7 Quick Takes Friday #14

I cannot believe that it is so soon Friday again and time to contribute to 7 Quick Takes Friday, a meme hosted by Jennifer at Conversion Diary. I am happy to report that I am back in sunny California, and it has been sunny! Also, the cold I felt I was coming down with simply disappeared as soon as I was home. (Maybe it has something to do with Fr. Ed blessing everyone's throats, one at a time, at noon Mass on St. Blaze's day. (Yeah, it was nice to start my first day back in the USA with a morning off and noon Mass.)

1. I started the week still in Lithuania. On Sunday, the English department chair and I attended Mass again at St. Casimir's. The temperature inside the church was still below zero. Proof positive: the holy water was a solid chunk of ice. After Mass, the dean, department chair, and I had dinner together at an Armenian-style restaurant. The food and company were both outstanding. Afterward, we went shopping, the one and only time while there that I had time to pick up some souvenirs, and I was delighted to find an illustrated book of the history of church art in Lithuania for Fr. Ed, who likes art. The only drawback is that the book is written in Lithuanian. Hopefully, a picture really is worth 1000 words!

2. After returning from the evening out on Sunday, I discovered that my ticket was for Tuesday, not Wednesday. On the one hand, I was distresse, trd to figure out how to get the Tuesday night class taken care of. On the other hand, this was a godsend. I really did not want my division to be reorganized in order to pose for a 125% expansion with my being able only to provide input from afar, since the direction things were taking were not at all to my liking and would have made it difficult to maintain quality control. It was a godsend (perhaps literally) that I was able to get back on Wednesday, before the final decision was made on Thursday. Once back, I was able to provide my input, and the decision all the way up and down the chain matched exactly what I wanted. Yes! Saying goodbye to the students a day earlier was emotional. Lots of hugs!!

3. The three-and-a-half hour drive to the airport was, in a word, snowy. We left with plenty of time to spare, which was necessary because a tractor trailer had jacknifed across the snowy, slick roads. Powder-white snow covered everything: the slim birch trees struggling to grow in the northern sea climate, the ice-covered lakes that reminded me of ice-skating as a child on New England frozen ponds, and the once-green-now-white fields. The trip reminded of Robert Frosts' poem about driving through the woods and snow on a winter night, only I was traveling in the day. In fact, as we passed the ice-encrusted birch trees, which in the summer could have been very much like the bending birches that Frost describes so affectionately, the poetry of Frost, a fellow New Englander, and Frost-related memories flooded my thoughts. Beyond his poetry, I have always felt affinity with Frost because he, like I a few decades later, home-schooled his children long before it was an accepted practice. Then there was the time that the British co-editor of one of the books I published through Georgetown University Press came to visit friends in New Hampshire when I was visiting family in Maine. We met at Robert Frost's farm, which was not only equidistant from where we were staying but also only a mile from my uncle's house. There, on the hood of her rental car, we signed the publishing contract, which needed original signatures, and then I showed her the real mending wall and the real west-running brook about which Frost wrote so meolidically.

4. My departure brought its moment of adrenaline. The Lufthansa flight arrived from Vilnius was delayed, and I arrived at Frankfurt with just minutes to make it to another gate area and through security before my Washington DC flight departed. I made it to the gate out of breath just as they were calling my name to say that the door was closing. Whew! This really is not the best way to get my morning calisthenics. I am sure planned exercise is a much saner way!

5. This week while on Facebook, I found a long-lost cousin. Well, she was not actually lost because I could have found her any time I wanted through my aunt, but when I made contact with another relative on Facebook, up popped the name and picture of this cousin, who is now living in New York. She was the youngest of my aunt's four children by far, not much older than my own children, so sort of a half-generation younger than me. I grew up with my older three cousins but had left Maine by the time their youngest sister was born. Maybe it is time that I got to know her better. I contacted her, and we are now Facebook friends. Lotsa catch-up to do! This is definitely going to be fun!

6. When I got home, Donnie told me that there were some interesting developments in family life that he had not shared with me by email while I was gone. Perhaps it was just as well. I have now blogged about them on the Clan of Mahlou site (Welcome Home?), but I will quickly relate them here. (a) Lizzie and Blaine, who have lived about because of work assignments in different states for the past five years of their 7-year marraige, have decided to divorce and remain permanently apart but good friends and devoted siblings. (Not blood kin, they were raised together from the time we took Blaine in from the barrio as a teenager.) We sort of think that is probably the relationship they should always have had, but grown children make their own decisions and parents support them whether or not they agree with those decisions. (b) While recovering from the loss of Ray, Noelle has encountered another difficulty. Her bone infection has worsened, and doctors are talking again about possible amputation of her foot. She is scheduled soon (still don't know the date) for some last-resort surgery to avoid amputation. Prayers welcomed!

