Rememberlutions 2017

Since January 2015, I have kept a decorated glass jar on a shelf as a place to store reminders of things I want to remember about the previous year. You can find my posts about 2015 and 2016 by clicking. Because these early years of medical training tend to involve a lot of doubt and self-recrimination--as well as long working that seem to preclude having time for fun and relationships--I like the idea of pausing to look back at my accomplishments and positive experiences. This blog post is mostly a personal exercise in gratitude, but I share it with you in case you are curious about what went on with me over the last year. I don't expect you to read all of it, but maybe leave a comment at the end with one of your favorite memories of 2017.

To be honest, my favorite memories from 2017 are every time I hugged a crying mother, or when a patient, family member, or attending thanked me for being a good doctor. There was the catastrophizing teenager who assured me I had calmed his fears about his prognosis. Multiple children of old and sick patients in the hospital expressed appreciation for how I conducted family meetings, answered their questions, and grieved with them. And my heart just melted at the way the mother of a newborn with Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome called me "Dr. Kristen." I hope most of these memories were left out of the jar more out of concern for my patients' privacy than because of exhaustion. I did collect encouraging feedback from my superiors to come back to when something goes wrong, or I (inevitably) fail at some task:

"Thanks for all your great work on neurology. You have great attention to detail even working overnight as a guardian angel of neurology. Hope you will get some good rest after your overnight."

"You have good clinical judgement." (From none other than the guy who literally wrote the textbook on pediatric clinical diagnosis.)

"Special thank you to you for always going the distance: your willingness to step up in a lot of ways from this project [on reducing burnout] to your [history of medicine] noon conference and the stuff from this morning [sitting up front at Chairman's Rounds after an overnight shift in the pediatric emergency room] is inspiring!"

"I just wanted to let you know that you did a great job this week. The patient that you saw today was very complex from the ID standpoint and you did an exceptional job of collecting all of the information and putting it together in a coherent fashion with an excellent plan. I usually try to come up with some critical feedback but you really did an exceptional job and I can't think of anything specific for you to work on."


In other news, I was made a Yelp! Expert and have had two of my reviews featured as Reviews of the Day. My Yelp! account is another repository of memories from the past year, from the sketchy froyo place in Shadyside (Happy Berry) to our marvelous 12th anniversary dinner (Altius).

Now on to the Rememberlutions jar. It is not big enough for all my good memories: there was a whole stack of programs in addition to the tickets and scraps of paper stuffed inside. Here they are, in approximate chronological order:

We started the year by using our new Carnegie Museum membership to visit the Art Museum to see Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica's work.

Then there was a Duquesne University studio production of local faculty musicians performing late-19th-century French, Weimar-era German, and mid-20th-century American cabaret pieces called "The Art of Cabaret."

Probably my favorite musical performance of the year was the organ and vocal concert "Choral Fantasy" at East Liberty Presbyterian Church in January 2017. The melancholy sounds of the singers' voices drifting down to us from the balcony still haunt me.

Watching Hidden Figures with a group of Black women leaders in Pittsburgh.

Any year that includes Dale Chihuly glass is a good year. (Columbus, OH)
Other criteria: good food, fun games, beautiful music, friends and family.

While playing a pre-show ice-breaker game before a WordPlay performance at the Bricolage Theater (like The Moth, but with a live-DJed soundtrack), Dear Husband and I (Delilah) met Mary (Sampson), who invited us to attend the 19th annual Summit Against Racism at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, which she was organizing over MLK weekend. I later went back to the Seminary to watch "Unfinished Business: From the Great Migration to Black Lives Matter," a documentary about Pittsburgh's Black community.

The Pittsburgh Opera's Pennsylvania premiere of As One, a two-person operetta about a transgender woman's coming to terms with herself, had some of the best music for string quartet I have ever heard.

A "Welcome to worship card" from Third Presbyterian Church with the verse, "Jesus spoke to them saying, 'I am the Light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.' John 8:12"

Beauty and the Beast, which was beautiful to watch but involved so much CGI that it wasn't really an improvement over the original cartoon version

Nefarious, another of our favorite new games this year.

Woody's Order, a one-woman show about the play-write and actor's older brother, Woody, who was born with cerebral palsy and "ordered" a sister from his parents. At the Pittsburgh Playhouse.

Pilobolus' Shadow Land at the Byham Theater, a review of which I combined with some of my own nocturnal dreams at the same time: What Dreams May Come.

