Warning: short, scattered-thoughts post. just got to the library. two exams (genetics and histo) this upcoming week. must study :)

ECHO FREE CLINIC

Today was my first day volunteering at ECHO (Einstein Community Health Outreach) Free Clinic. I signed up for the semester to do Front Desk work – mainly answering the phone, scanning referral letters and test results, scheduling patients, admin stuff like that. I also tried out my Spanish over the phone w/ a Spanish-only speaking patient. After a few sentences, I gave up and handed the phone over to a student interpreter. Must improve mi espanol!

It’s not as glorious as other positions in the clinic like shadowing the clinical team or being in Labs (where you get to draw blood constantly), but I chose Front Desk ’cause I wanted a sense of the flow/logistics of day-to-day operations at a free clinic.

Patient comes in, checks in, immediately gets scheduled to meet a social worker, etc etc. Just learning a few of the many things non-doctor members of the healthcare team do, and the annoying stuff they deal with. Twas great :)

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So I woke up for clinic at 7am and got back around 3:30. After some napping, QTing, and munching on a hero from the deli across the street, I’m at the library….finally. (I love going to a pass/fail school!)

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IN THE LIKENESS OF GOD

It’s so easy to get caught up in my daily life happenings to forget that the end of it all is not 70ish years down the road, but in fact – that there is no end. Basically, it’s hard to keep the right perspective in terms of time and focus. Eternity and God. Not a few decades and me.

In the Likeness of God (Philip Yancey, Paul Brand) is a book I got from my old man many years ago. It’s a book Yancey wrote with orthopedic surgeon Paul Brand, who spent most of his career in India treating leprosy patients.

The book’s divided into smaller books kind of how the Bible is divided into Genesis, Exodus, etc. Except these smaller books are called “Cells”, “Bones”, etc. And in each book, you have ~10 page chapters called things like “Unity”, “Mutiny”, “Loyalty”.

I read a 10 page mini chapter or two at night before going to bed, and it’s such a money way to appreciate God in the crazy beautiful way he designed the human body from the organ systems all the way down to cellular level.

The book is basically Dr. Brand’s reflections on how Christ’s analogy of the Church being like a body is indeed true. The book’s packed with factoids of how awesome the human body is and how Christ’s body resembles it.

For this med student who wants to seek after The Best Thing, this book is so awesome. John Piper describes C.S. Lewis as having brought together concrete logic and creativity, two seemingly opposite things. I feel the same way about this book. It’s not science vs. God. It’s science within God, from God, and for God (a play off of Romans 11:33-36).

And I’ll end with this quote. It’s written on one of many glass displays along the entryway to one of the main buildings on campus.

“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”

-Albert Einstein

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Whether this quote relates to what I said, you decide. Either way, the lesson for me today is: sleep, then eat, and you’ll feel wide awake to write a blog post and study :)

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