' "

She asked the girl a question. The top part of the upside-down L began turning in its little brass dowel. I could see that the nurse's hands were spinning it. She asked another question. The rod stopped.

"See, she says she's not in a lot of pain. Where is it on a scale of one to ten, honey? Ten? Nine? Eight?..." The rod magically came to a halt at 6. I think that's actually a lot of pain. More than I would have expected.

There's a remark in the Wikipedia article about dowsing which states, "Both skeptics of dowsing and many of dowsing's supporters believe that dowsing apparatus have no special powers, but merely amplify small imperceptible movements of the hands arising from the expectations of the dowser. This psychological phenomenon is known as the ideomotor effect. Some supporters agree with this explanation, but maintain that the dowser has a subliminal sensitivity to the environment, perhaps via electroception, magnetoception, or telluric currents."

I asked to hold the dowsing rod. The nurse asked the girl questions. Nothing happened with the rod in my hand. The nurse tried moving it around in relation to me and the girl, then physically moving me around, then holding her hand over my hand as it held the rod, but the rod was silent. Like the girl.

"Come on, honey," the nurse said to the girl. "Let's make a believer out of this doctor. Are you glad the procedure's all done?"

The rod drifted a little, swinging in its brass sheath, but otherwise didn't budge. The sound of the ventilator rhythmically sighing, the other equipment ticking, and the steady beep-beep-beep of her pulse-ox monitor filled the silence among us.

"She's still got some sedation on board," I said to the nurse. "I'm sure she's tired."

"She can move out of her body, you know," the nurse told me. "She visited her last nurse while she was on vacation in Hawaii. Her spirit has power and energy that's way bigger than ours."

I believe if we do have souls, some of the greatest souls on earth, those closest to "the Kingdom of God," are in these catastrophic lives, prisoners in these suffering-ravaged bodies. But as far as I can tell, we're bundles of parts at the mercy of our own cells and chemicals. If we are more than the sum of our frail little parts, I'm going to have to take it on faith. The day I met this girl I didn't know what to believe. What I could see was that there was a lot of pained wishfulness around her, but very little visible good, except perhaps in our wish for her healing.

It was one of saddest stops I've made on PACU rounds.

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Photo credit (bottom image): diseased rose by Richard Cocks, license under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5

Lost in Beantown in a Silver Punch Buggy; and, Why I Blog

Ordinarily I would be using this blog to vent about the day I had today at work, where I spent over two hours trying to manage someone who was trying very, very hard to die on my table.

But I don't want to write about that stuff today.

I just want to curl up in my little blog, my writing home, my very own little piece of space-time, and RELAX. It really is home-y here for me; I feel like each post, whether I'm writing one or re-reading one, is an easy chair in which I can snuggle up or stretch out and just enjoy my rambling thoughts, spread them out in front of me like little treasures bought at a fair, and see if I can make sense of them at my own pace.

This home-like feel of one's own blog is one of the things that Anali and I talked about yesterday when we met each other for the first time and had lunch - and not the lunch we were expecting to have!

Our blog meet-up had a pleasingly comical aura about it as we navigated through what might have been discouraging setbacks and re-framed them as celebrations of serendipity. First of all, it was POURING rain. Secondly, Anali's usual parking garage was temporarily closed, so I jumped into her adorable silver beetle and we drove around for a bit scouring the streets for parking, but no luck. We wound up in a now-unfamiliar area of Summer Street that has been built up considerably over the last few years, and somehow found ourselves parking at the waterfront Westin hotel, unsure of whether they even had a restaurant! How ever did we get there (they did have a restaurant: Sauciety, "an American grille"), wind up munching salad from charming, lop-sided bowls that looked like they were offering us their little morsels of radicchio and chicory, then sampling a dessert called "cappuccino intrigue," from our original plan of lunching at a tiny Boston coffee shop in the financial district?!

So there we were whipping out our picture-taking machinery to snap photos of the food. At last, someone who not only doesn't scoff, but also understands! It was wonderful to be able to have a conversation with another blogger, especially one like Anali, who is every bit as sweet as I pictured. I started blogging almost a year ago because I was inspired by Hilda's blog and needed some place to explore this oboe adventure. Then it became that "room of one's own": a place for me to enjoy retreat and expansion at the same time, to learn about medicine, faith, the arts, my own responses to what goes on around me, especially when in "real life" it's often hard to strike up conversations with people about very esoteric elements of those things, like oboes and anesthesia!