A worship concert, "The World Beloved," at First United Methodist Church, one of our three faith communities.


This hand-written note from the Chair of the Pediatrics Department that came with a gift card to Millie's Ice Cream: "Have a couple of scoops on us. I am so grateful for your hard work and caring ways! Best, Terry" (Everyone got one, but still.)

At some point I went back to the Bricolage for WordPlay and played a game of bingo that involved finding someone who had never attended one of these shows and someone who had hands larger than mine. If I can, I like to attend on Friday nights, because the American Sign Language interpreter is really good.

Visiting the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with friend FN while there for a conference in April.

I completed two jigsaw puzzles this year, one of a Bengal Tiger by myself (click for photo and short story), and one of the constellations and zodiac with my family over Christmas.

Treasured memories from our trip to Copenhagen and Scotland at the end of May so I could give a conference paper include walking on the beach in Aberdeen and touring the grounds of Balmoral Castle, Scottish Home to The Royal Family. Most interesting tidbit: watching Queen Elizabeth age from a perfectly ordinary-looking young wife and mother in their early photo Christmas cards to the wizened, white-haired old lady as I have always known her. We had actually attended church with her that morning(!). Also riding the funicular part of the way up Cairngorm Mountain and then hiking to the summit.

I gave the first Pediatrics noon conference for the new interns, a history of medicine talk about using food as medicine.

Staying up late on a work night to watch Moonlight with our "friends": someone shared to a list-serv I'm on that there would be a viewing of the film at a local theater, so we showed up, only to discover that it wasn't a public event at all: the owner of the theater had invited people he knew to his "home" to see the movie projected on a large screen over the stage.

Celebrating my birthday with dugout seats from one of my residency programs that were close enough for the Pirates Parrot to wiggle his butt in our faces.

Of all the game nights with L & R, apparently my favorite was the time we played the ever-expanding game of Concept. Second favorite: Carcassonne. Third: Starfarers of Catan.

The Pittsburgh revival of In the Heights, the Tony-Winning Best Musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda advertised with his picture (but a different lead actor in the show). Heart-felt but not particularly memorable for me.

Laughing our butts off from the cheap seats at An Act of God, an irreverent religious comedy written by a former Daily Show writer for a local comedian. Unfortunately, the home-town crowd appeared to have found ticket prices too high, and they ended up closing the month-long run 3 days early, before we could recommend it to anyone else.

Attending "On Green Dolphin Street," the September 2017 Jazz at Emmanuel vespers service


A note from friend JR, who hand-made my new Halloween earrings in the shapes of candy corns, spiders, and pumpkins: "Dearest Kristen, I hope that this week is going better for you. I also hope that you enjoy the earrings. I love and miss you and am always here if you need me." (I went as a Smarty Pants for Halloween; those are Smarties stuck to my pants with double-sided tape.)

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Power of Poison in the Natural World exhibition. I should get around to writing that blog post... Did you know the Mr. Yuck sticker was invented at the Children's Hospital here?

Then there's the program from the jazz concert by our neighbor at a suburban Presbyterian Church containing the following written conversation: Me: "We need spinach for Cajun chicken." DH: "We also need to cook rice." I guess that's what we had for dinner, which reminds me, I should post the recipe sometime, as it's one of our favorites.

Watching Murder on the Orient Express over Thanksgiving.

A ticket the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra's superfluous and mildly offensive mini-operetta staging of Haydn's Creation. The music by itself was worth it, however.

Probably my favorite theater experience was Dodo, an "immersive" theater experience put on by The Bricolage in the Carnegie Museums of Art and Natural History after hours that began as a surrealist comedy and became a meditation on memory, loss, and preservation.

From the jar I also retrieved a ticket to see Rogue One at Christmas 2016 (we later re-watched it with FUMC friends over dinner) and our stubs from a community theater production of The Music Man back in November 2016. Big events from 2017 that didn't make it into the jar included a c-c-c-cold visit to Fallingwater and a warmer one to Columbus; hearing the Junior Mendelssohn Choir sing and also the Bach Choir's War concert; going to Kennywood amusement park and tubing down a crick with my pediatrics colleagues; planting trees with the Pittsburgh Redbud Project and wandering Main Street in little Cambridge, Ohio, all decked out like a Charles Dicken's novel (blog post coming!).

Happy New Year, Reader. What are you going to remember about 2017?

