Being September, I’m thinking about teachers.
          I was at a medical conference and the speaker’s topic was clinical teaching. Most of us in the room were world-weary medical teachers, but some were bright-eyed new grads looking for ideas, inspiration, or advice. The interactive question posed by the speaker: “tell the people at your table about a moment when a teacher made a big difference for you.” You’d think the incident would be a life-or-death situation, a huge, serious event, but immediately I thought of Dr. Hope.

Two things triggered this line of thinking for me:

1. Hearing about the swimmers who helped to save their friend from a shark attack in San Diego last month
2. Watching the series “Station Eleven” (based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel)

     In the shark attack, two men—in the same ocean-swimming group as the attacked swimmer— responded to his cries for help by swimming toward their friend and the attacking shark. One was an untrained rescuer who said on CBC he was “going on instinct.” The second was a trained ocean lifeguard who had been taught, like all first responders, not to enter an unsafe area…yet also went to assist. Along with another swimmer and a surfer, they were able to get the victim to safety and he survived the attack. The shark had left the area, and no one else was hurt.
     In the series (the book was written in 2014 and I’m watching on CBC Gem), a deadly global pandemic occurs, and in today’s episode, a plane is left on the tarmac at an airport because the people inside have been exposed to the disease. When one character expresses his distress at leaving them to die, another character asks, would you die for a stranger?

I've been thinking about spies. Likely (spoiler alert) because of Elizabeth from the Thursday Murder Club series (see book review, July 6 2024). The only true spy that I've ever met was a friend's grandmother, who apparently was a spy in WW2, but I didn't know that at the time I met her and therefore couldn't ask her about it. On second thought, maybe she isn't the only spy I've ever met; by definition, I shouldn't be able to tell, right?

For those of you living in a cave/under a rock/taking a news break and therefore don't know: Alice Munro recently died at age 92. Shortly thereafter, her daughter Andrea Skinner wrote publicly about sexual abuse by her stepfather (Munro’s second husband), and Alice’s failure to support her, or even acknowledge her daughter’s trauma.
     Full disclosure: despite being a short story writer and admirer, I’ve never been a huge Alice Munro fan. Of course, she undeniably has tremendous skill and has won every major literary award including the Nobel Prize for Literature (2013).

Right now, our city is infested with caterpillars.
It’s Northern Ontario, and it’s June, so there are always black flies and mosquitoes at this time of year. Now, we have to add caterpillars?
For a while, they were hanging from the trees on cobweb-like strands, and we had to dodge them when cycling or running. They took over the deciduous trees in our yard, and their droppings are covering our deck (who knew caterpillars generated so much poop?). In the last few days, predictably, there are cocoons forming in every windowpane and doorframe, after which I guess we’ll have a lot of moths around. Wherever I go, in addition to “hot enough for you?”—which briefly replaces “cold enough for you?” at this time of year—people are talking about the caterpillars. Spraying trees, pesticides vs garlic concoctions, foil around trunks. My one neighbour just laughed and said “It’s nature. What’s the big deal?”

Have you heard of “lifestyle medicine,” which is apparently new? A definition online suggests “evidence-based, person-centred care,” of which the pillars are: 1) healthy eating 2) mental wellbeing 3) healthy relationships 4) physical activity 5) minimizing harmful substances and 6) restorative sleep. Doctors can do extra training to become “lifestyle physicians,” which bothers me quite a lot because…doesn’t this concept sound an awful lot like family medicine?

In Rivka Galchen’s book Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (see book review dated May 22), the reader accompanies the narrator through a true witch hunt. Although it is a novel, the book is based on the actual trial of Katharina Kepler. Her son was Johannes Kepler, whom you may remember from science class as the mathematician/astronomer who developed understanding of planetary motion, telescopes, and was considered the father of modern optics.
 
     In this book, we see “she said” vs “he said” testimony, false accusations under oath, corruption, bribery, exorbitant legal costs, and painstaking slowness in the process of justice.
Sound familiar? It certainly does to me. Has anything changed since 1615?

Apparently, other people don’t have these recurrent dreams to which I'm prone. I seem to have themes that appear over and over, psychoanalysts rejoice!

1. Triathlon dreams, even when I have not done a tri for 5 years now. The race is starting and I’m not ready. I have no contact lenses and can’t see, I’ve forgotten my bike, my gear is at home/in a locker/unavailable. I’m swimming madly to catch up, having missed the start. We’re running, but the route is crazy: up many stairs, through a house, on an escalator, on a floating dock. The only fun one was the dream where the swim portion was completed on waterslides!
2. Exam dreams: I’m late for the exam. I can’t find the room (often my high school, or the hospital at McMaster where I did some of my medical training). I didn’t study properly. Or, I studied but they changed the exam subject to something else and now I’m unprepared. My bike has been stolen, I have no transportation. (I last wrote an exam in 1997. Honestly, brain, for God’s sake…let it go.)
3. Performance dreams: figure skating, dancing. I’m in a large group, it’s a show or contest of some kind, and I know none of the steps. No idea of the choreography, so I’m always a beat behind. Sometimes my vision is impaired here as well.
4. Medicine dreams: office or hospitalist. There are many patients to see and I’m way behind. I can’t find them, I keep getting lost or distracted, I think I’m caught up and then realize I’ve missed an entire list of people, or haven’t seen them for days. There’s a maze of obstacles, or the computer isn’t working, or I go to an examination room and it’s someone’s living room behind the hospital door.
   

After reading Plum Johnson’s “They Left Us Everything,” (see What I’m Reading, April 10, 2024), I’m feeling torn about Marie Kondo, the tiny hyper woman who told us all to thank our stuff and then let it go unless it brought us joy. According to Plum, cleaning out her parents’ very large and cluttered home brought a new appreciation for her parents, their past, their love story, and her family history. She lovingly catalogued and sorted over a century worth of stuff, and it took her a solid eighteen months. She photographed favourite areas of the house and made a photo book.
Whereas my brother-in-law told his parents that if they didn’t clean out their basement, when the time comes, he’s lighting a match and throwing it down the stairs. Obviously, there must be an in-between point here.

What is happening right now?
Teacher friends describe fights at the school, kids who swear at teachers or the principal, assignments not completed, and an inability to intervene without parents getting upset. Why do these kids think this behaviour is okay? Why won't parents allow teachers to discipline their children?
ER doctor friends describe belligerence, patients drunk or high and not wanting help, just somewhere to stay warm and get a sandwich, leaving whenever they want, showing up again when the homeless shelter kicks them out. What led them to this point?
Stores all have those signs now that "shouting and swearing will not be tolerated." Security guards are everywhere. When did it become okay to shout and swear at people, something I witnessed during the COVID toilet paper fiasco?
A friend's fifteen-year-old daughter put up with parents yelling at her when she refereed a soccer game for eight-year-olds.
What is happening?