When I got home I did a google/blog search using the terms "why blog" and came up with some interesting results, examples of which include the posts here, here, here, here, and here. I thought about why I blog, and about some of the things Anali and I talked about. I decided I'd explore my own motivations for blogging with a list of my own:

Top 10 Reasons Why I Blog

10. To keep in touch with family and friends

9. Narcissistic tendencies. I am opinionated. I enjoy sharing my opinion, venting my frustrations, telling my stories even if they only matter to me, etc.

8. Self-expression feels emancipating (and is cheaper than therapy!). Ditto above (I enjoy sharing my opinion, venting my frustrations, telling my stories even if they only matter to me, etc.)

7. Who can I talk to about anesthesia, besides other anesthesiologists?

6. Who can I talk to about oboes, besides Kyoko and fellowkyokostudent?

5. To remember certain special moments.

4. Blogging is versatile. Journalism or journaling? Tool for school project, or fundraiser for a good cause? We pick.

3. I enjoy the interactive nature of the medium. It's intriguing to exchange thoughts with others across the world.

2. Learning about things like archaeology, photography, molecular psychiatry, waiting tables, monastic life, almost anything you can think of, is totally cool - especially through the creativity of others.

1. Writing is FUN! I write for the sheer pleasure of it, even if no one's reading (which is totally how I thought this blog would be, although I guess there are some folks reading it after all!) :)

What Can One Person Do?

In Prior Convictions: Did the Founders want us to be faithful to their faith?, an article in this week's New Yorker, Jill Lepore describes a debate between two characters in the 1797 novel The Algerine Captive by Royall Tyler. One character is a mullah and the other is Updike Underhill, a Calvinist surgeon captured by pirates and sold into slavery among Muslims. The following is an excerpt of her description of the debate, which lasted five days:

"But Christianity must be the one true religion, Underhill counters, else how had so much of the world been so persuaded by the teachings of a few fishermen, so quickly? 'If you argue from the astonishing spread of your faith,' the mullah answers, remember that 'Mahomet was an illiterate camel driver,' born nearly six centuries after Christ, and yet his faith had spread through Arabia, Asia, and Africa and a great part of Europe: 'In a word, view the world.' ”

Whatever one believes about faith and its meaning, or religion and its value or lack thereof, I think this exchange brings up a crucial idea that has been highlighted lately in the media.

The ideas and actions of individuals - courageous, creative, thoughtful individuals willing to put action into their ideas - can truly change the world.

I think Padraig O'Malley, the University of Massachusetts professor who was instrumental in getting opposing sides in South Africa and Ireland to come together and TALK to each other, should get the Nobel Peace Prize. Last August he flew 36 Iraqi leaders from enemy groups - Kurd, Sunni, Shia - to Helsinki to face each other and TALK - a remarkable accomplishment. O'Malley's approach is simple but revolutionary. He says in a Boston Globe article from last October,

"'Governments can't deal with divided societies, because they don't understand them...People from divided societies are in the best position to help others from divided societies.' The process can be slow and incremental, and by its nature is devoid of political sound bites. But if it works, it can pay off in a way that traditional diplomacy cannot: creating a lasting peace from within, rather than a truce imposed by larger powers from outside."

This same article from last October left me with an idea that has stayed with me:

"These negotiators have found that individuals, not governments, hold the key to resolving conflict."

This past week a second round of talks took place - Helsinki II. The Boston Globe article that describes these current efforts quotes Sherman Teichman, executive director of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts, who noted that

"...while many have called for dialogue, few have stepped in to fill the need. 'One of the things that perplexes me is why we find ourselves filling this void,' Teichman said. 'I'm very proud that we've done it. It came down to the intellectual and moral courage of Padraig O'Malley who stands as an example of what one individual can do to work toward peace.' "

Another individual I heard about just today was Thomas Taha Rassam Culhane, an urban planner who is installing solar water heaters on rooftops in the slums of Cairo and promoting environmental awareness and activism in the city's most impoverished Coptic Christian and Muslim neighborhoods. Just one person, using his gifts, education, and hard work to teach others and change lives by transforming ideas and practices, can make such an enormous global difference.

As I think of shining individuals like these I can wish my Orthodox Christian friends a happy Easter with a truly hopeful spirit:

Χριστός aνέστη! Aληθwς aνέστη!

Христос воскресе! Воистину воскресе!

!المسيح قام! حقا قام

Si Cristo ay nabuhay! Siya nga ay nabuhay!

