Welcome:

Here you will find the somewhat random musings of a pediatrician in Watkinsville, Georgia. Some of my posts will involve medical topics, some political (maybe), and some spiritual. I will probably throw in an occasional comment about UGA athletics, or some other sports-related topic, as well.

Your comments are invited.

Rhinos

Rhinos
Walking with Rhinos

Monday, July 30, 2012

Opening Ceremony Observations

Like so many others, I spent a few hours Friday night watching the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics.  I imagine that I was not the only one that found the ceremonies, well, interesting.  Thanks to the extreme narration skills of Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira, there was very little room for the television audience to watch the ceremonies and form their own impressions of what was happening.  

Facebook post during the Opening Ceremonies:  Watching the Opening Ceremonies being narrated by Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira is far too similar to watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with its extreme overnarration. "The Voldemort puppet is over 100 feet tall and his wand shoots real sparks!". Thanks very much, Matt. I had difficulty interpreting the fact that I just watched a huge Voldemort puppet shooting sparks from his wand.

I doubt that an artist such as Danny Boyle would want someone telling his audience what to think, but perhaps I am wrong about that, since he probably had a hand in the script that Matt and Meredith used.

The narration team told us that the bizarre hospital scene was a tribute to Great Britain's National Health Service.  The children in the hospital beds were then tormented in their nightmares by a handful of iconic British literary villains until the Mary Poppins army came to the rescue.  Had I not been told how to interpret the scene by Matt and Meredith, I would have assumed that the NHS was part of the nightmare.  

My personal nightmare regarding socialized medicine, however, is already becoming reality.  The passage of the Affordable Care Act and the fact that it was upheld by the Supreme Court is a giant leap toward socialized medicine in the U.S.  Where is an army of Poppins's when you need it?

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Creative Visualization for Seniors

You may have read my post about my paternal grandfather (Granddaddy) and one of the events that happened to him during WWII ("It's raining...mules?").  I thought today that I'd write about my maternal grandfather, whom we called PaPa.  PaPa passed away about 2 1/2 years ago from lung cancer.  I have written about his passing in a previous post ("Cancer").

I thought I'd post a funny story about PaPa tonight (there are a few, so maybe I'll post more of them in the future).


We were visiting him at his home one night in early January of 2010 and he started having a lot of pain and difficulty breathing.  The hospice nurse was called.  She came over and tried to work with him on relaxing.  She told him to "visualize being in a peaceful place, like the beach".  He either didn't get the "visualizing" idea or pretended not to.  


The nurse told him to imagine he was in a peaceful place.  He responded, "I can imagine a lot of places."  Mom then tried to explain and said, "Pretend like you are at the beach".  He then, despite his pain, laid back, closed his eyes, put a smile on his face and pretended to be holding a drink in his hand.  At that moment, especially when he had been struggling so much with his pain, it was a hilarious thing to do.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Greatly Exaggerated

The rumors of this blog's demise have been greatly exaggerated.

I've just been a little busy with life.  Being a husband (depending on who you ask - more on this later), being a father, being a pediatrician.  Working on developing more of an online presence for our practice.  Learning how to put up drywall.  Completing adoption paperwork (though my wife really gets the credit for that) and adoption education.  Just a few things.

In the course of completing our adoption dossier documents we had to obtain a newly issued copy of our marriage license.  The appropriate request was made to the state vital records office and, just like that (well, actually two months later), we received...a divorce verification.  Dated the same day that we got married.  Although we probably would be married by common law by now (16 years later), we thought it would be a good idea to have our state confirm that we are, in fact, actually married.  My diligent and lovely wife worked hard to contact an actual person in the state government and we do now have confirmation that we are married and that our children are not illegitimate.

We are now waiting on approval from US Customs & Immigration so that we can send our dossier to Ethiopia.  We are very excited to be that much closer to welcoming our new child into our family.  Anyone out there speak Amharic?