Healing From Loss

This year Imbolc came to me. Imbolc is the symbolic end of winter. We acknowledge it with candles to light the darkness of the night.

It is also known as St Brigid's Day, and Groundhog Day, February 2.

Here is how Spirit worked with me to produce a deep healing, and increase in awareness, of something I had hidden in my heart.

I have a skill set in anesthesia that is unique. As a cardiac fellowship-trained anesthesiologist, I have the skills to help someone who is one their way to death, come back. This is more than inserting a breathing tube in someone who can't breathe and would die. That is bread and butter anesthesia skill. It is the Cardiac Anesthesiologist who is called to help when a colleague has someone trying to die in the O.R. and they want help with the Code Blue.

Yesterday I saw more blood, gore, and death than I care to admit. All I can say is that during the code I was helping in, I saw Our Lady in the corner of the room. She said that she would come back for this person later, but that this patient would survive the code long enough to make it out of the O.R. There is a big difference between a death in the O.R. and death in ICU, by the people who count those things.  And as the pupils grew fixed and dilated, and the v-fib grew coarse, I was inspired to suggest an amp on Sodium Bicarb. It worked! And patient went to ICU. I checked this morning on the computer. Our Lady was correct.

After my twenty-four hour in-house call at the hospital,  it was my turn to see Nana in the nursing home. She said, 'I am hungry' and there was a tray and a chair next to her. I tried to feed her, but it was not at all like feeding my baby seven years ago.  I couldn't navigate the teeth in the barely opened mouth. I managed juice. Everything is thickened, because she can't swallow right. Then the nurses and nurses aides' came. I asked for instruction on how to help her eat. I watched. I learned. I helped.

Nana asked for the wheelchair. I took her around the entire building. She delighted in the beautiful orchid displays by the front.

There was once a time when taking care of the sick was done in the home, and the dead were washed and dressed by women. I felt the Goddess, in all of the suffering that was being treated by the workers, both men and women, but mostly women, at the nursing home.

When I heard the husband of Nana's roommate, who is incommunicative, praying in Samoan, and saw him bow his head and hold her hand, I saw the fruit of a lifetime lived in Love.

In the meantime, I was texting and calling my sister to help decide placement for mother when she leaves the hospital. It is our request to have them be at the same facility, as there is a rehab section that would be nice for mom.

All of this didn't phase me. I just keep going and going. But when my sister said that Target had a clearance sale on the tall seven day Votive candles I had just run out of, I decided to go. I bought every one they had left. There were fifteen in all. A deal at eighty-three cents each. They had the scent in them, and go for over two dollars at the grocery store.

Sicilian Orange. A label on another candle, a soy one, caught my eye and also stabbed my heart. Nana is from Sicily. Her house had just been sold to pay for her long-term care. Lilac & Honeysuckle. Dad. His favorite scents. For years we tried to get a lilac tree to grow in Southern California. It never worked. Our winters were not cold enough. Instead we grew honeysuckle on both fences that surrounded the back yard. The fragrance of honeysuckle in June is one of my favorite memories from childhood. I would pinch the bottom of the blossom, pull back the stamen, and catch a drop of nectar on the tip. I enjoyed many of these. Gardenia  Lily . Fresh gardenias were always in a bowl in my home I grew up in. Memories flooded my mind of my life with my parents. Beach Paradise. The beach is a huge part of where I grew up. It is always within me. Wildflower Meadow. That is my safe place I go to in my mind, when I was seven and walking on fallen logs with a friend at Sequoia. Life was so exciting and beautiful and fresh then. Bali Sunrise. This one I have yet to understand, but was guided to buy it.  Sweet Spun Sugar. I bought a big one, pink, for Erzulie. We go back, and she has always looked out for me. She keeps me always at my best, and I appreciate that a great deal.

I hadn't realized how important it is to accept death, and loss, and suffering, with something to focus  upon; in my case, it is a series of candles I will enjoy in my home over the next weeks.  I can smile because it happened, and look forward because I took the time to acknowledge where I had been in life.

Keep your eyes open for similar help from Spirit on Healing from Loss in your life too.  Happy Imbolc. And Blessed Be.

Namaste,

Reiki Doc

Doctor Defends His Life Against Medical Errors

"If you can't take care of your colleagues--you have no business taking care of anyone else."--my favorite gastroenterologist

Today I worked with my favorite Gastroenterologist. He was a pediatrician, a famous one at a famous hospital, back in India. Once he came to the United States, and had to retrain, he decided to become a Gastroenterologist. Back home, his medical school classmates do not understand why he would leave a prestigious field like Pediatrics, and work as a less-respected field.

"There are three kinds of patients. The first are the PPO's. They are nice. The second are the HMO's. They are always angry because the referral did not go through right, and they had to wait for their care. The last are the GNP (an IPA in the area). They think that anywhere else besides the main fancy hospital people don't know what they are doing." he shared.

Apparently the main fancy hospital 'has everything, all kinds of equipment' because of the many donations. They have EUS and another new technology.

A nurse asked about the local teaching hospital. 'Don't they have those technologies too?'

'I would not let them treat my dog, unless I wanted the dog dead!' he said.

Apparently he had a liver biopsy. He wanted transjugular, but the colleague he went to only did transcutaneous. (His colleague of choice went to his alma mater, and he respected their common institution.)

In recovery room, after the procedure, my favorite gastroenterologist knew something was seriously wrong. 'I am bleeding.' he said, and asked the nurse to contact the doctor. The doctor could not be reached, and the nurse sedated him. (The bleeding was internal, and it did not show on the dressing).

He had called his wife at the gym before the sedative. When she got there, he woke up. Nothing had happened. He called his friend, another G.I. attending and explained the situation. He got admitted to the hospital. Again he called his doctor, but only a resident got sent.

He passed out again. When he woke up, he was getting 'a fluid challenge'. 'What is this? Why am I getting a fluid challenge?'
'Your blood pressure is 60 (systolic--a pressure incompatible with life)'
'What is my hemoglobin?'
'Seven' (He had fourteen before the procedure. He had lost half his blood volume).

He called his friend the surgeon. His friend sent up his fellow. In fifteen minutes he was in the O.R.
There were five liters of blood in his abdomen. (He was hanging on to life by a mere thread.)

Anyone else that was not a physician would have not known to pick up the phone, or even whom to call, and would have died. It took four years and half a million dollars to get his health back to what it was before. The reason he keeps working still, is to make sure he has good insurance coverage.

'It was a good lesson for me," he said. "First, I learned to take good care of myself. Second, I learned what it is like to be on the patient side of the doctor-patient relationship."

He took action, not legal, but with the hospital. A review was done. The offending gastroenterologist was offered the chance to leave or be fired. He left.

"But you know what?" he asked, looking me straight in the eye, giving me the chills.
"I had a bad feeling about this. Before the procedure, when we were in the car, I told my wife. She asked me do you want to go back home? I said, no, we are here already. I often wonder what would have happened if I had listened to that feeling and not gone through with it."

Namaste,

Reiki Doc