Making a List, Checking it Thrice (or more)

November 16, 2011

One of my favorite characters from the movies is of Ruby Thewes (kudos to Renee Zellweger for her Oscar-winning performance) in “Cold Mountain”. There are a thousand likable qualities to her, but one that I admire most is her down-to-earth nature and her manner of making lists that comes from it. One of the earliest moments on screen finds her counting off the things that need to be done around Ada’s neglected farm:

Number one, lay out a winter garden for cool-season crops. Turnips right here, onions, cabbage, collards. Number two, patch the shingles on the barn roof. Have we got a maul and froe? Number three, clear and turn this field. No harm done lettin’ it go. Now we’ll do well…

She goes on until 15, 16, 17… It’s a pattern that plays out throughout the film, a telling symbol of the nature of the character. She is about getting things done, the antithesis of Scarlett “tomorrow is another day” O’Hara. She strikes me of several women in the maternal side of my family, women from western South Carolina, women who were self-sufficient because they had to be. I imagine my mother made lists. My aunt. My grandmother. My great aunts and great grandmothers. Women who got things done.

I make lists, too. I make lists at work – reports to get done, classes to put together, all the different steps in different project to manage, emails to return. Sometimes I make the lists day-to-day. Other times it’s more “stuff to get done this week”. Forget the Outlook task manager or flagging emails (I do, actually, do the latter). If I need to remember to do something tomorrow, I need a hand-written note in front of my face. There are simply too many distractions, otherwise.

I also make lists for things outside of work. I make lists of songs I want to learn to play, books I want to read, thoughts I want to write about, movies I want to watch or lectures to go hear, trips to take. I make lists of bigger goals, too:

  • ScooterLatte Bookmobile
  • Lose 30 pounds
  • Run that darned, elusive Chicago Marathon next year
  • Write the next great American novel (okay, I’ve never had that as a dream. ever.)

The past few months, though, there’s been this one thing on every list – kind of hovering – that I’m grudgingly learning is an item not so easily checked off. It involves health. While training for that elusive marathon this summer, I had a series of strange health events that culminated in a pretty scary one that landed me in an ambulance, being driven to the ER. Several docs and tests later, I learned that I had a certain ligament and a certain artery that were not quite in the right place and thus were not playing nice together. I would need some surgery to fix it up.

Knowing that I needed to have surgery, that I was going to be laid up for a bit, affected practically every other item on every other list I had. Worse, I had to wait about 6 weeks before I finally got a surgery date; the unknowing making it all the more difficult. And then, even with the date, there were a bunch of unknowns that just hung there, like clouds above any and all planning for anything I was trying to accomplish.

Almost all of the uncertainty is in large part the result of a very good thing, i.e. I have been healthy my entire life. Never been sick worse than the flu, never broken any bones, never spent the night in a hospital… you get the picture. As I’m coming up on my 49th year on the planet, I’d say this is pretty good. I’ve been really fortunate. However, being a fortunate daughter leaves me unaware of how things are for those healing. How they go.

Now, one week post-surgery, I can tell you clearly how they DO NOT go. Like a checklist. 

Get Well is the item I want to cross off the list. It’s the one I want to put behind me, but it’s not happening as I’d hoped. Yes, I am healing very well. I’m thankful. I have someone to take care of me, friends who check in, supervisors and coworkers and a workplace that are understanding, and sick leave to cover my time away. Still, I’m lacking that experience to hang onto, the thing that lets you know what’s normal and what’s next. I can’t break my “get well” task down to smaller, manageable tasks, because I’m not quite sure what they are. I’m finding it very frustrating.

Last night, when I asked my spouse if she thought I was ready to go back to work today, she reminded me of two things, ultimately two things I can put on a list, knowing I’ll be better when I do them:

  • You have yet to walk more than around the house and the yard.
  • You haven’t driven a car in 10 days.

Okay! These are good! These are concrete goals. These are things I can handle better than “relax” or “rest”. I understand and appreciate those sentiments, but don’t know what to do with them. They don’t work easily in my Get Well Checklist. Walking, driving, sitting up, and going to the surgeon for follow-up and a “you’re okay to go back to work” note – these I’m writing down. And checking off. Soon enough.

 

2 Comments | daily muse | Permalink
Posted by salgore

A Trident of the Information Conundrum

November 15, 2011

In the span of twelve hours (in the past 18), I read two separate things that struck me… well, they left me… dumbfounded, really. Coupled with a third recent habit (can you couple to make three?), I find myself at a loss to express, let alone explain, all that I think of them except to say, “It’s a conundrum.”

