Don's Blog Praise What Comes 2-13-23

                   Praise What Comes

Surprising as unplanned kisses, all you haven't deserved

of days and solitude, your body's immoderate good health

that lets you work in many kinds of weather. Praise

talk with just about anyone. And quiet intervals, books

that are your food and your hunger; nightfall and walks

before sleep. Praising these for practice, perhaps

you will come at last to praise grief and the wrongs

you never intended. At the end there may be no answers

and only a few very simple questions: did I love,

finish my task in the world? Learn at least one

of the many names of God? At the intersections,

the boundaries where one life began and another

ended, the jumping-off places between fear and

possibility, at the ragged edges of pain,

did I catch the smallest glimpse of the holy?

  Jeanne Lohman

 

 

 

 

Don's Blog Wild Geese 2-10-23

      Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

    

      Mary Oliver

'Letting Go' 2-6-23

It's June,1988. I have been Editor of Missouri Medicine for awhile. Thirty-five years seems yesterday. If you wish to enlarge the print - on the computer put the mouse arrow on it and press.

Don's Blog 'Slowing Down' 2-6-23

   This poem is a gift from a friend.

     Slowing Down

After hurrying through days

of busy occasions dutifully noted

on calendars with fast-turning pages,

I hear whispers around me,

talk how I am slowing down

as if somethings wrong with that

and I should be sorry to be my age,

mournful about the changes.

But for now I have to say

how welcome the changes are,

that it's good sometimes

to live within a smaller compass,

no longer in charge of anything

more than daily necessities,

that I am learning 

to be worthy of time

and robust with memory

in a sanctuary of silence

where the loves of my long life

walk the shadows with me

where we embrace

where we sing.

  Jeanne Lohmann

Trip to the Alaska Bush Spring - 1969 IV

But our time is short and we had to hop on our new small plane to Kotzebue. We are back on point as we head north to this small village on the northwestern coast. Kotzebue or Qikiqtaġruk gets its name from the Kotzebue Sound of the Bering Sea off the northwest coast of Akaska. It was named after Otto von Kotzebue, a Baltic German who explored the sound while searching for the Northwest Passage in 1818. Qikiqtaġruk, means "small island" or "resembles an island" in the Iñupiaq language. It is an historic native village. The Noatak, Selawik and Kobuk Rivers drain into the Kotzebue Sound near Kotzebue to form a center for transportation to points inland. In addition to people from interior villages, inhabitants of far-eastern Asia, now the Russian Far East, came to trade furs, seal-oil, hides, rifles, ammunition, and seal skins. The trading center expanded with the arrival of whalers, traders, gold seekers, and missionaries. As we arrive at the airport we enjoy their sign. They call themselves the polar bear hunting capital of the world. Maybe not.

Some Alaska Native villages can look eerily the same.

The old ways predominate,

but there are some modern amenities.

But we are here for a purpose. Living inside in close quarters all winter results in chronic adeno-tonsillitis in native children. This in turn causes infection and blockage of the tube between the throat and the ear with resultant ear infections (otitis media). We are here to perform adeno-tonsillectomy in previously diagnosed children. Despite its rural location Kotzebue has an excellent hospital facility.

Over the next three days we do ten tonsillectomies a day. The first day we finish at 3:30PM; the second day at 2:00 and the third day at 1:00. We start out as relative strangers and become a team. I am not operating faster. The team increases its coordination and pre and post op activity becomes more efficient. The best outcome is that there are no postoperative bleeds. This is professionally satisfying at every level. A good friend, a traveling nurse, will specifically followup these kids and hopefully they will have better health and less ear infections. And every evening there is a spectacular sunset.

Trip to the Alaska Bush Spring -1969 III

We are in Nome for the day on our way to Kotzebue. Here is the local hospital in Nome in 1969. It was replaced with the modern Norton Sound Regional Hospital in 2013.

Here is the leader of our intrepid crew as we walked on Main Street. I am surprised not only by my apparent youth but also my totally inappropriate travel outfit. “What was he thinking?”

But I was not the only one who dressed up for the trip. Here’s the surgical team: the nurse anesthetist and the surgical nurse in front of a local bar. Unfortunately we could not attend the “Dance at Sam’s Pool Hall with Music by United Freedom Socials’.

