Miracles Both Ordinary and Not So Ordinary

In my current rotation in the neonatal unit, I'm spending a considerable amount of time observing premature babies and babies with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome as well as, for the purpose of perspective,  with newborns not presenting any particular health challenges. The birth of any baby seems nothing short of miraculous to me. When a newborn is healthy, it's a cause for wonderment.

So many things can [and too often do] go wrong between a baby's conception and birth.  When everything goes as it should, which happens, auspiciously, far more often than not, it's a cause for celebration. It's sort of an unspoken acknowledgement with every birth of a healthy child, in the face of everything that might possibly have gone wrong for this new little creation, that once again all the worst-case scenarios have failed to come to fruition and the way life should be has triumphed once again over all the more problematic possibilities. It's the sort of thing that gives a person the faith to continue with such work in the face of what, all too often, feels like sheer futility. 

Seeing the preemies in their respective states of struggle gives me empathy for my own parents, who lost preemie twins a couple of years before the births of my brother and me, and who dealt with uncertainty concerning my own outlook. A newborn girl was delivered yesterday at my precise birth size of two pounds, two ounces and fifteen and-one-half inches in length. Though the outcome cannot be guaranteed to be perfect for any baby, now is a  great time to be born in terms of all that can be done for premature babies. While the child faces increased risks for all sort of complications ranging from but not limited to breathing problems, cardiac issues, gastrointestinal problems, brain and developmental problems, and far too many potential hazards to list here, odds are that she will bypass all the potentially disabling conditions and will emerge as a healthy child. The child's prognosis is, because of this time in which she was born, if anything, brighter than mine was.

I told a neonatologist standing nearby, who served his residency here at this facility while my dad was serving an oncology residency at the same time here and is a friend of my dad, that the tiny girl I observed was the precise size I was at birth. This is the hospital where I was born. The neonatologist was actually on duty during the interval in which I was treated at the NICU here. He carefully took the baby from her incubator and handed her to me. I was as sterile as I'll ever be, as I had scrubbed and gowned but hadn't yet handled any of the babies in the unit. We don't touch any babies, much less the preemies, without being freshly and thoroughly scrubbed. As I held her, I tried to compare her weight and mass to objects I have held. The closest approximation I could reach was that she felt to me about like a dense loaf of homemade whole wheat bread. How do medical personnel go about the act of reassuring parents of a baby who weighs roughly as much as a denser-than-average loaf of bread that the child's future looks anything but bleak?

About two minutes after handing me the baby, the neonatalogist took her from me and placed her back into her incubator. He then put his arm around me and steered me, crutches and all,  down a corridor, through two set of double doors, and into the room of a patient. The neonatologist introduced me to the patient and to her husband, who was seated in a recliner next to his wife's bed. I shook their hands. The neonatologist then told the new parents that less than twenty-three years ago, when he was completing his residency at this hospital, I was born here weighing two pounds, two ounces and measuring fifteen-and-one-half inches in length -- exactly the weight and length of their own newborn daughter. He told the new parents that I would graduate from medical school in the spring at the age of twenty-three. 

The young couple's new baby may someday attend medical school as I am doing, or perhaps will not. We cannot know what direction her abilities and interests will lead her. It  was, nevertheless,  gratifying to see the countenances of the young parents  transform from worried expressions to ones that looked perhaps calmer and more filled with hope.  I was most honored to have been even small a part of it.

I don't own this video. I hope the owner doesn't object to my use of it.

My Latest Encounter With a Psychopath

not my actual bra, but not far off (it may in fact be bigger than most of my bras)

Because I'm attempting to get a jump on all my coursework so that I'm not running around like a chicken with its head cut off late in the quarter as many of my classmates will be, I had my second interview in one week (fourth interview overall) with my diagnosed psychopathic inmate. There's always an unbreakable (to the degree that anything is unbreakable) glass partition between us, and there's a guard on each side of the glass lurking not far away, surpervising usually three inmates and their visitors, all of whom for various reasons require closer supervision than do the average prisoners who conduct their visits through glass. In addition to the guards' supervision, our conversations are audiotaped and viedotaped. We converse through a telephone.

