The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations

The day I tried to cook with the moldy garlic was the day we decided I had to switch to the higher prescription glasses I had been refusing to use the last few years. My old scratched and outdated ones just weren’t doing the job for these extremely myopic eyes. They weren’t helpful enough for quickly seeing the apex of a uterine rupture or getting all the little donkey hairs out of the donkey bite wound. Thankfully, though, prior to the switch of my glasses, the old glasses were enough to still see the clear blue eyes of my little strawberry blonde boy who just celebrated his first birthday yesterday. His blue eyes gleam and he lets out a little squeal when he catches sight of something he wants to play with, like the bucket of peanuts or the can opener. Toys have little interest for him these days. But a toy, a very specific toy is just what one little girl wanted. She asked the nurse midwife for a doll. The nurse midwife told me that she herself didn’t have a doll, and she knew I pro

  I was exhausted from the previous weeks of figuring out how to take care of both my newly expanded family and all the hospital duties - inpatient medicine, pediatrics, obstetrics, urgent and non urgent consultations, ultrasound interpretations, xray interpretations, administrative duties. I wanted a contrast - a contrast from the long nights in the OR trying to stop the flood of blood from a postpartum hemorrhage or in the obstetrics ward watching an oxytocin drip on a patient with stalled labor. The furnace of hot season started blasting forth its fires making both our energy levels    and the glasses on my sweaty face slip off. I wanted a contrast. A contrast from the world of brown - brown dirt, brown skies, a weather forecast that said “dust.” The greatest contrast I could think of from Chad was northern Finland - Lapland. So we left Chad for a three hour tour, or well, in our case, a two week vacation. In a matter of a few flights, we were transported to a world of white - a wor