Being Reflective. It's the New Year, right?

With my step father, DK as I call him, being a surgeon, I hear medical stories all the time. In fact, some of the cases he performs end up becoming our dinner table conversation. Here are some examples for your orientation.

"So today I did a radical prostatectomy on a prisoner who was airlifted to the hospital..."

"Today I removed fishing wire from the penis of an 11 -year-old."

"William is now and will be forevermore known as one-ball Billy."

My mom and I have heard so many stories over the years that one would think by now we would be somewhat desensitized to the medical terminology and able to overlook the realities that such an inflated vocabulary might entail... But, this is not the case of course.

These past few days have been kind of sad. The medical stories I have been hearing have not been about the routine blasting of kidney stones or the normal prodding of the bladder. They have been more serious and more personal. For instance, the husband of DK's nurse had a stroke on Christmas Eve and has been in the hospital since. Then, today he had a second stroke rendering him blind. DK said his nurse looks thin and ravaged...with reason.

A little bit later this evening, DK got a call from the O.R. telling him that one of his patients, who they thought was on the road to recovery, was experiencing unstoppable internal bleeding. DK's phone call with the hospital was as follows:

"Oh my God. What? We sent him into recovery after having checked that he was dry of blood."

DK then hung up the phone and stared at the wall, "Shit."

It's so unnerving to hear these things. You're probably thinking, "Well duh, Jackie." But really, the life of a surgeon is not necessarily what you might see in an episode of E.R. That is, there are more patients that survive than die, and the atmosphere of the operating room is not frantic. The doctors, nurses, and techs KNOW what they're doing. They listen to Dave Matthews and cut away at body organs, carrying out what is for them a completely routine operation. So, when you witness how the routine suddenly morphs into something atypical and you see the alarmed eyes of a trained physician as he swears under his breath, it can be quite unsettling.

Aside from the events at the hospital, I logged onto Facebook a few hours ago to find out that one of the professors I had in Barcelona died on Jan. 5, 2011. We all find out from time to time that someone we knew has died. Maybe we knew them well and maybe we didn't. I can't say that I knew Professor Cardona very well on a personal level, but I have nice memories of him, his wife, and his 10am Spanish Contemporary History class. After seeing that he died, I found myself a bit teary-eyed. He was so nice! I remember talking with him after class one day and telling him that I had planned a trip to Paris for Christmas. He then grabbed out of my hands the graded essay exam that I had written for his class and found a blank spot on the paper where he began scribbling down his favorite places in Paris. In the midst of doing so, Professor Cardona paused and looked up at me, insisting that I make friends with a French boy for all of 5 minutes (anymore time than that was simply unnecessary) so that we could take a romantic picture together overlooking the Siene River. He handed me back the paper and said, "Ya verás, París es increíble."

Professor Cardona was also the first and only professor in my entire college career to give me a B. It irritated me at the time to think that one B+ would tarnish my perfect record of A's. I remember talking to him about it afterward--not about the grade, but about my essays. My overall grade didn't change, and I was of course disgruntled about the inevitable drop in my GPA, but I knew that my professor really cared about whether I actually understood what he was trying to convey. That made it okay for me. It's certainly valuable when you find that rare professor who is more interested in talking with you instead of over you.

Anyway, as I was mentally considering the sad news I had heard about DK's nurse's husband, DK's patient, and the recent death of my professor, I began to think about how Facebook, despite being a representational facade of what goes on in real life, is still (at least loosely) based upon what is going on in actual time. Maybe we should deem Facebook to be a work of fiction that is "based on a true story" because really, you shouldn't believe everything you see on Facebook!

Maybe Professor Cardona really isn't dead...

But even so, questioning the verisimilitude of Facebook entirely would be admitting that at least part of what it has to offer us is truth. It's a paradox similar to the one that Hemingway states in A Moveable Feast, "If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact." Remembering this quote, I stared blankly at my Facebook mini-feed mentally sorting through my sad news and all these random thoughts, "Weird that such sad events have occurred so sequentially... how much of the truth is actually captured through Facebook? " Then, my Facebook news-feed automatically refreshed itself to show a new update...

One of my high school teachers just gave birth to a baby girl.