The Gum Tree for 2005 September 8

This was a good last week. I flew to Houston Thursday night after doing some surgeries here in MO. There were few hotels with vacancies because of Katrina--so I got set up in a suite at the Marriott. It was not so bad on the wallet because of a Medical Student Interview discount.

Then on Friday I flew out to Utah for the funeral. The funeral was lovely. It is funny; I learned recently that when you have cataracts then light gets bent funnily through the eye. The condition is aggravated at night so that indicator lights on the dashboard can stretch up and down so that it looks like you have a big long red/orange light from the top of the visual field down to the bottom. A few people use black electrical tape to blot out the light on their dashboards--pretty smart I thought.

Then--an epiphany--Grandpa always put black tape on the dashboard. Some people were heavily critical of that--(*clearing my throat* MOM)--who personalized it as JUST ANOTHER example of his passive-aggressive-compulsive-disorder tendencies (and therefore and example of Dad and me--Damn those Walch Men Traits!). I found out at the funeral that G-Pa had cataract surgery not too long ago--and his were mature brunescent thick cataracts were taken out. G-Pa just wanted to drive without huge lights clouding his vision. After his surgery he didn't need glasses for seeing far away and the night glare, starburst, ghost glow condition cleared up.

Funny how things clear up when you have the right perspective. I think that after this life we will all have a more clear idea of each other--as well as ourselves, and we will have some pretty startling revelations about why we did some things. Sure some of those things may be because we have weaknesses, but our earthly diagnoses (e.g. those annoying labels that SOME people place on us) are probably not quite true.

That is one thing I learned this weekend--we need to put some things in perspective. I guess that is just my clever analogy of how we try to remove the mote out of our neighbors eye while having a beam in our own.

I also learned that we need to give each other a lot more slack in terms of their behavior or personality quirks.

Finished Theodore Roosevelt's Autobiography (quite a big book) and starting on the Autobiography of Frederick Douglas (I read 10 chapters yesterday--riveting).

I also found out that my interviewer at UT-Houston (an exceptional Heart Surgeon--Dr. Frazier and VOLUNTEER Professor) was an avid fan of Theo. He commented that T.R. didn't quite realize how great a man he really was. After that he said that I had nothing to worry about in terms of getting into UT-Houston. We shall see.