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Photo credit: top image originally posted by to Flickr as Iraqi Children by JoAnn S. Makinano USAF, February 7, 2007 ; licensed under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 License

My Other Favorite Instrument

Mr. Phil, a balloon-making entertainer, was chatting with us at the local diner last weekend and figured out that we all play musical instruments. While he was making the penguin balloon my daughter requested, he went around the table asking us what instruments we played.

My husband plays guitar.

My daughter plays the piano and composes, but she'd rather be singing. She was pleased to be able to join us adults in her first adult choral piece last Saturday by sight-reading with the sopranos.

My son sat up straight and tall when his turn came and announced proudly, "I play the violin."

"What kind of balloon would you like?" Mr. Phil asked him.

My son thought for a moment. "Can you make a pterodactyl?"

To our surprise and delight Mr. Phil replied, "I sure can. Purple ok? Brown's too boring."

Then Mr. Phil turned to me.

"How about you? What do you play?"

"Guess," I said.

"Hmm...you have a bit of the 'earth-mother' about you...I would have to guess cello."

I think what he was actually suggesting was that I was plump, but I couldn't complain. I LOVE the cello. I love the richness of its voice, its ability to lend both beauty and grounding to a piece, its deep expressiveness. But I had to tell him I was learning to play the oboe, which he opined had a comparable role among winds despite its much higher register - a special voice, one that could express the music in versatile, emotionally compelling ways either with a principal melody line or as a rich undercurrent. I liked his line of thinking. Cello passages started to waft through my head...the adagio from Act II of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty; lines from Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on Christmas Carols; the Bach cello suites.

Recently I heard this NPR feature on cellist Rufus Cappadocia (totally worth a listen!). I was completely enthralled by the places this musician could take his instrument - incorporating sounds from all over the world (including much of the modal music I love so much), even modifying his cello by adding a fifth bass string to maximize its versatility. His music brought together sounds from Sufi and Middle Eastern music, flamenco, blues, Gregorian chant...I felt like I was listening to creativity itself made incarnate through his playing. I found his track "Prayer" particularly haunting. His music, slow or fast, makes me want to dance. I'm going to have to put his CD Songs for Cello on my birthday wish list...and the video for his piece "Transformation," which includes a dancer, below.

I will never be the virtuoso that talented musicians like Cappadocia are, who can use their instruments so skillfully as truly one-of-a-kind voices with fresh ideas to express, but I am so inspired by them and the music that comes from the work of their hands and minds. I am still working on Gabriele Marie's La Cinquantaine, and last Monday Kyoko added Solveig's Song by Grieg to my homework assignments. It's like learning a language. The trouble is my patience (or lack thereof): whether it's speaking something new or playing music, I want to be fluent, like, YESTERDAY!!!

Brief Book Meme

Elaine Fine, who writes the blog Musical Assumptions, sent me the following meme/game today:

1. Pick up the nearest book.

2. Open to page 123.

3. Find the fifth sentence.

4. Post the next three sentences.

5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

So here are the three sentences I found in the book which, in a roomful of books, currently seems to be occupying the spot closes to me:

"I couldn't articulate it then, but I was writing my way out of a former North Dakota, the seven-year span with my parents, into the space I would occupy as a young man.

The elm in the furnace bubbles, still juice, and I wade to the garage-granary in the rising wind, a hand up to ward it off, and go to a pile of oak one-by-fours I've saved for a furniture project and sigh. I load the staves in my arms and head for the furnace through the wailing white."

These were penned by North Dakota poet laureate Larry Woiwode in his memoir What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts. Even his day-to-day chores evoke for me a writer's life - every act a metaphor, an incarnation, of the mind-spirit labor of the creative process, of noticing the world in a particular way, of being and becoming a writer and dealing with the "wailing white" of an empty page, arms sometimes loaded with staves and sometimes empty.

There are a few special teachers in my life whose hope in me I feel I've betrayed, by going to med school instead of living a life in art, be it dance or writing, or by choosing the field of medicine I've chosen despite the promise of other areas, like pediatrics. He is one of them. Over a dozen years ago when I was sitting in a writing workshop he led at Cambridge University, his faith in my voice was a gift. It was as if he had laid a blessing hand on my lips and ears, my eyes and my mind, and said "Ephphatha: be opened." I would carry the experience of that workshop with me long after it was over...and perhaps it is alive in some way still as I go about my "day job" hoping to be of help to a few patients. I hope so.