May Memories, Part I

I have taken so many more pictures than I have shared to Facebook over the last month, so I thought I would put some of them together here in a post written after eating a delicious spring-like lunch (salad and Triskets with brie; the secret is Green Goddess dressing). It feels so good to sit at the dining room table--while Dear Husband eats lunch and watches soccer in the next room--with my wet braid hanging between my shoulder braids, refreshed from a shower after three hours of trimming bushes and pulling weeds and raking up the long grass left by the mower, fueled only by NPR radio on my phone, since I skipped breakfast. That's okay: more room for a piece of the heaping strawberry pie DH baked this morning. It's my turn to have the kitchen for the afternoon: I will watch Persuasion on Netflix Legally Blonde on YouTube while I make banana bread with the over-ripe bunch I brought home from the office.

The first weekend I attended two films at the Jewish Film Festival on the Carnegie Mellon Campus. Validity is a Pittsburgh-produced film starring my colleague's sister as a scientist struggling with whether to use unethically sourced data about hypothermia collected on concentration camp prisoners. It's based on an actual person and controversy, and I don't know why the film's promotional material didn't name Robert Pozos's work at the University of Minnesota (perhaps he asked them not to?).

Meanwhile, Dear Husband was playing and conducting a choral service at church with the Schubert Mass in C (WordSung).

That afternoon I hung out at the main Carnegie Library before watching Disposable Humanity, a documentary about the Aktion T4, when healthcare providers helped the Nazi government sterilize and kill disabled Germans. Theirs are the only Holocaust victim names that by law have to be redacted, as if it is still so shameful to have been diagnosed with a disabling condition that it would be embarrassing for yourself or your family to have it known.

The second weekend I drove to National Harbor, MD, for the Society for General Internal Medicine conference. I didn't actually stay at the expensive hotel, having snagged a bedroom in an AirBnB across the street and through the fence. It was awkward if I had to run back in the middle of the day for some reason, but parking was free, and I could afford it without a roommate.

I attended a variety of panels--on reproductive health for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, treating osteoporosis, culturally competent nutrition, and fibromyalgia--and helped present a workshop on taking care of adults with Down Syndrome.

I brought a bunch of "I <3 medical history" ribbons to leave at check in and was gratified to find someone wearing one. (Even though you can't see either of ours in the picture!)

I had resolved not to play trivia again after winning two years in a row and then joined an unlikely table at the back of exhibitors from Team Health. Team Stealth ended up coming in 2nd place! 

After the conference I attended the wedding of my residency cohortmate. The next morning, I met a colleague for breakfast in Old Town Alexandria to discuss our respective books and then enjoy the art studios at The Torpedo Factory. After Mother's Day lunch with My Awesome Parents, it was an easy drive back to Pittsburgh listening to Anthony Doerr's All The Light We Cannot See. (It was okay.)

I'll leave you with a panoramic view of Pittsburgh from the back deck of one of the residents, who lives on the South Side and hosted journal club. There was a break in the rain just long enough for us to go out and marvel at the city spread out before us.

Click here for Part II.

Happy 100th Birthday, Gram!

My paternal grandmother was named for her father, and my younger brother has their name as his middle name. (My middle name is my maternal grandmother's.) She was born on the same day, month, and year as the late Queen Elizabeth II. They led very different lives. Gram grew up poor in rural Texas. Her mother died when she was 11 of complications of an abortion, after her doctor told her not to get pregnant again but her husband didn't care. She wanted two things when she grew up: nice clothes and to travel. She got them both--visiting 27 countries on four continents!--as well as a long career as a night psych nurse. She joined WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), went on a blind date, and met the man of her dreams. They married and had four children, five grandchildren, and four great grandchildren. 

I was the first grandchild. Gram has been the longest reader of this blog, which I started to document my travels. Friends and family recently gathered from around the country to celebrate her 100th birthday.

Some of her favorite things 

- cheese and crackers and a glass of wine in the evening

- strawberries with Nutella

- tissues in her pockets and candy in her drawers

- researching family genealogy

-  reading

Even more anatomical art!

We'll get to the anatomical art, but first I want to show you an upcycling collage I made. The oilcloth mural above used to hang in the gathering room of the church where Dear Husband and I now attend. After decades and decades with pride of place after having been donated by a parishioner, it suffered water damage during renovations, not to mention looking dated. On top of that, it depicts Saint George slaying a dragon for Mary, Queen of Scots, an allegory for Catholicism defeating Protestantism. So, yeah, maybe no longer something to have in the living room of a Presbyterian church.

The mural was removed and cut into pieces if congregants wanted to keep a memento. DH wanted the dragon, but someone else had snagged it, so he picked up the queen, which we loaded into the car with some difficulty on a windy Sunday after church. He wanted display her on his office wall, so I found a 3' x 4' frame online and invested in some supplies (black paint, silk roses, flower beads, old jewelry I no longer wear).

Then the person with the knight and dragon decided she didn't have a place for it and gifted it to DH. So I purchased another frame. When both had arrived, my Awesome Parents helped me prep and frame them. I then added the three-dimensional flourishes on the acrylic cover, so as not to damage the original mural.

They are so large that with the decorations, we could only fit one into his car at a time, so I will update this post once the second one makes it to the church and the building staff are able to hang them high on the wall above the couch in DH's office.

 

UPDATE: The Knight and Queen have been hung! In Dear Husband's office, that is. Sorry that the light isn't better.

Now to the anatomical art. I am slowly accumulating a collection from cross-stitch to collages to the piece d'resistance, a quilled paper skull and brain. Over the holidays I saw a social media post about the multi-media artwork of Emma Pannell, who uses upcycled materials in her embroidery and beading. I just loved this turquoise-colored hand with its copper wire and stones, so I treated myself to a print and a frame to match the ones above. Since she works in Great Britain, I had to pay a tariff and cut down the A4 size to fit my American frame, but it adds such a pop of color (especially since I left room on the wall for two other pieces I have been watching on Etsy, and they tend more to a brown palette). Now DH and I will have art in our offices in different parts of the city but in the same frame.

The second new piece was a surprise from friend J.R., who made a pair of sooty yet sparkly lungs out of resin and gifted it to me while we were in Tennessee. It reminded me of the antique medical dictionary a colleague had gifted me back in residency, Robley Dunglison's Medical Lexicon (1854). That led to a project on the history of Black Lung combined with a lesson on racial and cognitive bias in clinical reasoning that I have presented locally a few times.

While the semi-circular cut outs on either side fittingly made it look like an ashtray when flat, I don't have a lot of horizontal space on which to display it, and I thought I would get to enjoy the piece more if I hung it on the wall. In my stash of frames from the Goodwill store, I found a white, square one that wasn't quite deep enough to encase the lungs. After a moment's hesitation, I decided to cut out the "melanosis" and "pulmonary" pages from the dictionary as a background. Then I mounted the lungs on the glass to create a sort of shadow-box effect.

Besides the fact that I decoupaged the pages 90-degrees off from the original hanger and had to affix a new one on the back, I'm really pleased with how it turned out: old and new, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, in a spot where I will always see it from my desk.