Hospital Loma de Luz- Honduras

Most people have heard of the proverbial phrase, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." It's a creative way of teaching us about optimism. When life presents us with sour "lemons," or challenges, we can use them to make "lemonade," turning those difficulties into something sweet and desirable. But, these lemons can't become lemonade by themselves; one has to add water and sugar in an active effort of optimism. Indeed, life tossed our world a few "lemons" this week on a global scale, and it can be difficult to find the ingredients necessary to make "lemonade" amidst the great suffering that is a consequence of war and man's sense of entitlement. However, this week also gave me watermelons- and no, I didn't make watermelon-ade.  It had been a long ten days for one of my patients this past week. Ten days of fast, labored breathing and incessant, chest-burning coughing, ten days of not eating well, ten days of lying in...

On initial glance, "Cold February Days" may come across as a confusing title for a post from a blogger writing in the middle of the Honduran tropics. And though I still spent this past week in shorts and a T-shirt, February fifteenth was cold in a different way. Laying myself down for the night after a regular day working at the hospital, I had a feeling- heard a voice- inside of me asking me to check on an old friend. After a failed attempt to find my friend's Facebook account, a quick Google search confirmed the fearful instinct I felt writhing deep in my stomach... *** The world said good-bye to a beautiful soul on the twenty-first of January of 2022. It lost a scientist, a creative writer, a poet, an artist, a photographer, a future doctor, a pianist, a food and coffee connoisseur. Her name is Julie, and she lived almost thirty years becoming all of those things while also giving of herself to others as a daughter, a sister, a friend, and so much more. The last moment...

If you ask Wikipedia, it will tell you that "Anne Frank is a German-Dutch diarist of Jewish heritage and one of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust." If I had the opportunity to edit her Wikipedia page, I would introduce her as "a teacher for mankind and one of the bravest and most hopeful young women of our time." I remember Anne speaking to me through her diary in the fifth grade- and I had admired her ever since. As years went on, I remember wondering, "how could a young girl be so in-tune with the meaning of life?" Even more unthinkable, "how could she be so optimistic while being a victim of such atrocious acts of persecution?" While bed-ridden this weekend due to the wrath of the unwelcome COVID virus, Netflix was a trusted friend, introducing me to the new movie:  My Best Friend Anne Frank . The vantage point of this movie is from Anne's good friend, Hanneli Goslar. (Warning: movie spoiler ahead). When offered the opport...

...We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest. We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future that is not our own. ~  An excerpt from  A Prayer of St. Oscar Romero There have been many times during my journey in medicine when I have experienced helplessness in the inability to provide complete healing or care for another person.  In dwelling on these experiences, I have inevitably conjured up a multitude of reasons for this incompleteness: time and financial constraints of the healthcare system, my own lack of knowledge and experience, the lack of motivation from the patient him- or herself, or the inherent lim...