Must be half way by now....

I must admit that I don't really count the days like someone else in my family; I just know that it must be past the midway mark because I am running out of stuff that I know!   I am always confused as to whether the time goes by slowly or fast ..... All in all, it does go by quickly as Tony and I seem busier and busier every year ..... especially if I let him alone for any length of time.

We are doing a few classes for the anatomy teacher to demonstrate that our PBL approach can work with any topic.  We are focusing on the knee.  And we are using me as proof that you don't have to be a "content expert" to be a good tutor in PBL.   (The last time we sang the "..... the knee bone is connected to the ...", I sang, "ankle" ....... clearly not an expert in the human skeleton ......)  We conducted a contest with a prize for the best group drawing and labelling of a picture of the knee.  The contest was fiercely fought and and rather well done.  (But at one point I did sit there wondering to myself, "Has my life come to this?")  

The two groups competing on opposite sides of a board.

"Are you sure that that goes there?"

Actually, both Tony and I are aware that we have way more things to share than we have time left in terms of class hours still scheduled.   This isn't a bad thing, just frustrating; and I imagine that even if we stayed through Christmas (just checking to see if our wives are reading;we are not staying), we would still have a few things more we wanted them to learn.   So, instead, we have been picking extra times in the week to inflict ourselves on them.   At 3 pm on PBL days, I have started doing some presentations on ethics principles, so that at some time in the future some of the words look familiar.   And it almost makes me feel better ..... but I have to encourage the students to be much more assertive.  In the case I used for "Autonomy", a 50ish woman with MS refused a soft diet and risked choking and aspirating and they agreed that she had a right to do this --- unless the doctor said it was in her best interests to have the soft diet and then we could make her!  UGH...

We have continued to go "live" to provide some variety to our pbl classes.  We brought the students up to interview a woman who has schizophrenia and epilepsy.   As with the recent dengue patients (and hopefully even with our "paper people"), the experience of the person with a disease makes it more vividly memorable.   The patient was chatty and freely talked about people poisoning her, a wonderful personal history that was entirely un-factual and the stuff of textbooks...   Then Tony conducted a continued learning session in the hallway about the conflicts in medication for epilepsy and schizophrenia.  And I talked about the difficulties of nursing chronic patients of any kind - especially those without any social supports.   Nursing, maybe more than any other profession, puts Rogers' "positive unconditional regard for all persons" to the test. 

 For the first time in a number of years, I didn't get to St. Ann's this week... I wimped out.   I started as usual on Tuesday after class on my bicycle ...... when the skies opened and I just got to the front gate at Mercy and headed to the little building there.  (It still says "Snack Shop" and also that it sells phone cards ......  However, it has not done so in my nine years -- maybe it will be a snack shop again one day, so no sense taking down the signs, eh?)   Well, an hour passed with torrential rains persisting and when it finally settled into normal rains, the street were flooded with several inches of water.   As I was already wet, that wasn't the problem -- the problem was going to be the cars on the road with all that water!  So I am becoming more and more Guyanese - the rain here is used the same way as snow in Canada.   I'll blame my lack of daring on Anne, to whom I had promised not to do anything "exceptionally stupid". 

When you are below sea level the water has no place to go.

Next Tuesday is a major holiday here -- Divali, the Hindu festival of lights.   Sister Barbara has arranged that the girls go swimming at a private pool, so I will go to supervise!  I am adding some St. Ann's pictures because Tony and I were over on the weekend to get their old computers connected to the internet... and some of the girls took my camera.

The construction noise continues, six days a week, and once they were here till 10 pm.  I tried to include a sound track of the noise, but lacked the skill..  So if you can imagine two large gas-powered cement mixers that are slightly old right under my window, going from  7 am till at least 5 pm .......  It is a constant roar and your brain gets it into the background after awhile, but it is only about an hour after the mixers are turned off that my brain becomes silent!   (And I thought living in the Bourda Market last year was noisy!   Even the dogs barking at the mango thief were quieter.)   The noise is either here or outside patient rooms... so "through suffering to glory!"   (I have suggested moving the concrete mixers permanently to outside the patient rooms as an efficient way to cut down on their length-of-stay stats!) 

Almost everything in the construction work is done by hand; there are about 30 or so workers, most of whom are "unskilled muscle" and young.  I can't help looking and wondering what they are going to be doing when they get to forty - let alone sixty......

We had a field trip to the Amerindian Museum on Tuesday, and it was one of the best conducted tours that we have had in years.   A young man there, Yannick, did a superb job in detailing all of the artifacts... So good in fact that a few nurses were appreciating all of his assets .......

Yonnick and his new anthropologist.

We get out and about... University of Guyana to see Raymond in Chemistry and Sekhar and Stephanos in IT; out to dinner with Mercy CEO Helen (I had prawn curry with french fries and it was a national "faux pas" -- even the chef came out to see if I was sure that I didn't want any rice with the curry!  He knew it was a tourist, eh?)  and other small adventures...

Anne is on her own adventure in Calgary with our daughter, Sara.  It reached a new low for us here, 23.5C (or for the Americans 74F) and people were wearing jackets.   I imagine it was a bit lower in Calgary, although Anne tells me that even there it's only light-jacket weather so far, in the daytime at least.

This is enough for the week; thanks for coming on my journey with me.