Breath, stretch, shake, let it go.

Over the past couple weeks my spiritual growth has been on point and I felt on top of the world... what a set up...

Last week I ran off to NYC cause I felt like it. It was a great time, but that’s besides the point. On my way to pick up my mom from PA (she was at her cousin’s house while I was in NYC), I had a bit of a traumatic experience and I really haven’t been the same since... I was following this slow driving heifer on a single lane road when I decided to pass him (in the dotted area). I didn’t realize that a huge truck going in the opposite direction was a lot closer than it appeared at first... long story short I’m happy I’m in the physical condition that I am (although I do need to go to the gym).

Ever since that moment I’ve been moping around cause I felt inept in the worst way. I almost felt as if though I wasn’t worthy of living after making such a stupid mistake which could have thrown away my life so easily. All of it because of some impatience.

After a good talk with one of my buddies I realized that I that I was doing myself a disfavor beyond belief. “Duh” I’m sure some of you are saying, but it’s very hard to pull yourself out of these situations when you don’t detach yourself and look at the situation from a different perspective. I needed to detach my self from that and let it go but I was so caught up on the fact that I could have died that I forgot to live the present that God gave me. Now this is very ironic because if we go back to the original situation it was exactly the same case then... Anyways, I will be in a class room from 8am to 5 pm tomorrow so I’m gonna hit the sack.

Here is a clip of Ekhart Tolle that I feel is very relevant. He is the author of The Power of Now, if I know you, I probably mentioned this book to you. His voice is creeperiffic but look beyond it. Just don’t do acid.

Be.

Hello kiddos, hope your Ramadan is going well and that you are fasting and not starving, I need to talk about me because I want to stroke my ego. About 3 weeks ago I had noticed that my patients at work had been genuinely pissing me off. To the point where I wanted to straight up slap em’ across the face. Although the some of you may not know me, I assure you, this is completely out of character. I’m not one to become irate but that’s what was intriguing about these situations. They continued to repeat over the course of the next couple weeks and I was eerily aware that it was happening… just that it felt that someone had paralyzed me from acting appropriately. Granted, these patients are not in anyway respectful or remotely show any kindness. Still, I was so shocked that these angry thoughts were so easily streaming into my head.

It was almost as if though being angry with these patients was “cool”. Although these patients are down right nasty from time to time, I pride (for lack of a better word) myself on being able to maintain my cool and not fall into the anger. In retrospect I realized that my pride was taken and thrown right back into my face. Beautiful. We are often presented with situation where we’re supposed to do the “cool” thing, and often times the “cool” never gets us anywhere. Anyone who listens to Lupe knows that.

So I thought and thought and thought and thought some more about what I was doing to allow these ridiculous situations control me. All of this thinking came to no avail. I really had to dig down within and realize that I wasn’t grounded at all to figure out my answer. It was all right there in front of me like the answer key for a test. I needed to reaffirm to my self that I was doing this for God and nothing else. When you confirm this to your self everything becomes much clearer as we realign our selves with God.

After all of this sorted itself out, Ramadan started… and of course I already had a roadblock set up. I had a case of sinusitis and was set to take antibiotics for the first 7 days of Ramadan every 12 hours… Finally after finishing my course of antibiotics I got two fasts in a row… feeling as good as ever. The second day I fasted I was at work… with the same sort of patients, but with God’s grace I didn’t even get phased and was able to give love throughout the day. I’ve noticed that in order to truly appreciate what we are given we should only give a single object, person, or idea our attention at a time. This may sound extremely basic but it’s very true. Your appreciation for your food goes down the drain the moment you pick up that tv remote. Anyways, after these two blissful days of fasting I got sick again. After contemplating on it I realized Allah was forcing me to figure out other ways to grow closer to him by taking away my ability to fast which in itself is beautiful but at the same time stinks cause I love fasting. This situation seems to perfectly fit into my current state as my best friend, who is the only person that spiritually gets me rolled out to Montréal for the semester. So now it’s just me and I’ve decided that I’m going to use this time to focus on my connection with God (so you might not see me as much this semester).

In any case, today as I was on my way home I decided to put my iPod on shuffle and out came one of my favorite songs of all time. So many things about this song struck me right after another to the point where I had goose bumps all over. Being able to be content with what we have is beautiful, however being content spiritually is a disease. Don’t stop growing.

