This morning, I met with my research advisor to go over a transcript of my first interview, which I conducted back in September. My project is qualitative research, speaking with hospice or near-hospice patients about their main concerns during this transitional period that we term end-of-life. My first interview was with a lovely woman from the South, with a subtly sharp sense of humor and generous spirit, who died a couple months after I met her. She's the one who I wrote about previously, who had written a story she'd wanted to publish in her nursing home newspaper. We'd worked on it together, and she died before it could get published; it will be printed in April.
With those strings in mind, I read the transcript with my advisor, who said, isn't it funny to hear her voice coming back? I agreed, and I thought how nice it was that I had the interview on tape, and also how nice it was to see it transcribed on paper. I've been so trained to close-read that when conversation becomes written, I pay attention differently. Words take on much more contextual meaning. And as fresh eyes to the interview, my advisor noticed motifs and word choices and turns of phrases that I hadn't, while speaking to the patient. She also loves telling any story that comes to her mind when something reminds her of it; they're always funny, or touching, or interesting.
Reading the transcript made me excited anew about the project, realizing that there was more than I realized in those conversations. I'd worried that without structure, and with such different people in different situations, it'd be hard to glean anything from the interviews. But even if each transcript turns out to be very different, there are plenty of individual insights into a person's thought process and expression of them, and that's worthwhile.
Much of the reading I've been doing on qualitative research and narrative analysis emphasizes what's lost when conversations are transcribed into script. You lose tone, pauses, faces, and so on; it's true that much nuance is sacrificed. And so I was surprised to see that simultaneously true is that something's gained in this translation. There's something about the act of recording, which inherently must be in a different medium than actual experience, that gives a perspective outside of the experience itself.
*
This afternoon the wife and I continued to labor over our class slideshow, to be shown at our school's annual second-year-show this weekend. Each year the graduating class puts together a slideshow of pictures. Ever since I saw the fourth year class slideshow during my first year here, I've wanted to work on ours.
We downloaded all the pictures sent from our classmates, and because I wanted to give the show a theme and not just be a conglomeration of pictures, we went through them and organized them. Then we laid them out into slides, keeping in mind order and cohesiveness and variety. Then wife and another friend/classmate of ours chose music to correspond to different parts of the slideshow, and had to learn how to splice music to put together a mix. Then we had to sync, sync, sync, and sync again the music to the pictures; there were a lot of transitions in the pictures that we wanted to line up with transitions in the music. Then we embedded a short video to conclude the show.
We probably spent the equivalent of 24 hours over different days in order to piece together this 6-minute slideshow. We had to choose which parts of songs we wanted, decide which pictures to cluster together, find pictures of everyone in our class, learn how to have certain pictures come into view, figure out how to time slides. All of this required learning details, looking up programs, pulling hair, and intermittent/continuous swearing.
It also meant watching the show over 20 times to see whether our piecemeal efforts congealed into solid form. As frustrating as the process could be, watching the product always made me nostalgic. Four years of people and experiences, compressed in two-second segments placed side by side like pages pressed in a book. Each time we would notice new nuances, the way a lyric coincided with an item on the slide or how, small moments of self-pride and love for the images--that won't be noticed by anyone else, but are known to us and after all that work, gives a lot.
It's a representation, but not only a representation--not in the sense that it's something else other than a representation, but that "representation" encompasses more than we give it credit for. It's not a replica of the experiences that give rise to the memories or even the memories themselves, but it's an experience on its own. The process of making this out of things already made, surprises in the way that in how new it is, how much there is still to learn and feel.
There's the personal satisfaction from creating something with your own hands, and also the sense that something's happening to you. This dynamic way of connecting yourself with things outside of you that are also kind of part of you, and of connecting the outside with parts of yourself that are also kind of already part of your environment, is obviously too poignant for me to describe with any sort of clarity. But for all the curses and furrowed brows, it feels damn good (so long as it goes well for the show, too).
*
I'm really grateful for small experiences like these, things no one would pinpoint as reasons to be a medical student. And of course it's more than medicine that led me to having these moments, and of course if I'd done something else I would've been led to others, but I don't think I've been exposed to quite as much compact variety at any other phase in my life. M and I talk a lot about reasons for and against a career in medicine, with the long stressful process being a drawback. But there are also a lot of opportunities to meet things you may never have felt. I'm lucky that Yale is particularly suited to exploring these things, often without much idea of concrete goal. I also feel lucky for being a part of a small community of students for four/five years; for me it's combined aspects of high school and college I liked most (with some of the bad of each thrown in there, too). I don't think I'll ever experience anything like it again, and in remembering and living it, I miss it too. So for that too I want to record.
