Resolutions
New Year's resolutions are for schmoes. If you really care to make a change in your life, you'll start on September 21st or July 9th or February 16th or any other old day in the calendar. There's nothing magical about January 1st and if anything, it gives people license to fail and having done so, put off the changes until the new year rolls around again.
That said, I do feel like the New Year provides opportunity to reflect on the good and bad of the past, and to project the "hopes and fears" upon the coming year. Often, events around January 1st seem to frame or anticipate the course of life in the next 365 days and it seems no mistake that this January first, finally finishing the 800 page behemoth, I should pick up Mountains Beyond Mountains. This biography describes the life and career of a truly dedicated infectious disease doc and the work he's done to bring health to the poor in Haiti and elsewhere. It's awe-inspriring and makes me feel inadequate, uncaring, clumsy. But it also gives me a little bit of hope, a slight nudge of encouragement to think that I could accomplish even a teeny fraction of the things this great man has done. I hope this kernal of empowerment will stick with me throughout the stupid clinicals and dull lectures and other mundanities of nursing school and help me grasp all of the opportunities I have this year to become a compassionate and talented health practitioner.
Paul Farmer:
"The only noncompliant people are physicians. If the patient doesn't get better, it's your own fault. Fix it."
Regarding the treatment of a poor TB patient. "When she received [the antibiotics] she soon began to respond - almost as if she had a treatable infectious disease."
"I'm still looking for something in the sacred texts that says 'Thou shalt not use condoms.'"
"We want to treat his ass. ID says treat. Love, ID."
He had "faith [in God]. I also have faith in penicillin, rifampin, isoniazid, and the good absorption of the fluroquinolones, in bench science, clinical trials, scientific progress, that HIV is the cause of every case of AIDS, that the rich oppress the poor, that wealth is flowing in the wrong direction, that this will cause more epidemics and kill millions. I have faith that those things are true, too. So if I had to choose between lib theo, or any ology, I would go with science as long as service to the poor went along with it. But I don't have to make that choice, do I?"
"I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can't buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent."
That said, I do feel like the New Year provides opportunity to reflect on the good and bad of the past, and to project the "hopes and fears" upon the coming year. Often, events around January 1st seem to frame or anticipate the course of life in the next 365 days and it seems no mistake that this January first, finally finishing the 800 page behemoth, I should pick up Mountains Beyond Mountains. This biography describes the life and career of a truly dedicated infectious disease doc and the work he's done to bring health to the poor in Haiti and elsewhere. It's awe-inspriring and makes me feel inadequate, uncaring, clumsy. But it also gives me a little bit of hope, a slight nudge of encouragement to think that I could accomplish even a teeny fraction of the things this great man has done. I hope this kernal of empowerment will stick with me throughout the stupid clinicals and dull lectures and other mundanities of nursing school and help me grasp all of the opportunities I have this year to become a compassionate and talented health practitioner.
Paul Farmer:
"The only noncompliant people are physicians. If the patient doesn't get better, it's your own fault. Fix it."
Regarding the treatment of a poor TB patient. "When she received [the antibiotics] she soon began to respond - almost as if she had a treatable infectious disease."
"I'm still looking for something in the sacred texts that says 'Thou shalt not use condoms.'"
"We want to treat his ass. ID says treat. Love, ID."
He had "faith [in God]. I also have faith in penicillin, rifampin, isoniazid, and the good absorption of the fluroquinolones, in bench science, clinical trials, scientific progress, that HIV is the cause of every case of AIDS, that the rich oppress the poor, that wealth is flowing in the wrong direction, that this will cause more epidemics and kill millions. I have faith that those things are true, too. So if I had to choose between lib theo, or any ology, I would go with science as long as service to the poor went along with it. But I don't have to make that choice, do I?"
"I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can't buy them. You can feel ambivalent about that, because you should feel ambivalent."
posted by Imle at 5:02 PM
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