Good Friday 2012

32 years ago, I was within eight weeks of qualifying in Medicine and, plucking up courage, I embarked on a two week locum at St Andrews Hospital, Bow in the East End of London.
It was a baptism of fire: I worked two consecutive 120 hour weeks as a medical houseman and felt as if I would never see daylight again.
Students today are forbidden from doing such work before they are qualified and the working time directive forbids junior doctors from working such intensive hours. But what I learnt in those two weeks set me up with a fund of experience that would prove invaluable to me over the years.


Sitting here in our conservatory now it seems hard to imagine that time. The 1980s were fundamentally different from now: all the technologies we take for granted didn't exist and I can remember spending hours working in the library using the vast Index Medicus to reference research papers, page by page. Now we can google search something in seconds that would have taken hours back then.


In 32 years time, I will be 86, and the year 2044. Technologies will have converged in unimaginable ways and its a stark reminder too today to read that the Larsen B ice shelf in Antarctica is collapsing faster than had been thought.


In words that were written long before the discoveries of quantum physics, Blaise Pascale wrote:


"The least movement is of importance to all nature.
The entire ocean is affected by one pebble".

It is a potent reminder that time is just relative and that we are all connected, no matter where we are.


Nicholas
















This morning, as light from the rising sun floods the conservatory, my eyes are drawn to a little green chair that sits in the corner opposite me and the magnificent orchids that are situated on the windowsill above it.


The chair was an inheritance from my Aunt Rose. She was a 1st grade school teacher and the chair was once in her classroom in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania. Daddy repaired a broken spindle between two of its turned legs, sanded it and painted it a dark green before I moved it to NYC with me in 1983. It now provides a place of rest for 3 teddy bears and a smallish stuffed version of Uncle Bulgaria of Wombles fame.


The orchids, nine in total, provide the conservatory with an incredible sense of timeless grace and elegance, a beauty that is rarified and somehow other. 


The chair with its stuffed animals is a reminder of little girl tea parties with my sister in Grandma and Grandpa's basement growing up-yes, the chair was there because Aunt Rose was there... but that is another story entirely....these tea party memories and the memories of reading all my Dad's childhood books, kept perfectly to adulthood I might add, come flooding to mind. And juxtaposed in time and space, the orchids cared for and nurtured by a now grown woman, help me to believe that I have made it through those more tumultuous waters of childhood and youth and arrived, with a few twists and turns, at a safe place in my life. 


As I look more closely at the chair, I see there is a chip in the paint on the right hand side and a spider has made a web on one of the lower legs, perhaps a testament to my housekeeping skills, but perhaps more to the nature of things not used.


Today I marvel at my mind's ability to simultaneously hold memories and dreams, my past and my hopes for the future, and I am not sure if I will clear the spiderweb away or not.