Showing posts with label remember. Show all posts
Showing posts with label remember. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Sunday, April 11, 2010
playlist
I periodically lose my song playlists, which upsets me at the time because I spend some time putting them together based on various associations, and then they develop more associations as I listen to them. A few times now, they've disappeared from my iTunes and I'm left to start over (I've tried saving them but I don't do this often enough to encompass changes over time, so that the last ones I've saved are not the ones that were currently on my iPod when I lost them). A friend once told me that this might be good, to consciously change and renew, and I thought this was a good point. Sometimes, though, I remember the old and ache for it, like now--when I'm fully enmeshed in the third year of medical school which is also soon nearing an end, when I suddenly remember a song that was so definitively part of a playlist entitled "second year" and a handful of the songs on that list come back to me and though I can't remember all of them, I go back to the ones I do and remember so clearly the walks and study sessions and nothingness spent listening to those sounds, and more than that, how the feelings of the songs themselves get mixed up in how I felt back then, how those songs chose me and I chose them for that time and experience in my life, how suddenly the gap between then and now can simultaneously open up and close. It's a crazy, crazy thing.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
gone
During an episode of Scrubs the other day in which the show quoted the statistic that 1 in 3 hospitalized patients die, J. asked me whether I identified more with the characters now that we were on the wards. I replied that I haven't had enough comparable experience to really empathize more than anyone else. We were talking about this again today, and J. mentioned how she's learned that one's person tragedy affects so many, often touching far beyond those who knew the person.
Two and a half hours after that conversation we received news that Natasha Collins, a student in the class below ours who has been battling an aggressive form of leukemia, has passed away.
Several months ago her class began a national bone marrow drive to find her a donor, and the registry was overwhelmed by the response and support. Friends to whom I've passed on the message did the same, and followed her story as one intimate to them. Because of the concerted effort of her loved ones, and the accumulated reaching out of strangers, she received a transplant last month. Earlier this month, she battled an infection with more perseverance than any of her doctors had anticipated, getting through in a few days what we'll spend the rest of our lives questioning, imagining, considering, without knowing. Today she passed away.
As with the passing of Mila, who I also didn't know, during our first year, I'm stunned by how deeply we're affected, how communal a community is, and how far commonality extends. Back then I was also surprised by how much was connected by this tragedy, these ever prevalent and recurring themes that seep into daily life, thrown into hard relief by the suddenness of something gone.
At the end of the show, the three main characters are each faced with a patient in danger of dying; three split screens fill the television, and for a split second we wonder who it will be: which 1 of the 3? In the end, all three pass. Because statistics are just numbers, and some days it will be more and some days it will be less. Each time, it will feel much bigger than 1 in 3; each time it will feel like there has just been one--correctly so--and now it is gone.
As with anything gone, we're left to remember and to continue better, for what they've given in passing. No one day, no one endeavor, carries the depth of strength that she showed, that having never touched her, we could feel carried from her air to ours. And so there is reason to continue.
Two and a half hours after that conversation we received news that Natasha Collins, a student in the class below ours who has been battling an aggressive form of leukemia, has passed away.
Several months ago her class began a national bone marrow drive to find her a donor, and the registry was overwhelmed by the response and support. Friends to whom I've passed on the message did the same, and followed her story as one intimate to them. Because of the concerted effort of her loved ones, and the accumulated reaching out of strangers, she received a transplant last month. Earlier this month, she battled an infection with more perseverance than any of her doctors had anticipated, getting through in a few days what we'll spend the rest of our lives questioning, imagining, considering, without knowing. Today she passed away.
As with the passing of Mila, who I also didn't know, during our first year, I'm stunned by how deeply we're affected, how communal a community is, and how far commonality extends. Back then I was also surprised by how much was connected by this tragedy, these ever prevalent and recurring themes that seep into daily life, thrown into hard relief by the suddenness of something gone.
At the end of the show, the three main characters are each faced with a patient in danger of dying; three split screens fill the television, and for a split second we wonder who it will be: which 1 of the 3? In the end, all three pass. Because statistics are just numbers, and some days it will be more and some days it will be less. Each time, it will feel much bigger than 1 in 3; each time it will feel like there has just been one--correctly so--and now it is gone.