1. Photoshop

Over the past 8 weeks, I took a class on the basics of graphic design. We covered basic principles of design, as well as how to use the Adobe products, Photoshop and InDesign. I learned a lot, including a gained (and unexpected) awareness of how often pictures that appear in magazines, websites, ads, etc. are manipulated. It happens so often, I now note, that I find myself questioning what the heck is real in any of these images anymore. It’s one thing to draw or paint a picture of a setting and throw an extra tree in to make it look nicer. There’s an expectation of interpretation in some artistic disciplines. I’m not sure that everyday photography carries with it the same.

Examples: I sit in a committee working on redesigning my library’s website. We’re looking for images to use in our rolling banner. We’re looking at other pages for other departments and come across a really lovely picture of the quad with students on it, having lunch, studying away. It’s on the department’s homepage, the one visitors will look at and say, “Ooh, how nice.” After a few seconds, someone in the group asks, “Were there ever any trees there?” And we all look closer and then we feel… well, what do we feel?

A few trees added to make the quad look nicer (nicer than it’s ever looked, but…). No harm, no foul. It’s like the three hamsters in tea cups. I mean, it’s pretty easy to tell it’s the same darned hamster copied and pasted three times over. It’s cute. It’s fun. It’s a joke. So the department’s website is a joke, too? You tell me.

2. Wikipedia

People trust Wikipedia. There are have been stories and interviews ad nauseum on the topic of its credibility. I regularly see medical students with a page from Wikipedia open on the PC in front of them as I walk through the library. Not a big deal, I guess, if you’re looking for some basic info or perhaps a nice diagram. I recently had some surgery and one of the best diagrams of the artery involved in my surgery, I found on Wikipedia. It made it easy to share with family members or friends who wondered what and where the celiac artery was. In fact, there was a nice, condensed version (questionably lifted from an uncredited source) of the condition I had. Again, I had several very good journal articles from reputable society publications that I could pass along to others, but Wikipedia was a lot easier and just the right amount of information to share.

However, here’s a little snippet from an interview with the singer-songwriter, Lisa Hannigan, that I read last night before going to sleep:

Not everything is “perfect” in Hannigan’s world – her Wikipedia page, for one. “There’s so much misinformation about me there,” says Hannigan, sweetly. “Especially, all the stuff about me and Damien [Rice]. There was all this speculation about us after I left his band. [Hannigan sang with the singer-songwriter from 2001-2007. They also had a romantic relationship.] And all these supposed bad feelings and broken hearts. It was weird, but we sorted it out ages ago. Anyway, I wanted to change all the stuff about that on my Wiki page. But my page lady said, ‘Oh, it’s a conflict of interest for you to write your own stuff. And besides, the amount you want to change is too much!’ So, I’m stuck with all this stuff that isn’t true. Yes, my reign of terror against them has just begun.

Lisa Hannigan: Road Songs, by Peter Gerstenzang, Nov/Dec 2011 Issue, American Songwriter

You tell me, what do you do with these two examples? How can you reconcile them? How do you teach the credibility of sources? I’m still working out how I’m going to bring this example into my next lecture on such for a group of students. And I will. In the meantime, I’d love to hear others’ thoughts.

3. Google

I refuse to go into any diatribe, pro or con, about the role and place of Google in our information searching behavior. I’m done with that. I simply want to present here something I read this morning in the book, Every Patient Tells a Story, by Lisa Sanders, M.D.

I picked up a copy of this book and had the author sign it when she spoke at the Annual Meeting of the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries a couple of weeks ago. Physician, professor, author, oft-sought-after speaker, and technical advisor to the television show, “House, M.D.”, Sanders’ book is an expansion on a column she’s written regularly for the New York Times Magazine over the past several years. (For more on Sanders, see this NPR story.) I’m only a few chapters into it, but it’s a good read. And she was a good speaker. But here you go… page 12:

Hsia (a first year resident at Yale) posed the question to the team. Neither had heard of such a syndrome. So, after the team had finished seeing all the patients they were caring for, Hsia hurried to find a computer. She went to Google and entered “persistent nausea improved by hot showers.” She hit the enter key and less than a second later the screen was filled with references to a disease Hsia had never heard of: cannabinoid hyperemesis – persistent and excessive vomiting (hyperemesis) associated with chronic marijuana use (cannabinoid).

So this admission wasn’t the first for this patient. She’d seen multiple doctors, received multiple diagnoses, and been given a plethora of treatments over the previous twelve months, all to no avail. Her chart was thick. The resident read all of it first. Maybe all of the doctors who saw the patient before had done some credible research on the case. Maybe not. We don’t know. All we know is the pattern of information searching by the doctor presented in this paragraph. All we know is that she went to Google and in less than a second had the right answer that had eluded everyone else up to that point.

Again, or perhaps for the third time, what to do with this? As a practitioner, consumer, producer, and teacher of how to seek, find, evaluate and use information, I’m left right now with only one really definite feeling – “It’s a conundrum.”

5 Comments | daily muse, librarian | Permalink
Posted by salgore