Conversation with Olivia

I had a really funny conversation with Olivia last night. As I was tucking her in, she asked me, "Daddy, how did baby Felix get in mommy's tummy?"

Great. How am I going to explain this?

"Well, babies come to a mommy and a daddy and the baby comes down from heaven."

She was quiet for a while and then said, "Do babies ever fall down from heaven?"

"No, babies are very safe in heaven. They won't fall down to earth."

She was quiet again for a while, then said, "Are my babies waiting in heaven now for me?"

"Yeah they're waiting for you now, and they'll come when you are older and married."

"I think they'll have to wait for a long long time...do you think they'll be bored up there?"

"I don't think so. I bet there is fun stuff to do."

"I bet baby Felix is pretty bored in mommy's tummy. Probably he will want to play with me a lot when he comes out."

"Probably."

Then she really impressed me with her insight and planning.

"Daddy, when I'm a mommy and have my babies, I think when I go to the temple on a date, I can have my babies watch baby Felix because he will be too little to go to the temple."

"That's a good idea Olivia."

I am always impressed with her ability to connect the dots. Sometimes she seems so much older than just four years old.

My patient today

I had a life-changing patient today.

She told me main purpose of her exam was to get glasses so that she could read and try to enjoy her life a little bit, because she wasn't planning on living longer than another four to five years. She had almost every problem known to man. When I picked her up, she was in a motorized wheel chair. She wasn't old (only 55), but she has suffered from seizures almost daily since she was two years old. This has severely impaired her walking ability.

She had breast cancer (with bilateral mastectomy -- she lifted her shirt and showed me the scars, which was shocking). She had colon cancer, and had almost all of her bowels removed, and uses a colostomy bag. She has lung cancer, from smoking every day. She has type 1 diabetes (the one you're born with). She has skin thinning, thrush in her mouth, yeast infections, incontinence, migraines, extremely low blood pressure, three heart attacks, a pace maker, 2 strokes, depression, and suicidal thoughts.

We had a long talk about suicide. That was interesting. Eventually, she said she doesn't want to take her life, but she is very ready to go. She is DNR, which means "do not resuscitate," so if she ever passes out or needs treatment or CPR or a blood transfusion or something, she doesn't want any help and she wants nature to take its course.

During the exam, I did her refraction and gave her prescription. I put the lenses in a trial frame her her to test out, and she was really happy with it. I mean, really happy. Like, almost in tears. She just wanted to read. But she had some other bad problems with her eyesight (like macular degeneration, and perhaps some retinitis pigmentosa), but we didn't want to dilate her or else she'd have a seizure in our chair. She told us we can try to just use the slit lamp to get a general overview of the health of her eyes, but we knew that she would need a dilated exam under general anesthesia.

Anyway, once we turned on the slit lamp and started looking at her upper eyelid, she immediately started having a seizures. Have you ever seen anyone have a seizure? They're pretty scary. Luckily, this one only lasted about 30 seconds, but it wasn't fun to watch. She started vomiting and crying and apologizing. Mostly she was just angry. Angry at herself and her body and her seizures. All she wanted was to be able to see, but we couldn't even look in to see what was wrong. She was crying and cursing and it was just very very sad. We gave her her prescription  so that she could use her glasses to read and watch TV, but then at checkout the metal detector alarm went off and and had another seizure.

This one was bad. She was foaming at the mouth with her eyes rolled to the back of her head, her body shaking all over the place. At one point she grabbed my jacket and pulled me on top of her wheel chair. She was squeezing my hand so tight. The EMTs arrived in about 15 minutes, and her seizure was still going on. I had never heard of a seizure lasting that long. She was still convulsing when they transferred her onto the gurney, and the sped away to the ER.

I heard come the clinic chief that she is currently unconscious. I hope she will get better, but then again, maybe this is her time to go. Maybe this is selfish to say, but I'm glad she didn't pass away when she was with me. We were all seriously thinking that it could happen.