As with anything gone, we're left to remember and to continue better, for what they've given in passing. No one day, no one endeavor, carries the depth of strength that she showed, that having never touched her, we could feel carried from her air to ours. And so there is reason to continue.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
untitled
In Connecticut, a morning in January and a morning in March don’t look too different when you look outside for help with what you should wear that day. Usually it’s bright and there’s often unplowed white on the sidewalks and people shuffling in layers. Even if there aren’t, you know enough about this coast to know that your scarf is not accessory but requisite. I came here from California, where warmth is numbing. Here winter occupies half the year, and the seasons are stitched together. Sometime in April someone starts pulling the thread. White turns to gray to yellow, a familiar and welcome flow. As capricious as the outside can be, even if it’s cold when sunny or if twenty degrees separate two consecutive days, we sense its character. And so, the oft elusive weather becomes part of our concrete knowledge.
This is why, when testing a patient’s cognitive function, we ask them what season it is. It’s supposed to come naturally. Our patient is seventy-eight, and the deeply pressed lines of her face change what I consider natural. As she furrows her forehead in an effort to find the “right” answers that she so badly wants to give us, the rain falls steadily harder outside. Watching her sit and speak in front of the weather, the bus ride we took to the nursing home feels farther away in time. I’m suddenly aware of my socks wetly clinging to the inside of my shoes.
When asked, our patient tells us the correct month—April. It’s only when she says this that I realize how far into the year we are. Only a couple weeks ago stacks of muddy ice tinged with white still created tunnels on the street. Not so long did thirty degrees feel warm. At some point in that winter the snow glazed over and made a varnish still visible at night and worthy of ice skating. During the day a friend commented that he liked how bright it was, when the snow was fresh and the sun piercing. This year it all ebbed into spring slowly so there was no time for embrace or longing. But we still remember.
When then asked what season it is, the woman sharing with us her presence hesitates. She doesn’t consult the window behind her, even though I look past her to the outside. Instead she looks ahead and I wonder at what or for. I think the sound of her delicately mouthed April has faded. Then she says, “fall,” and I think our insides break a little.
Would she have known, if we had been sitting outside to let the falling water slip off our cheeks, rest in her creases? What if the season had been the stronger one of few weeks past, and she could hear the salted snow stuck in the grooves of our shoe soles as we walked across the room to her? Or if she’d walked long enough for the water to seep into her socks? It’s out of grasp to feel what touches her, much less link sense with thought.
And fall here is not far from spring, anyway; what does it mean to mix and match transitions? It’s solemn on the ride back to school. My classmate sitting next to me confesses some depression over what he’s seen. In not these exact words he says that life is for interaction with experience, and to not know your experience takes away purpose. It’s funny to me that this sounds and is often true, when I came to medical school with the purpose of meeting experience.
But our windows tell us little, and what we feel of the outside is inexplicable. For the woman giving us her words, the layers of expression have been shed, and the experience left so bare that it’s gone from our view. Without even the frayed threads of winter past to twist around her fingers, it’s still spring.
This is why, when testing a patient’s cognitive function, we ask them what season it is. It’s supposed to come naturally. Our patient is seventy-eight, and the deeply pressed lines of her face change what I consider natural. As she furrows her forehead in an effort to find the “right” answers that she so badly wants to give us, the rain falls steadily harder outside. Watching her sit and speak in front of the weather, the bus ride we took to the nursing home feels farther away in time. I’m suddenly aware of my socks wetly clinging to the inside of my shoes.
When asked, our patient tells us the correct month—April. It’s only when she says this that I realize how far into the year we are. Only a couple weeks ago stacks of muddy ice tinged with white still created tunnels on the street. Not so long did thirty degrees feel warm. At some point in that winter the snow glazed over and made a varnish still visible at night and worthy of ice skating. During the day a friend commented that he liked how bright it was, when the snow was fresh and the sun piercing. This year it all ebbed into spring slowly so there was no time for embrace or longing. But we still remember.
When then asked what season it is, the woman sharing with us her presence hesitates. She doesn’t consult the window behind her, even though I look past her to the outside. Instead she looks ahead and I wonder at what or for. I think the sound of her delicately mouthed April has faded. Then she says, “fall,” and I think our insides break a little.
