The Innocence of Children

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Back in the Blogosphere!

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It's been 6 years since my last appearance here and a lot of water has passed under the bridge, more like a billion cubits. I have grown up,   I was grown before but trust me I have grown a lot more. I have completed a residency, chief residency and fellowship and actually moved from NY to a more idyllic less fast paced town in the Midwest in this time. The move has come with all of the culture shock that entails moving away from the North East and I have plenty to write about this. I transitioned from trains and buses to actually driving myself everywhere and recently completed a solo 7 hour drive with 3 brief stops to refuel and use the restroom. It seemed like a good idea then but several rarely used muscles showed up multiple days in a row to protest against being so abused that in concession to these muscles, any distance greater than 4 hours by road will automatically be upgraded to a flight. My regular driving distance on days when I want to escape the quiet of my town ...
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CULTURE SHOCK II

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 I first wrote about culture shock here  twelve years ago when I came as a student to the US for the very first time. And even after all this time, there are still things that shock me, even when I think I have assimilated into a culture very different from the one I was brought up in. I'll go back twelve years and then fast forward to present times. I arrived in Boston at the end of summer and thankfully got accommodation not too far from school which meant I could walk to school and did not have to commute. It also meant that I passed by people on the street every day and as a typical 'yoruba' gal greeted them with a cheery good morning. The first few times when my greeting was not acknowledged, I thought I had not greeted loud enough for me to be heard, so I changed the cadence of my voice which resulted in the exact same response- silence. It took me a while before I stopped instinctively greeting every being I passed on my way to school, but a few months later I had ad...
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Death III

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In recounting my near misses, I can't but think of how many other misses I am unaware of. As a child, I was the only one who was hospitalized a few times compared to my siblings and cousins. I cannot remember if I ever felt sick enough to be at deaths door, but I do know I disliked getting injections. During one of my trips to the hospital I was to receive a Novalgin injection, for those of you old enough to remember Novalgin, it was the most painful torturous injection ever. I screamed hell and blue murder as the nurse approached with a Novalgin shot. 'I don't take injections', I lamented in my most piteous voice, you would think anyone with a heart would see the tears and back down but those nurses were a special breed. After a few minutes of my temporary madness, my father was summoned, it took just one look from him and I accepted the drilling of the syringe through my marrow (that was what it felt like) without as much as a squeak. The feeling Novalgin gave your bu...
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