“We got arms but won't reach for the skies
Waiting for the Lord to rise
I look into my daughter's eyes
And realize that I'm gonna learn through her
The Messiah, might even return through her
If I'm gonna do it, I gotta change the world through her”



Lyrics

Why don't you rebel?

Hello kids.

I’ve been thinking a lot about ways to grow further spiritually cause I felt like I hit a brick wall. On what felt like the 48 hour trip back we decided to peep the Lauryn Hill unplugged album, which is always a amazing album to listen to (if you’ve never listened to it… you need to). It seems as if though every time I listen to it I always have a new thought pop up in my large sized dome piece. In the midst of these deep songs I’ll often zone out in my own thought and during one of these moments I came back to reality to hear Lauryn repeat “why don’t you rebel?”

This sent me off into another thought which really got me going off on my mental tangent which fit right into another idea that had been stuck in my head for the past few days: In order to grow the most we must detach ourselves from worldly things. Definitely a “duh” kind of moment cause one can just say “Ramadan” and its all right there in front of you. But what this really means to me is being able to let go of the attachments to all material things even people (to an extent). Often times we base our happiness on a person or a situation when really we just need to look within to find our true happiness. You can say that’s cheesy but you know it’s the truth. God created us out of His love and so we have a part of Him within us. Therefore if we are able to focus on that inner self then we will have our own divine happiness.

Of course this is easier said than done but one of the ways of going about doing this is through removing our ego. Ramadan is a blessing in itself that we often take for granted… rather that we don’t take at all. Many of us are often thinking about how hungry we are as opposed to how much closer to God we are getting. By taking away material things from our daily lives we are shown that we really have our own “remedies within us… if only we reflect”.

Back to the main discussion: So when I listened to this song I heard rebel over and over again and then she asked are you satisfied? It really made me think about my present connection with God. At that moment I knew I needed to change something… after meditating about it, I realized that I’ve grown to comfortable in my day-to-day life. Knowing that it’s when our soul is in the hardest of situations is when we grow the most.

I really don’t want to post this blog cause I think it sucks. However I get a feeling that I should.

Why don’t you rebel?

Down to the board.

It’s 12 am, I’m on my way back from a terribly tiring day at work and I can’t stop thinking about how much my head hurts. As I drive home and I see a water tower and a smile suddenly comes to my face. I like water.
However, in this case, that’s not the reason why I smiled(if it was this would be a pretty amazing blog… but its not that amazing). I had a 59ish year old patient today who was having/had an heart attack and had to have been one of the funniest patient’s I’ve had in a while. He was what you would imagine of an “angry old man”… cursing just enough to have you on edge and not being able to hear you to not. When I first met him I walked into his room and he’s on the phone with his friend and I tell him I’m about to set up an IV for the meds the nurse needs to administer and so on the phone he goes “ahhh shit I think I’m having a heart attack or something… I’ll talk to you later”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a patient phrase it quiet like that. I was having a bit of a time holding my laughter. As I started talking my nonsense he told me “I’m not trying to go down to the morb”. I thought about it for a second and then I started laughing and began busting his chops. At that time I thought it was his stuffy nose that caused him to talk like that. Then later he started laughing because he thought that I thought that he said “down to the board”. (incase you haven’t figured it out we’re talking about the morg). Anyway we continued to trash talk one another throughout the day and then we started talking about where we grew up… turned out that he lived right by the water tower which was a mile away from my old house.
So as I approached this water tower I couldn’t help but to think of the old man who even in the most critical of times in his life was able to make someone else laugh and not even be worried with his predicament. There is no real “punch line” to this story… it’s just amazing how in such a crappy mood the entire way home from work all I had to see was a water tower that immediately changed my mindset.

What a blessing this life is.

Singe your fingers...

What a cheesy title to a blog entry but who cares. In any case I’d been meaning to write a blog about one thing or another for the past 3ish weeks and didn’t end up happening until now. It’s interesting how even when I want to write a blog at times, I don’t end up doing it until its “meant to be” complete.

A couple weeks back when I had that patient with the hemorrhagic stroke (last blog entry) a friend and I were talking about the effect of traumatic and challenging events on people’s life… more specifically the metamorphosis that these events induce. Obviously in my case, the traumatic event was my father’s death. When I had my father in my life, I never really took to any of his lessons that he had taught me. It wasn’t until after his death that everything started to catch on. Prior to his passing I would know what was right and wrong but, would still do as I please… which usually ended up being wrong (not to say I was a devil child, I was just hormonal and slightly retarded). It wasn’t until my dad passed that all his lessons suddenly began stick.