Would she have known, if we had been sitting outside to let the falling water slip off our cheeks, rest in her creases? What if the season had been the stronger one of few weeks past, and she could hear the salted snow stuck in the grooves of our shoe soles as we walked across the room to her? Or if she’d walked long enough for the water to seep into her socks? It’s out of grasp to feel what touches her, much less link sense with thought.
And fall here is not far from spring, anyway; what does it mean to mix and match transitions? It’s solemn on the ride back to school. My classmate sitting next to me confesses some depression over what he’s seen. In not these exact words he says that life is for interaction with experience, and to not know your experience takes away purpose. It’s funny to me that this sounds and is often true, when I came to medical school with the purpose of meeting experience.
But our windows tell us little, and what we feel of the outside is inexplicable. For the woman giving us her words, the layers of expression have been shed, and the experience left so bare that it’s gone from our view. Without even the frayed threads of winter past to twist around her fingers, it’s still spring.
Monday, June 11, 2007
comfortable
How did it happen that I have two weeks left to wrap up a year's worth of work, to soak up my beloved apartment, to pack for travel and to prepare for school so that I'm not swamped when I get back in August? No matter how I try, I can't finish all the little things I thought I could do with my "free time." I've put a whole lot of photos in albums, but then I accumulated new ones this year. I've read a few books that make me want to get more. I've amassed much new music that I'd like to put in exactly the right playlists, but the minutes elude me. My email drafts folder grows by the day. I haven't written in my paper journal in ages; this past year, when I did write in it, it was when I was moody, not so much a thoughtful mood, just a moody mood. It's full of the same stuff. I regret that, because this year was so full of new, nuance.
This past Saturday I went to a graduation party for a girl who just graduated from my high school. We played together as kids, but I haven't spoken to her in years. She was salutatorian and is going to UCLA, and wants to major in environmental science. How odd to think of that time, so long ago. Notre Dame is very much the same and different too. We talked about teachers who were still around, Spirit Week, college applications. I sometimes missed high school while I was in college, but I haven't missed it in a long time (especially now that I miss college). As I told her how much she had to look forward to in college, I remembered how nice that summer before college was--so much possibility, so much excitement, so little anxiety, because my scope of the future back then ended with college. I didn't think past that, and it was great. At the same time that I grew nostalgic for that phase, I realized that I didn't want to be back there. I'm incredibly happy to be where I am right now, and I've liked--am grateful for--growing up a little. I love how much fuller life has gotten through experience and story. Like kids going into college, us kids going out have so many choices and opportunities ahead. We're in a scarier place than we were back then and somehow that's becoming less something to lament and more something we've gained privilege to.
The carefreeness of my weekends this past year in a very small way recalls a little of that stress-free summer before college (I doubt anything will ever be as completely thought-free and that's okay), but I've appreciated it differently. This past weekend was a lotta Steph & San Francisco. I saw her classmates perform classical music at the Alumni House and it was a nice excuse to dress up. Her friends are a warm, talented group of people. We went on another inNout & Krispy Kreme run afterwards, and spent quite a bit of time watching the donuts being made on the conveyer belt. I think I felt actual pain when they threw away a deformed donut that we'd been watching from its inception through its development. Such sugar coated goodness, never to be eaten! On Sunday I met up with Steph and Albert (silly kids!) again to go to the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, which was quite the packed event. We were basically a herd marching slowly down the few blocks of Haight, and it was lively as outdoor affairs usually are. People peered at us from their balconies on the apartments lining the street, and we ate overpriced mediocre Chinese food while sitting on steps. There were bands at both ends of the fair, and various troupes moving from one end to the other. Everything was funky and hippie and colorful. It was a sunny cold day but warm within the cocoon of crowd.
Walking back, we somehow decided that we should build a fire in my fireplace and make s'mores. So we stopped at Steph's apartment so she could change and Albert could rest on her futon, then to Albert's apartment so he could get books and let me borrow his awesome backpack for my Asia trip, then finally to mine. We hesitated for a bit, unsure if the chimney was "open." When we finally went for it our fire went out pretty quickly, but we persevered and soon it was glowing. Christmas in June! The sunlight pours through the windows through the white curtains in my living room, so the room was awash in yellow sun and orange fire and the three of us were mesmerized. Then we skewered our marshmallows on fondue sticks and melted them atop le petit ecoliers. There was also dark chocolate with almonds. All the while my "comfortable" playlist provided a musical backdrop. I packed a little, they read a little; mostly we lolled and lazed around. An old friend, a new one; a city from my past where I've made my home of the present.