7. Ah, Friday at last! And a special Friday at that. I was supposed to be on leave all week from work, but considering the drastic changes being planned on Wednesday and Thursday, I put in pretty full days, although I did take Wednesday morning for errands and Mass and came home at 7:00 p.m. for our Bible study group when I might have stayed later into the evening as I did on Thursday. I do have to go in to work this afternoon, but this morning, yippee, I am going to First Friday at St. Francis Retreat Center! A moment of peace! :)

Wishing all of you a weekend of peace!

7 Quick Takes Friday #13

As I started to write this post, I noticed that it is my 13th Quick Takes Friday, a meme hosted by Jennifer at Conversion Diary. I was a little unnerved, seeing the number 13 so closely associated with Friday! Ah, well...here we go, anyway, in no particular order.

1. Stealing Doah. Yesterday, by request, I posted an excerpt from my book, Blest Atheist, on the Clan of Mahlou site about how many years ago Doah was dying at Renboro Hospital (name changed) and with Doah's pediatricians' implicit consent (not explicit -- he would not have been able to give that kind of encouragement), Donnie and I literally stole Doah from the hospital in a very dramatic, made-for-the-movies episode in our lives. It's a story that Doah never tires of hearing. Here are the first paragraphs. If you are interested, you can read about the whole story, including how once again God was able to bad into good, at the Clan of Mahlou site.

Told by doctors at Renboro Hospital that Doah would die for certain, the trail ahead of us to bring him into adulthood seemed hopeless and far, indeed — except that I simply have no idea what the word, hopeless, means. To me, where there is life, there is hope. Clearly, though, to maintain that hope, we would have to do something about the attitude of the doctors and hospital in which Doah was being followed.

We did not have to think long. Matters quickly came to a head at Renboro Children’s Hospital. Our knock-down-drag-out fights with doctors there pitted parent against doctor in a war that was not going to serve Doah well. In June 1980, that cold war heated up rapidly. I refused to sign papers for a fundoplication, an operation that would repair Doah’s hiatal hernia at the risk of losing him because of his breathing difficulties from a subglottic stenosis (narrowing of the trachea) that were treated by a tracheotomy. (Nowadays children's with tracheotomies have decent survival rates; back then, most of the children died.) Doah’s pediatrician, Dr. Paul, was one of our strongest supporters. He would come to the hospital, mediate disputes, and provide me with his medical opinion. Dr. Paul researched the surgical procedure. He learned that the operation (in 1980) had only a 25% survival rate in cases like Doah’s and, if the patient survived, there was only a 50/50 chance that the surgery would take care of the problem. In any event, the surgery would have to be repeated every few years. (Over the years, the surgery success rate and survival rate has approached nearly 100%, but the surgery does still have to be repeated every five years.) Given these statistics, the pediatrician agreed with us that surgery was not wise.

Bent on what we assumed was their pursuit of medical training and the chance to do what was then a relatively new procedure, the doctors insisted that Doah have the surgery. Part of me wondered whether they just assumed he was going to die, anyway, and therefore he was a good candidate for “training” surgeons on a new procedure. In any event, the doctors did not accept my refusal to sign papers authorizing surgery and took the case to court, requesting that the court grant custody of Doah to Renboro Children’s Hospital so that they could do the surgery. We were not told about this court proceeding; apparently, we were going to be deprived of the opportunity even to be in courtroom and defend our rights as his parents. Shades of American democracy as it sometimes perverted by evil forces! I found out about this intention because I read promiscuously —- books and journals and articles and medical records: all Doah’s surgical reports, all the nurses’ notes, all the medical entries of any sort. And that is where I found it. In Doah’s four-inch-thick file was a scrawled note about our being unfit parents because we would not sign for the surgery and the date of the court proceeding. The date was only two days away.

What to do? A daring plan entered my mind: steal Doah from Renboro Children’s Hospital and take him out of state to Beanton Children’s Hospital where Noelle had been treated for her spina bifida and related birth defects three years earlier. I trusted the doctors because they listened to me. The doctors I knew there even liked me. I quickly found out more about Noelle’s former urologist, Dr. Colodny, and learned that while he was at that time specializing in lower GI problems, he had at one time worked in the area of upper GI problems. He could be Doah’s doctor, I reasoned. That thought comforted me, but we still had to get to Beanton.