Today's visit started out much as did all the others. We always start out with the usual social niceties (psychopaths are better than most at that) but quickly got down to the heart of the matter.  It has been made clear to all of us in the course both by our professsor and by prison officials  that we are not the prisoners' counselors. We are in no way qualified to counsel prisoners or anyone else. We are there to collect information that is to be used in our personal research for the course.
For the most part, we are given a script from which we work. We are authorized to deviate very  slightly because sometimes a prisoner's response  leads to a logical follow-up question, but curing what ails them, or making them feel  better about their prognoses or about life in general, are not the reasons we are speaking with them.  The guards supervising on both sides of the glass are also aware of our parameters and have been instructed to cut any interview short if it appears to be veering blatantly off-course, or if they see us [the university students] doing anything as stupid as giving out  personal information that could endanger us. We're just dumb university students. It's their job to protect us from our own stupidity. If that sounded snarky, such was not my intent. The correctional officers are looking out for our best interests and are doing their jobs.

I was pretty much following the script. The guy was describing his high school experiences when he started talking about a girl he dated in high school. As he became more and more specific about this girl, the guard on the other side stepped closer to him. Then the inmate asked me my bra size. He was immediately handcuffed, and the interview was over. He laughed hysterically as he was led away in cuffs.The officer on my side escorted me to an officer just outside the door of the visitors' room with the glass partitions. This guard immediately asked me if I was OK (he didn't yet know what had been said, but knew the inmate had spoken inappropriately to me). I had to wait in an office while administrators listened to the audiotapes and viewed the videotapes.  I'm not certain exactly what they were listening for; I can only surmise they wanted to know if I had in any way contributed to the direction the interview had taken, or if the inmate had said something even worse than what he had been heard asking me. It was confirmed that neither was the case.

I was directed to an outside office (proson personnel can't, for a myriad of reasons, take us into the secure areas, where most of the high ranking administrators' offices are housed) where I met with an assistant to the warden. She apologized to me for what had happened. No apology was really needed on that account; if a person has reached the age of eighteen without enduring anything more traumatic than being asked one's bra size  (in my case, it's not particularly impressive, incidentally), that person has lived a highly insulated life. My life certainly has not been lived with that level of protectiveness, it almost goes without saying, or I probably wouldn't be finishing my second year on a university campus as someone who is barely eighteen.

Then the warden's assistant went on to deliver the blow, which was that I would not be allowed to have further contact with that particular inmate.  She apologized, saying that it was through no fault of mine and that she understood the inconvenience to me (major understatement), as I had already invested considerable time in this project,  but that it was a privilege for a prisoner to participate in such a program, and that the inmate in question had abused his privilege to the degree that he could no longer be trusted to be involved with interview-based research involving university students. She offered to have another inmate available for me by Monday. She gave me her card and told me to call her on Monday, and she also told me she would personally contact my professor to explain the situation and the time I had already devoted to the project in the event that a time extension for completion of the assignment was required.

There was nothing more she could do. The prison has its protocols it must follow. I thanked her for her time and consideration. I was escorted all the way to my car by a correctional officer, which I thought was perhaps a bit of overkill. After all, an inmate in one of the more secure penitentiaries in the nation had asked for my bra size. He was on  one side of the barbed wire, and I was on the other. It wasn't as though my life had been threatnened or I was otherwise in any danger. Still, it was a thoughtful gesture.

Right now I wish to take the time to say that I formerly lived in a community in which a not insignificant number of (mostly California State-employed) correctional officers and their families live. For whatever reason, recent legislatures and governors in California have given generous deals to the state's prison employees, and their salaries, benefits, overtime compensation, and retirement plans are reflective of this treatment.  While I concede that many prison jobs are quite dangerous and/or unpleasant, when  roughly twenty qualified applicants vy for every available position,  it's indicative that the pay and benefits could probably be lowered to some degree without losing an unmanageable number of qualified employees and/or future applicants.  This is critical in a state with a budget deficit the size of California's.  