We found ourselves in the midst of history. Here is the first sidewalk in Nome being poured on Main street in 1969. When I returned recently in 2017 this sidewalk was cracked and in need of replacement. Over 50 years in Nome takes its toll on a sidewalk.

Trip to the Alaska Bush Spring - 1969 II

We stop at Nome for the day to change planes. Nome is on the southern coast of the Seward Peninsula. It sits on the coast of the Norton Sound of the Bering Sea. It is incredibly isolated with less than 22 square miles of land and water. There are no ferries or outside roads to the city. Nome is also known for its harsh winters. Between November and March it is common to have temps sitting well below zero degrees and ranging between -10 and -55 degrees Fahrenheit. Nome was not originally a major native trading center and became famous only in the summer of 1898 when gold was discovered in Anvil Creek. Over the next ten years the population grew to 20,000. It became the largest city in the Alaska Territory. There is still gold mining activity. Currently slightly more than half of the population of 3,700 is Native American. We get to walk around this fabled city. Here is what the shore road looked like in 1969.

The city is less than 20 feet above the level of the sound so it needs protection.

Many of the homes are fascinating. Here is one with the multiple racks on the low roof. Some of the racks are red. This means that they were taken recently when the animals (moose and caribou) were coming out of the velvet. The red is from the blood vessels between the bone and the discarded velvet. Compare those with the the white moose rack on the right.

Trip to the Alaska Bush Spring 1969 I

It is time for a Blog change of pace. Here is some personal history and adventure. It is the spring of 1968 and I am in St Louis finishing my residency in Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery at Barnes Hospital and Washington University Medical School. I am in the McMillan Hospital operating room doing a long head and neck case with my mentor Dr Joe Ogura. I get a phone call from my wife Jan and break scrub to hear, “We’re going to Anchorage!” We are more than relieved as we have been worried about going to war - my previous Chief Resident, Bill Diehl, also in the Air Force, has spent this last year at a hospital in Cam Ranh Bay, Viet Nam. We are excited and energized to go to Alaska on active duty. I am a Berry Plan USAF Lieutenant, soon to be a Captain, and then a Major. After attending two weeks of Officer’s Training including many hours of lectures and some nighttime adventures (in one exercise I was carried on the stretcher because of my age) at Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls Texas, I return to St Louis. I pack up the Suburban with Jan and our two housebroken kids, and orders in hand, drive west and then north. The trip to Anchorage takes 13 days and the boys are no longer housebroken. I serve at Elmendorf Hospital in Anchorage, Alaska. In addition to my duties at Elmendorf I am able to attend part time at the Alaska Native Medical Center (ANMC). Thank you Colonel Vandenbos. Along with the usual health ailments the Alaskan Native population has an incredible number of patients with ear disease in need of corrective surgery. For the next two years I do three ear operations every Tuesday morning at the ANMC mostly on children. I also have the opportunity to travel to the Alaska Bush several times where these patients live. Our first trip to the bush was in the spring of 1969. We fly from Anchorage to north Nome and then Kotzebue.

Our team is me as the surgeon and two nurses. One is a nurse anesthetist and the other a surgical nurse. Our plan is to treat Native children with chronic tonsillitis. Leaving Anchorage we fly to Nome. One of the joys of living in the north is that being in small planes allows us to see the Land. We are over a large river on the way to Nome.

We see caribou below us,

and this is the best way to see a large grizzly bear in the bush.

Amaryllis 1-27-23

Last month we had a water leak in the lower level. I moved some bulbs from the dark and they started to sprout. This week one bloomed and is now on the kitchen table.

I love the anazing bloom and the way its organs hang out.

Amaryllis A flower needs to be this size to conceal the winter window, and this color, the orange of a Fiat with the top down, to impress us, dull as we've grown. Months ago the gigantic onion of a bulb half above the soil stuck out its green tongue and slowly, day by day, the flower itself entered our world, closed, like hands that captured a moth, then open, as eyes open, and the amaryllis, seeing us, was somehow undiscouraged. It stands before us now as we eat our soup; you pour a little of your drinking water into its saucer, and a few crumbs of fragrant earth fall onto the tabletop. Connie Wanek, 1997

'New kid onthe block' 1-25-23

Here is an editorial from Missouri Medicine, our state journal from May of 1988. I was the newly appointed editor.