And the Big News is...

A first for my time in Guyana:  never in my nine visits has so significant an event happened in Guyanese history .....  Are you ready?  Drum roll, please.

Guyana Golden Jaguars beat Trinidad and Tobago 2-1 to proceed in the group play for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil!



And we were there on the pitch...well almost.



Denzil, one of our nursing students, served as our host for the game. 

Last night, we were at the National Stadium to see Guyana beat its arch-rival Trinidad, to go through to the next round of the2014 World Cup for the first time in its history.   We were picked up and driven to the match by one of our more enterprising older students - Denzil Hernandez.   He used his taxi-driving skills to get us to the game on time and on the only road ..... it could rival the Long Island Expressway or the Q.E.W. from Toronto at rush hour - except that some of the road is just dirt.   He had arranged for our tickets and was going to get us our official yellow Jaguar shirt, but the scalpers had put up the price to $2,000 Gy [$10 Cdn] and he was not paying that much for a shirt .....  I thought about our NHL jerseys! 

The National Stadium was built for World Cricket a few years ago ..... and we entered through lots of security and pat-downs as they were looking for guns.   Once we were inside, Denzil led us to the field entrance with a short piece of BS about who the two old white guys were... and I guess we were now medics as we sat with the ambulance.

Looking the part.

I love watching soccer from ground level as one gets a sense of the speed and power of the young players...  It reminded me of my youth -- although actually I was never a very good  soccer player, even in my memory!   Guyana played a good attacking game and TandT was content to sit with four at the back until they went 2 down in the last part of the match... and then the referee gave them  a mercy call outside the box so that they scored in extra time.   I have mellowed some and was not coaching as the referee gave 90% of the 50-50 challenges to TandT -- I just noted it as an observation .....   Of course, old coaches never really die ..... and I had my very helpful opinions, though no one asked me for them.   We ran into other students and people we know, though Denzil was clearly "the man" as he seemed to know everyone!  

The parking lot had cars parked bumper to bumper, six deep .....  it was unlike the parking at the Polo Grounds in Wellington, Florida, where my sister lives .....   And just for good measure, Denzil's brother and his wife were there, so we fought through traffic going the wrong way to drop them off, and then back through gridlock going the right way.   We were back before midnight, dropped at our gate by our chauffeur.    A great night ..... I have always liked winning better than losing!

And speaking of winning:  Tony designed a test for the PBL sessions that we did in Anatomy and Physiology, on "the knee" (remember the blackboard diagrams?).  We gave it to our first year students and to the second year students who had the traditional pedagogy ..... AND .....  I think the results will really interest you ..... when we publish, eh?   Or, God forbid, you might have to read Tony's blog to see if he leaks the results.

This was another week over-packed with responsibilities, both in the classroom and in our social life. We had to "steal" a few extra classes to get all our PBL pages completed so we can get home to our special, loving, gracious, talented, beautiful, supportive, etc., wives on the 26th of November.   The students are seeing us very often -- I hope that familiarity doesn't breed contempt.   So far they are playing well with us and seem engaged in all our efforts.

Friday saw us all meet at the Public Hospital Morgue, the Rite of Passage for all First Year Mercy nurses -- at least since I have been there:  the visit to the autopsy lab of Dr. Nehaul Singh, the chief and only pathologist in Guyana.   (On the first day of classes the students ask, "Are you taking us to the morgue?" sometimes even before they know our names .....)   As in all other years, this year there is a range of students from petrified to curious...  There were some who had their gloves on as soon as they got there and some who found it all a little much ..... including one student who was trying for an Academy Award in the Drama category .....

This year there was a Guyanese pathology resident who spent a lot of time with the students showing them all the internal organs and cross sections.  Almost all the students participated as he suggested -- after the organ had been removed from the body.   He was a most excellent teacher, and I said a short prayer that he will consider staying in Guyana when he is credentialed.  There have been others before for whom I had said the same prayer, but the salary dollars overseas seem to them more like heaven than just another country.  I know if had asked him he would have said, " I need to feed my family."  And thus spake Qoheleth!