Aberdeen: Death and Mourning

The Maritime Museum in Aberdeen, Scotland, is hosting a series of five exhibitions while the Art Museum is temporarily closed. The current one is called "Kiss of Death: Death and Mourning in the Victorian Era." It is anchored by the fanciful bonnet by Jo Gordon (left), the feathers of which simultaneously hide the wearer's face in her grief and project it outward into the public sphere. It cunningly captures the materialistic and highly ritualistic [ideal of] Victorian mourning. The whole concept is named, of course, for Queen Victoria's prolonged mourning for her husband of 21 years, Prince Albert, who was inconsiderate enough to die of typhoid fever (or was it Crohn's Disease?) less than two weeks before Christmas 1861.

(This is an excellent article on the historical importance of Albert's death.)

Of course the mourners had to wear black--shiny black for "full" or "deep" mourning, dull black later on, and shades of purple and even white in "half" mourning. One whole case contained black jewelry at various price points, from jet (actually hardened coal) and onyx through black glass, enamel, and bog wood on down to vulcanite (a hardened rubber). There were two other contemporary art pieces in the exhibition; one of them was a time-lapse video of a performance artist wearing a black crepe dress and weeping while a hidden hose soaked her with water. This made the dye run from the fabric onto the white floor. By the end of the mournful tune playing over the images, the top of the dress was gray and the puddle an inky black at her feet. If a woman cried (or sweated) while wearing crepe, this symbol of public mourning would mark her skin, so she was reminded of it in private as well.


The other contemporary art piece is the one to the right--a curved mirror with pink, tan, and black blobs representing the ectoplasm that might haunt a seance. It reminded me of the review I did of Heather Wolffram's 2009 book, The Stepchildren of Science: Psychical Research and Parapsychology in Germany, c. 1870-1939 for the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. They also had examples of "ghost photography" on display, as well as funeral announcements.




How fitting that while we were in this exhibition, the museum called for a minute of silence to remember the 22 victims of the bombing in Manchester.


Death was all around us in Aberdeen. There's a big bronze sarcophagus commemorating a bishop connected with the University standing on its grounds. We wandered among the tombstones in one old church yard on our way back from the beach on Thursday. Dear Husband walked through another on Friday after attending a choir concert at St. Machar's. Many of them are made of granite, as that stone was mined for building in nearby quarries and gives Aberdeen its nickname of "The Granite City." I snapped the picture to the left while on our way to catch the bus to the airport Sunday morning: we couldn't figure out if that was a granite mushroom that had sprouted among the other memorials or some kind of decorative finial that had fallen off. I'll close with a more somber example: the story told by the headstone below right.

Under the Christian insignia "IHS" (IHSOUS, Greek for "Jesus" in Latin letters), it is dedicated

"To the Memory of Elizabeth Deborah, Wife of John Paton of Grandholm, and youngest Daughter of Thomas Burnett Advocate: died 24th Feb.y 1860, aged 37 years. And of their Child, Elizabeth Bertha, died 11th June 1861, aged 16 months. Also the above John Paton, of Grandholm, who died August the 27th 1879, aged 61 years. His Widow Katherine Margaret died 26th Feb.y 1919, aged 87 years."

The font for the wife and daughter are of the same size, so they must have been done at the same time. Perhaps Elizabeth Deborah was buried with a simple stone, and then when Elizabeth Bertha died too, John decided to purchase a larger one. Because his father in law is mentioned, Thomas B. A. must have contributed some money. Little E. B. was just 16 months old when she died in June, perhaps of polio, measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, or even small pox. Her mother E. D. must have died in childbirth, although at 37 it was unlikely her first. Maybe she caught "puerperal fever" from the midwife's dirty hands, or maybe at an "advanced maternal age" she developed high blood pressure and eclampsia. Smaller type records the dead of John at the relatively young age of 61. Fourteen years his junior, his second wife outlived him by forty years. She must have raised the older children well, as I imagine one of them took care to add her name and dates to this record of their family. Gone, but not forgotten.

Aberdeen: On the Water

Aberdeen lies on Scotland's northeastern coast. From its large free Maritime Museum, Dear Husband and I learned that it was a trading post in the Middle Ages, then became a fishing center, later added shipbuilding, and--since the discovery of oil and gas in the North Sea in 1964--has hosted those energy industries. We happen to have approached the museum from its rear entrance, which is hidden down an alley (below). The displays are an amalgam of traditional maritime objects (parts of ships, models of ships, paintings of ships, photographs of ships, hand-colored photographs of ships, documents about ships, things that used to be on ships) and more contemporary exhibits about the North Sea and the fishing and drilling industries. We piloted a little submersible, watched a 3D video about working on an oil rig, and marveled at the variety of objects pulled out of the mud of what used to be the harbor's edge during an archaeological dig in the 1970s: coins, the sole of a shoe, most of a barrel, a little golden brooch, crockery.