These things make me want to write because I want to both bottle it up and keep it in me, and to pass it around and make it tangible and living around me. There's much more I've wanted to write and more I will want to, and more photo albums I'll want to make, and more little things to do and make, but nothing can really capture everything. So you might as well carry it around with you.
This past Saturday I went to a graduation party for a girl who just graduated from my high school. We played together as kids, but I haven't spoken to her in years. She was salutatorian and is going to UCLA, and wants to major in environmental science. How odd to think of that time, so long ago. Notre Dame is very much the same and different too. We talked about teachers who were still around, Spirit Week, college applications. I sometimes missed high school while I was in college, but I haven't missed it in a long time (especially now that I miss college). As I told her how much she had to look forward to in college, I remembered how nice that summer before college was--so much possibility, so much excitement, so little anxiety, because my scope of the future back then ended with college. I didn't think past that, and it was great. At the same time that I grew nostalgic for that phase, I realized that I didn't want to be back there. I'm incredibly happy to be where I am right now, and I've liked--am grateful for--growing up a little. I love how much fuller life has gotten through experience and story. Like kids going into college, us kids going out have so many choices and opportunities ahead. We're in a scarier place than we were back then and somehow that's becoming less something to lament and more something we've gained privilege to.
The carefreeness of my weekends this past year in a very small way recalls a little of that stress-free summer before college (I doubt anything will ever be as completely thought-free and that's okay), but I've appreciated it differently. This past weekend was a lotta Steph & San Francisco. I saw her classmates perform classical music at the Alumni House and it was a nice excuse to dress up. Her friends are a warm, talented group of people. We went on another inNout & Krispy Kreme run afterwards, and spent quite a bit of time watching the donuts being made on the conveyer belt. I think I felt actual pain when they threw away a deformed donut that we'd been watching from its inception through its development. Such sugar coated goodness, never to be eaten! On Sunday I met up with Steph and Albert (silly kids!) again to go to the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, which was quite the packed event. We were basically a herd marching slowly down the few blocks of Haight, and it was lively as outdoor affairs usually are. People peered at us from their balconies on the apartments lining the street, and we ate overpriced mediocre Chinese food while sitting on steps. There were bands at both ends of the fair, and various troupes moving from one end to the other. Everything was funky and hippie and colorful. It was a sunny cold day but warm within the cocoon of crowd.
Walking back, we somehow decided that we should build a fire in my fireplace and make s'mores. So we stopped at Steph's apartment so she could change and Albert could rest on her futon, then to Albert's apartment so he could get books and let me borrow his awesome backpack for my Asia trip, then finally to mine. We hesitated for a bit, unsure if the chimney was "open." When we finally went for it our fire went out pretty quickly, but we persevered and soon it was glowing. Christmas in June! The sunlight pours through the windows through the white curtains in my living room, so the room was awash in yellow sun and orange fire and the three of us were mesmerized. Then we skewered our marshmallows on fondue sticks and melted them atop le petit ecoliers. There was also dark chocolate with almonds. All the while my "comfortable" playlist provided a musical backdrop. I packed a little, they read a little; mostly we lolled and lazed around. An old friend, a new one; a city from my past where I've made my home of the present.
These things make me want to write because I want to both bottle it up and keep it in me, and to pass it around and make it tangible and living around me. There's much more I've wanted to write and more I will want to, and more photo albums I'll want to make, and more little things to do and make, but nothing can really capture everything. So you might as well carry it around with you.
Tuesday, April 27, 2004
the world forgetting...
I remember seeing this on another Live Journal, but being new to having my own site, I clicked on the heart icon under user info, which is, as I learned, where the memorable entries are stored. This is what they told me:
No memories found.
This could be because:
1. the user hasn't defined any memorable events,
2. the user's memorable events are protected and you don't have access to view them, or
3. the user doesn't have any memories that match your filter criteria.
Amusing, and a little sad, and a little true.
*Come
As you are
As you were
As I want you to be
As a friend
As a friend
As a known memory*
No memories found.
This could be because:
1. the user hasn't defined any memorable events,
2. the user's memorable events are protected and you don't have access to view them, or
3. the user doesn't have any memories that match your filter criteria.
Amusing, and a little sad, and a little true.
*Come
As you are
As you were
As I want you to be
As a friend
As a friend
As a known memory*
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