We returned to the classroom without any fatalities and spent the next two hours in an engaging discussion of life, death, body, respect, smells, suicide, lack of resources, amazement at the "insides" of real bodies, fervent promises to study anatomy harder -- and to get back on diets so as not to have all that fat showing when they hit the morgue tables.   It is truly a rite of passage as they will not be the same again -- hopefully!  

The organs that they explored in detail were those of a young woman about their age who had killed herself by ingesting poison.  The poison of choice was farm insecticide -- and you don't want to know what that does to a body.    The despair of the woman got hidden in the science talk, but all the class knew it was there.    I suggested that she had given them gifts... the chance to see the wisdom of the body, the reflections on the meanings of living and dying, what is precious in life, and why they are not going to have tomato soup ever again!  I said that if they can remember some or any of it, then as another old preacher once said (actually he said it so many times everyone lost track) then her life will not have been entirely in vain.  She has been our teacher in death in a way she could not accomplish with her life.   It was also Remembrance Day .....  I hope the students will remember her, as I remember Jim Bishop, Boston City Morgue, 1968.

Walking back from the morgue... and stopping for a pop at Paul's - a tradition.

Reflecting on life and death and nursing

We also had an "ethics trial" in which Dr. Tony was the Honourable Judge.   The students reflect on a case of assisted death and on whether they understood the actions and whether they might ever do the same ..... and how the ethical principles that I have been beating into their heads might apply - autonomy, justice, etc.   Then I assign roles -- such as the wife who kills her husband -- and we even bring her husband back from the grave, as well as a defence attorney and prosecutor, so that every student gets a character.  We even had Jesus appear before the court!   (He could only talk in scriptural quotes.) 

I get the most satisfaction out of having the people most violently opposed to the killing be the wife or the defence attorney .....  stretching their minds, eh?   They were very imaginative and dramatic, if not very reflective ethically -- well, you can't have everything.   The jury ruled that she was innocent because she wasn't in her right mind.   The decision reflects the ambivalence of society in general to "mercy killings" and the 'mercy killers"... It doesn't seem "all wrong" nor does it seem "all right"!

This was a week with a death theme. It was not only the morgue, but in our paper problem young Rajah is dying from an astrocytoma, and we had also visited the funeral home.   Mr. Claude Merriman described the roles that funeral homes play in the practical side of dying as well as the psycho-social supports provided to grieving families.    The students were disappointed there were no bodies in the cooler, but they did get more than enough the next day at the morgue.

One similarity with northern funeral homes is that you have to walk by the expensive caskets first before you can find the cheap ones.

We took one of my young girlfriends, Johanna, out to a fashion show.  I had promised to buy her a burger, but thought that she'd like the show better.   Now she has a lot to ask her parents to put in her stocking for Christmas.   Tony and I  were more preoccupied with the models -- and of course how much they reminded us of our wives .....

I forget whom she looked like more .....

Johanna with a runway seat.

 And to continue our full social life we were invited to join Tabitha and Sekhar as they had invited a dozen or so persons from their home state in India, Andhra Pradesh.  They had prepared traditional Indian foods so the new people wouldn't feel so homesick.    (The food was very good, but we need to work on our Telugu language skills ..... )  All the guests except us had come to work in the Information Technology  areas.

Almost like Pubnico -- the women were all huddled on their own.

And since my butt is telling me that I have typed long enough, just a final word about the girls' pictures from St. Ann's.   I have come to grips with the truth that they love my camera more than me .....  usually they take a couple of hundred pictures each time I am there; however, this time they took more than Aldric at a concert (Pubnico reference) -- some 400 plus!  I have trimmed them down to a dozen or so.

Tessa [left], a Mercy Grad and a St. Ann's Grad.  She was in my class longer ago than either of us could remember.  She was visiting her sister, Marissa, who was feeling under the weather.

Finally ....... Did I mention that GUYANA WON?
Thanks for coming this far...  John.