It is unfair to paint all workers of a particular line of employmnet and their families with the same brush, but, speaking broadly, while I didn't know most of the officers themselves well, I knew their children quite well. In one of the most educated communities in the nation, many of these offspring stood out like gangrenous thumbs.  (My primary attacker in the restroom assault incident was the offspring of a state prison correctional office, as one of his two accomplices.)  In general, the overall attitude of many (but not all; I must be fair)  of these students seemed to be that their fathers (if the families were intact, most of the mothers were stay-at-home moms) were doing quite well financially without ever having taken education seriously. There seemed little reason for the offspring to invest any major time or effort toward the endeavor of academic success, either. I must add that the number three graduate in the academic standing of my graduating class was the daughter of a state prison correction officer. She was a most diligent student and a genuinely good and decent person.  Not everyone fits the same mold.

My experience with the correctional officers and other prison employees with whom I had contact today (though, as federal employees, they could be cut from a different cloth, but I'll hope that such is not the case) gave me a more positive feeling toward prison employees and correctional officers in particular than I've ever felt since being aware of them. I felt that they all did their jobs proficiently and professionally, and were a credit to their profession, and additionally, went out of their way to be kinder  to me than their job required that they be.

It was a thoroughly dejected state of mind that dominated my thoughts as I drove through the prison gates and along the highway leading to home.  I don't have the technology to talk on my car phone through speakers because my parents consider it unsafe for an inexperienced driver.  I exited at an off-ramp so that I  could call my professor. In a major stroke of luck, I actually reached him rather than his voice mail. The prison official had already spoken with him. He asked me to come to his office as soon as I made it back to campus.

I thought it would be wise to carry evidence of the work I had already completed on my Psychopath Study, so I quickly stopped by my house to grab the file before going to the university to meet with my professor.  ( The idea of carrying a file jammed with transcriptions of  prior interviews with an inmate to a prison and leaving it in my car in the prison parking lot is something that, to my paranoid mind, is inviting trouble.)

I parked in the parking structure closest to the professor's office because he had told me to hurry, as he had things to do and didn't wish to waste an entire Friday afternoon waiting around for me.  (This professor is a most genteel sort of man.)  I pretty much  ran (I wish I'd had my skateboard in the car with me) to the professor's office, taking the stairs to the fourth floor so as to avoid wasting time waiting for the 1970's-designed elevators. A paraplegic could pull himself up the stairs at about the same pace that the elevators in this particular building move.

Allow me to state that I was not expecting sympathy in any form. I showed up at the professor's office because he told me to do so. Still,  it caught me by surprise when the first words out of his mouth were, "Boo hoo! An inmate asked you your bra size. Now I suppose you expect to be exempted from the assignment and expect a week off from classes for mental health reasons."

I had no answer, so I gave no answer. I just stared at him. "What do you want from me?" he finally asked.

"You told me to come here, " I reminded him.

"Oh, yeah. I guess I did." He stared blankly. My guess is that the professor is roughly in his early sixties. All sorts of stange and mind-altering drugs were avsilable during his college years. My suspicion is that he partook freely of those substances back in the day.

"So what have you done so far on this project?" he asked.

I took out the typed transcriptions of the first four interviews and handed them to him. All were quite lenghty because the inmate was cooperative and loquacious in those interviews, and the guards allowed me a little more time than was supposed to be allotted. The professor read through the transcripts  closely.

"I have twenty-five minutes of interview material from today's interview, too," I told him.

"You have more than enough to complete the project just with what you've already done. Go with it. You don't need to start over," he concluded.

"Thank you," I said to him, leaving hurriedly so as not to waste any more of his Friday afternoon.

"I'm sorry if I seemed a bit abrupt," the professor said as I walked out of the office.

"No problem," I answered. "It's all good."

So miracles do happen, whether they're more heavily influenced by God himself, by persuasive prison officials and crusty and spacy but not inhumane professors, or by mere chance. I'm not looking this particular gift horse in the mouth. Instead, I'll simply type  the final project tonight as I begin The Big Push.