After continuing to back and forth about the matter, I finally had a good metaphor come to me (shocking, as usually my metaphors suck). I've realized that in essence, everyone is a candle. And it is through these traumatic events that the candle is lit, and with that flame the individual is able to grow exponentially. Obviously there are those that do not deal with those events well at all and end up regressing. From my experience I have learned that these people generally based many of their actions on fear prior to having the event. Then once the event occurred and they were pushed further into a hole all they have left is fear… and we all know where there is fear, there is no faith...

And so I will leave you with a quote from Imam Ali (a.s.) regarding faith in God and ourselves.
Your remedy is within you, but you do not sense it.
Your sickness is from you, but you do not perceive it.
You presume you are a small entity,
But within you is enfolded the entire universe.
You are indeed the evident book,
By whose alphabet the hidden becomes the manifest.
Therefore, you have no needs beyond yourself,
What you seek is within you, if only you reflect.
- Ali Ibn' Abi Talib (A.S.)

Gravity.

Hello boys and girls. I hope you all are doing well and if you’re not - go see a doctor. Speaking of doctors I’ve been working about 36 hours a week (not sure if I included that in the last post but if so then you just read it again, punk) and I’ve been learning a lot as usual (most importantly not just about medicine/nursing, but spiritually). About a week or two ago I all of a sudden had reached a new level in setting up IV’s. I was just a straight beast and as much as I hate arrogance/cockiness ESPECIALLY from myself it had gotten to my head.

Now for the past week I have established one IV linev. That’s just a little something to learn from but there’s more. Earlier today we had a code come in and we were able to save her. This happened to be the first code in the ER that I was there to watch live. Indeed a very nice experience.

A couple hours after that we had a patient who exhibited signs of a stroke upon arrival to the ER. At the Bon, we don’t have the facilities to treat stroke victims. This patient was brought to us in error and really shouldn’t have been there – possible stroke victims are taken to UM. In any case the patient was decently responsive when he first came and throughout the course of the next few hours I watched him slowly decline. For those of you all interested – it was a hemorrhagic stroke in his brain stem. We were trying to get him transferred as throughout the entire time. Long story much shorter, there was a lot of red tape to cross and it really slowed down the entire process which shouldn’t have even had to take place because the EMS should have taken the patient to UM. I think the experience I had today with this case was one of the saddest cases I watched unfold before my eyes. I eventually had to remove my self from the situation because I was so upset. This normally never happens because I’m able to control my self but watching the patient’s health decline right before me was maddening… even more so was knowing that I couldn’t do anything about it. As change of shift came around there were no developments – I will just have to wait till I work next to figure out what happened.
On my way back home I was still very upset and it looked like there was a huge storm coming. I don’t recall seeing such dark skies in a very long time. As I continued to think of what had just happened I saw the sun break right through the clouds in magnificent showing. It really made me think of the entire situation from a different, worldlier perspective. Something in my heart told me that there Gravity effects everyone.

So simple, yet so profound. Often times the lesson is put right in front of us and we choose to ignore it and so it’s spat right back in our face until we truly learn from it.

Pop pop's day.

So it’s 2 am the day after Father’s day and I’m sitting at my kitchen table in my PJ’s with milk, cookies, and my laptop. Since my last blog 6 years ago, I’ve started picking up about 3 shifts a week at work, (12 hours each) today was one of my workdays. Work has been going very well, learning something new everyday (as usual) and it doesn’t hurt that making people laugh and healing never gets old.

Throughout the day people were asking me if I was a father… apparently I look 34. Anyway, the ER was rather slow and the weather was exceptional so I decided to go eat lunch in the courtyard with 75-degree weather and a nice calm breeze (the courtyard is a completely enclosed area with several benches and a nice little grass area that only employees have access to). After eating my lunch I started thinking more about my father and his impact on my life. I realized that I probably wouldn’t have cared anywhere as much for people in general like I do now had it not been for him. This means that I probably wouldn’t have gone into health care. And for those of you mistakenly call me your friends, probably wouldn’t.

After realizing how much I had gained and continue to gain from having had my father for a [huge] part of my life, I realized the sad fate that so many children share- not having their fathers in their lives. This is a sad reality and really makes me wonder how these children miss out on so much. However, inevitably they have or will become stronger from it.

Appreciating my father(and all those around the world that choose to be a part of their children’s lives) today has helped me realize that we should all try to help out those without a father figure in their lives so that they may grow up to become the father that they never had.