We developed a step-by-step plan to steal Doah from his hospital room. I shared the plan, but not the details or the timing, with the pediatrician. He looked at me thoughtfully. Then he said, “I cannot condone what you propose. However, if you do happen to end up in Beanton, please be aware that Bob, the son of my partner, is an intern there. He can provide the link back to us and make the transition of records and information smooth.” He disappeared from the room and came back in a couple of minutes with Bob’s phone number. The pediatrician’s implicit encouragement was all that I needed to put our plan into action.

The next day, the doctors were in court, and we were at the curb outside the hospital. Charles kept the car running in a “standing only” zone. What I was about to do would not, could not, take a long time, we reasoned.

Click here to read what I did: continuation of Stealing Doah.

2. The intensity of it all. As I write, I am exactly half-way through an entire semester's course, taught in 5 days! Today the students take their midterm. This is clearly a whirlwind course! For me, too. As soon as I finish the quick takes, I will have to prepare the mid-term, but I also have 8 students coming by this afternoon for short appointments about their research papers, which they will be able to write after I leave and turn in during the rest of the "real" semester, after I am comfortably back at work. I hope that they do better on the midterm than on their "surprise" quiz yesterday, which was not a surprise but seemed to be, based on the failing grades of 1/3 of the class. I went over the results with them before they went home, and I will do an hour review before the midterm today. Hopefully, some of this information will start to gel for them. Linguistic research is not an easy topic.

3. The note in my pocket. I had loaned my warm winter coat to Sr. Maria right before coming here and did not have time to go pick it up. Sister is not young and does not drive (does not have a car), so one of my friends offered to pick it up after prayer group, which I had to skip in order to take Noelle to see Ray -- glad I did since he died soon after. After I arrived here in Lithuania this past week, I put my hand in the pocket and found a note from my friend, saying "Have a safe trip and know that I will be praying for you and your family while you are gone." How nice, a warm touch from home in the cold and snow of a Lithuanian winter!

4. Shane. Good news came for Shane this week. He will be able to get COBRA. Of course, his unemployment check covers only his rent and COBRA would be 50% of that cost, so he would not be able to afford it, but it looks like Donnie and I can pay it for him by tightening our already cinched belts considerably more. The irony is that the company that fired him in order that their insurance premiums not go up due to the 2-million-dollar medical marvel of Shane's called Nikolina will have to pay twice as much as Shane for each premium. Firing Shane may not help them achieve their goal of protecting their low premiums after all. Seems like poetic justice.

5. Shane again. It has been only two weeks since Shane was fired, and he already has an interview for another job. Woot, woot! It is in the tech field; he had been working in dispatch. He wonders if the firing will not be a kick forward since he is skilled in tech and has always been the tech specialist for dispatch wherever he worked. The entry pay is lower than he was making as a supervisor, but the pay would quickly catch up. Where a door closes, God opens a window? We don't know if this is the right job for Shane or just an encouraging fluke, but he did get called back for a follow-up interview next week, a very good sign. So, he ends the week on a hopeful note.

6. St. Casimir's. On Sunday, a friend (the one who has enticed me to come to Lithuania two winters in a row) and I attended Mass at St. Casimir's. St. Casimir is the patron saint of Lithuania, so it is no wonder that the church is Baroquely grand, made of marble, and, in the winter, very, very cold. I could barely walk all the way to the front of this huge church, colder because few people were there to warm it with body heat, for the eucharist and really happy that here the Eucharist is served on the tongue only. My hands would have been far too inflexible to take it in hand. But the church is incredibly beautiful, and I, incredibly, have no pictures of it. I did not bring a camera! :(

7. A cold in the cold. Since last night I have felt a cold trying to seize me. I have been downing all the Vitamin C tablets I can get my hands on, but I may need to buy more. I don't know if it is the cold outside, the cold inside (it took a few days to locate a space heater so I spent a lot of time under blankets, typing with frozen fingers), the cold at work (now I have a space heater there, too, as do other faculty members), or the one time I went out into the cold with wet hair (something that I would not have been able to do in some countries where I have lived because of the cultural inappropriateness but here it is okay; I forgot my hair dryer -- along with, unfortunately, my long underwear -- back in California where I need them far less). Or maybe, it is the late hours I keep. I no sooner finish my evening classes here than my Blackberry is jammed with emergency messages from work, some of which I do have to handle, making for limited sleeping hours.

And now, I had better go write that midterm!