I'll pop in sporadically over the next seven to ten days when I need a mental health break as I'm grinding my way through every reading assignment, project, essay, research paper, or even short-term assignment if it's already been given.

I'll appreciate it if you think of me as you're enjoying your leisure time, but my time will come soon enough.

Happy Friday!

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Rainbows and Other Ordinary Miracles

Why are there so many songs about rainbows?

            This wasn't my actual double rainbow, but I decided to put the picture in just for effect.

This morning when I woke up my mom told me I should come into her room. I have a nice big window facing the east, but my parents' bedroom spans three sides of the house, so they have windows facing three direction.  Wondering what could possibly be so exciting that would cause me to want to take so many extra steps so early in the morning, I made my way to her room anyway. There, from the view of her west window, from which the ocean can be seen if it's not too cloudy, which it often is in the morning but happened not to be today, and if the neighbors haven't allowed their trees to go for too long without being pruned, which also happened to be the case, is a slight sliver of a view of the Pacific. I looked toward the Pacific and saw not just a rainbow but a  most majestic double rainbow. It was a thing of such beauty and glory that it almost caused me to believe another Jong Il or Jong Un or Kim Jong (or whatever their official family title is) may have been born.

It caused me to think of the song from The Muppets' Movie, "The Rainbow Connection," that asks the question as to why so many songs have been written about rainbows. How many songs have been written about rainbows, anyway? One website said Kermit the Frog grossly exaggerated when he asked the seemingly rhetorical question as to why there are so many songs about rainbows, with the website maintaining that songs about rainbows number a grand total of forty-two. (I question the authors' research/and or numeracy skills. First grade standards in nearly all U.S. states now mandate counting with one-to-one correspondence to a much higher level than forty-two.) Lyricsfreak.com lists eighty-six songs with the word rainbow in the title, and in scanning the titles, I noticed numerous omissions.  Lyricsfreak.com's list included only those with the word rainbow appearing in the titles. By the time hymns, folk songs, and children's songs are added to the mix, and the word rainbow may appear anywhere  in the song, the number would have to be in the hundreds.  This still doesn't answer the question of why.

Ben Michaels, PhD, is a fan of the Muppets and sings Kermit the Frog's song to his children regularly.  He cautions those who wish not not know the answer to the second part of Kermit's question -- "what's on the other side?" --  not to click on a particular link [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow} but Kermit himself already offered a basic answer to the question in part. "Rainbows are visions, " as in we can see them,  "but only illusions," even though we can see them, we cannot touch them; they;re not really there. I personally don't need to know more than that, which is, admittedly, a scary outlook for a potential research physician. My lack of curiosity alone is appalling.

I am very loosely tied to the LDS faith. One of the teachings of the faith, which is, in fact, borne on the crests of all the campuses of Brigham Young University, is this: The glory of God is intelligence.  If every religion possesses a single truth that is owned by no other, this would be, in my opinion, the truth held by the Mormons. Almost everything, if not absolutely everything, probably has a logical explanation to anyone sufficiently all-knowing to learn of and to comprehend  it.   To my way of thinking, though, this doesn't mean each of us has to learn of and comprehend the scientific basis of everything that seems to us simply to be a miracle. If truth were to be told, I probably possessed the underlying cognitive proficiency to deduce that many of the presents under the tree each Christmas morning were likely procured by my parents, but it was something I neither needed nor wanted to understand.  In some regards I still feel that way about Christmas and Santa, and perhaps I always will.

It is possible to accept that an element  can be visual yet not quite tangible, yet still somehow be real. One can appreciate its beauty and the sheer miraculosity  (yes, this is a bona fide word according to some but not all sources; I like it so I'm using it)  of its appearance and of its existence.   In my world, ordinary miracles exist every day. The most salient of those miracles I noticed this particular day, which was by now technically yesterday,  was the double rainbow I viewed from my parents' bedroom window. I celebrate its presence and my fortuosity at having witnessed it.  I suppose I could attempt to attach some sort  of religious significance to this, but for now, I choose simply to appreciate its sheer grandeur and leave it at that.

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