So anyway, I think I might try to visit her in the hospital tomorrow. I don't think she'll remember me, because she also suffers from short term memory loss. But maybe she will. But I should get back to studying because I have a midterm tomorrow and I haven't read through all the material yet, but I just couldn't focus and I thought that maybe by writing it all down I can get it out of my head for tonight so that I can study.

Neville

Racer Robots!

I was pretty tired of playing the same games over and over again with Olivia (Candy Land, Shoots and Ladders, Go Fish, etc.) so I decided to invent a new game. It was a pretty big hit, so I thought I would share the rules with you! It's called...

Racer Robots!

What you need:

1. Some Lego blocks or Duplo blocks
2. Cars
3. Dice
4. A track

 How you play:

1. Set up your Lego blocks at pretty close intervals all along your track.

2. Role the dice and move your car along the track, with the Lego pieces being each spot you land on.

3. Once you land at your Lego piece, you put it in your pile.  Keep going around the track until all the pieces are collected (or just until you get enough Legos...)

4. Use your collected Lego pieces to make awesome robots. Olivia's chomper robot is on the left, and my ducky robot is on the right. I think she won this round.

Swimming again

I just started swimming again during my breaks at school. I haven't been swimming since October of last year because school has been totally crazy. But this semester is pretty light at the moment, mostly because classes only started yesterday and I don't have anything to study yet. But I hope to continue with the swimming throughout this semester even as things pick up.

Some people think swimming for exercise is such a hassle, but it actually is my favorite form of exercise. Here's why:

1. You never get sweaty. You're in water all the time, so you never overheat and get red or anything.
2. You don't have to bring a whole change of clothes. All I bring is my swimsuit, a towel, and goggles. It's way less of a hassle than bringing tennis shoes, socks, shorts, a t-shirt, and whatever else. I don't even need a water bottle because I just drink the pool water when I'm thirsty. (I'm joking, I'm joking. Actually the thought of drinking pool water makes me gag a little, mostly because I saw a guy sneeze in the pool today. Blegh.)
3. You can work out your entire body and get completely exhausted in like 20 minutes. It's a pretty fast and effective workout. Plus, it's like strength training and endurance training put together.
4. You don't have to talk or acknowledge other people. I don't really like exercising with other people all that much because I kind of hate small talk and chit chat. With swimming, it's pretty much impossible to talk or listen to other people, so you can exercise with someone else without worrying about keeping up a conversation. It's an introvert's dream!
5. It gives you time to think. I can't listen to music or podcasts while I swim, and that's OK, because it forces me to think about my day and my life at the moment. It's kind of like meditation, but more tiring.
6. There's a huge clock on the wall so I don't have to worry about what time it is. I don't really like running or doing other exercises with a watch on because it always feels tight and sweaty, but then I'm always worried about being late. With swimming in the pool, I can just glance up. (I wear my contacts under my goggles so I can see the clock.)

This is why swimming is the best. Don't get me wrong: I'm pretty bad at it. I was actually the slowest person in the pool today. But it was my first time back in like 6 months, so hopefully I'll get faster. My goal is to beat the old overweight guy who swims laps everyday and then slaps his belly when he gets out of the pool.

I hate bathrooms like this

Plus, your older brother is probably right outside trying to pry open the door when everyone else is walking by,

Look what I found

WARNING: GROSS PICTURE BELOW

I was practicing some things during lunch today, and I saw this huge LASIK machine just sitting in the middle of the hallway on the second floor. There wasn't anyone nearby, and I thought it was pretty cool.

Then I walked up to it and saw this bag sitting on the blue paper

Yes, that is a sandwich baggie full of eyeballs. I guess they're sitting there for people to practice LASIK on. About 30 minutes later, a group of 3rd year students came up and were being instructed how to perform LASIK. 

The funny thing was that I was eating my sandwich out of my baggie as I was walking past this thing, but I didn't lose my appetite or anything.