Congrats, you found the museum! One of the first things we saw was this exhibit on the strange and powerful environment of the deep see, the weight of which compressed these styrofoam heads. Below is a model boat constructed in 1829. It was gifted to a church. There were a number of these, but my favorites were probably the half models made for display. We learned that plain half models were used when designing actual ship, with geometric methods of scaling up the hull once the client had approved it. Another thing I learned is that clipper ships were so fast because of their elongated bows' ability to cut through the water; as a side benefit, cargo stored in that compartment fell outside the taxed space of the hull and so was "duty free."

The museum does a good job including the perspectives of both women and men. While men built ships and trawled, women finished the models, mended the nets, and gutted the fish. The men went to war, and the women took their places in the factories. On one floor was a diorama of a fishing family's home. On another floor was an interactive dollhouse whose appliances could be powered by turning cranks to power wave or tidal turbines. We were both intrigued by the short cartoon film nearby from Greenpeace about the necessity of abandoning oil for renewable sources of energy.

I know you won't believe this, but I was silly twice in one day. While at the museum, in the shipbuilder's office, I "explained" to DH the features of the steamship I was designing. Then, after lunch, another museum, and a false start, we walked to the beach so we could wade in the North Sea. The water was, unsurprisingly, very cold. It had been an unseasonably warm day, but by late afternoon, the warmth was rising, and a cooler wind blew in. We wanted to walk on the sand all the way to the end, but the tide was too high. So we put our shoes and socks back on and walked along the esplanade. We looped around and back into town just in time to eat dinner with a friend and colleague at one of Aberdeen's premier Indian restaurants, Nazma Tandoori. We ended the day by visiting the Botanical Gardens (click for separate blog post).

Aberdeen: In the Garden

One evening Dear Husband and I walked down to the David Welch Winter Gardens at Duthie Park. Lady Elizabeth Duthie donated the 44 acres of Duthie Park to the city of Aberdeen in 1880 in honor of her uncle and brother, and William McKelvie designed a public green space with lakes, a gazebo, and (in 1899) greenhouses. The space has undergone a number of renovations, including new greenhouses in 1969, new lakes in 2013, and a new restaurant being worked on now.

These gorgeous blooms welcomed us to the hot houses. Unfortunately, being a public property, it does suffer some from neglect; the water features all need to be cleaned of algae. Poor goldfish.

Inside the square of the glasshouses is a garden of plants from "Aberdeens" around the world. The white benches crammed throughout the greenhouses all have labels from donors. One bears the following poem:

Sadly missed

A Rose-bud by my early walk,
Adown a corn-enclosed bawk,
Sae gently bent its thorny stalk,
All on a dewy morning.
Ere twice the shades o' dawn are fled,
In a' its crimson glory spread,
And drooping rich the dewy head,
It scents the early morning.





There was also some statuary and other art scattered about. Below left is "Liberty." Below right is "Warrior Ant," but from this angle DH thought it looked more like two people embracing.

The various rooms include the Temperate House, Corridor of Perfumes, Fern House, Victorian Corridor, Japanese Garden, Tropical House and Arid House, which have the third largest collections of giant cacti and bromeliads in Britain. The junior gardeners also had a little display on venus fly traps.

The scavenged stained-glass window of Aphrodite above hangs in the Temperate House over the sunken area where weddings happen. There are also the most lovely Birds of Paradise. The permanent signs promised a couple different, showy Australian species that we couldn't locate. Perhaps they are not in season, or else have been replaced by easier and cheaper plants.

The winter gardens are named for their long-time caretaker, David Welch, under whose leadership they won several awards. We had a lovely sit in his courtyard with a gentle water feature.

Unfortunately, after that we had just enough time to see the cacti and walk out through the hot house before the buildings closed for the night. We made a lap around the larger park, including a short detour through a "1920s rock garden" before heading back to home base. The sun set two hours later.

 

Watching over the whole park is this statue of Hygeia, the patroness of health, erected in Lady Duthie's honor. The photo doesn't even begin to do justice to how beautiful the blue sky was.