800

Just a quick note to wish everyone a happy Rumi's 800th birthday. Hmm, a trip from Balkh to Konya could be fun.

The BBC had an article on his birthday here.

From the Masnavi:

Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.

Claustrophobia Update

In this world of irony, it is only fitting that I posted about my odd claustrophobic dreams a couple of posts ago. Now, I'm living the dream.

For my placement in the badlands, the school assigned me a room in a basement. Where do those dreams come in? The bathroom: the ceiling is about 6'1", which means that I can't stand up straight. Shaving isn't easy, walking around has to be done doubled over...

But, that's the good part. The shower, well, is about 6'2" tall, and about 2' by 2'. In other words, it would make a cozy coffin for someone 6" shorter than me. The shower head is located a bit below my shoulder height. I can fit in there if I fold myself up a bit like an accordion bellows. To top it off, the shower head pops off once it heats up, giving me a fixed time limit for shower length... showering is a form of comical torture.

No internet access at home either; I have to go to the hospital to (slowly) check my email... and facebook is blocked. I feel like I've been buried in Kill Bill: Volume 2...

Bones

My rotation in therapy is done, so I've left behind the hermeneutic circles I'd weaved myself into, and I'm moving on to family medicine. I have a rural placement, in a town famous for its dinosaur bones; it's in what is called the badlands of Alberta. I may not have net access there... not sure how I'll cope with that. If that's the case, I guess I'll be doing a lot of studying and reading, and perhaps a lot of running as well. I'll have to pack my Nietzsche and Freud books... I almost bought a couple of Dostoyevski books on Saturday, but held off...

Changes

I'm one and a half weeks into my current rotation, and it seems to have had a pretty profound effect on my thought patterns.

Some thoughts I had today:

"Hmm, this reminds me of the conflict between Hegelian and Marxist dialectics."

"He's caught in a classic Batesonian double bind!"

Neither of those sentences would have meant anything to me two weeks ago. I bought a six-pack of beer on the way home.

Psych

I've never considered myself claustrophobic before, but how else can I explain my recent dreams? Over the past couple of months, I've repeatedly had dreams about being uncomfortably squished into tight spaces.

The last one was about two weeks ago, and I remember parts of it very clearly. I was leaving my office; the door was tiny, just small enough for me to crawl through, with quite a bit of trouble squeezing myself through. The door led into an antechamber, a small room perhaps three feet by three feet, with a second door on the wall to my right, leading to a larger room. The second door was the same size as the first, and I had to work my way through that one, while my lower body was still in the first doorway. As I was worming my way to the second door, someone came to talk to me through the second doorway; they mentioned something about increased budgets, and I was happy because it meant that I could get a bigger doorway for my office.

I eventually made it out into the larger room, but the ceiling there was about six feet high, and I kept hitting my head on the metal light fixtures as I walked around doubled over.

I wonder if being in my obstetrics rotation for the past six weeks had anything to do with it.

Now I'm thinking about going into psych; I'm in the middle of a two-week elective in family therapy, and it's great.