Felpetopedia y Lemusopedia

I'm rotating through surgery right now, which is always fun and interesting. Most surgeons I find are very get-down-to-business type people who move fast and furiously. However, every now and then you meet surgeons who take their time and explain everything out in very clear, easy to understand language, starting at the beginning with the simple and working their way into the complex. Two surgeons just like that are Dr. Felpeto and Dr. Lemus. They are both older gentlemen who are truly gentlemen inside the operating room and outside. They are excellent professors who their residents and students affectionately call encyclopedias because of the many years of experience and dedication to staying current on all topics in surgery and have given them the nicknames Felpeto-pedia and Lemus-opedia. It has been a pleasure to rotate with them and get to know them better through my 6th year surgery rotation! Cheers to them both!

Dread locs and Medicine

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about how similar these two things are. Maybe not for everyone, but for me, they actually have taken me through similar journeys. If I were a poet, maybe I could have made this sound really beautiful, but I think you all will understand what I'm trying to express just fine. Here are my thoughts:
When I first started both, I was unsure of the outcome, and afraid of what people might say and think of me. I am a trail blazer in my family and close friends to do them both and LIVING outside the box is not easy. With both, there is no such thing as linear progression; just as my locs unravel every time I get my hair wet, sometimes I learn things in medicine and forget a week later, have to relearn it, and keep relearning it until it sticks, just like I have to twist and twist my locs until they are permanent. I can’t really see or feel my progress with either but when I look at my hair, it’s locked and when people ask me about medicine, I know stuff! When I look back on both, and think about where I started and how far I’ve come, I feel proud that I haven’t given up no matter how hard or hopeless I’ve felt. I know that both have required and will continue to require a lot of work in the future because neither is every done. I really love both and they are two of the things that people most remember about me... They're pretty much always part of the description people give when they describe me.

Well hope this was interesting! I love my locs, and I love medicine and hope to have them both in my life for a long time!

Pre-Nostalgia...

"A sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations." That's what the google dictionary says. I wonder is it possible to feel this way BEFORE something is actually in your past?

There are so many things about Cuba that I am going to miss! I can’t even really begin to explain the impact this country, this culture, this experience has had on my life, but I am going to make a short list of things that I will truly miss and yearn for when I get back home. This will be ongoing, so keep your eyes open for new items!

- Greeting my friends with "besitos." This is when you press your cheek to your friend's cheek and make a kissing sound. And when you are really happy to see someone you hold that press and make 5 or 6 kissing sounds right in a row! Best greeting ever!

- A coming “cold front” meaning that the temperature is going to drop from 80 something to 70 something degrees... great weather!

- Street vendors passing my house singing that flowers, bread, pastries, veggies, and other things have arrived! Not having to leave my house to shop!

- Random people in the street calling at me “negrita linda” or pretty black girl.

- Someone referring to a neighborhood as bad NOT because there are drugs, gangs and gun violence but because people are too nosy, play their music too loud and let their kids play in the street with no shoes on. I love my neighborhood here for some of those very same reasons.

- Strangers inviting me to their homes, giving me free rides, holding my hand as I walk down stairs, offering me their seat on the bus, and all the other random acts of kindness here that are normal here. (Just a quick story if you all have time: one day I was taking my trash out and the bag broke and all my trash fell in the street. My "nosy" neighbor, who I don't know at all, came out of her house and gave me a new trash bag! Random act of kindness!)

- All my professors who know my name and are personally invested in my success.

- All the things I can buy with a dollar (this is also a short list):
Theater productions, plays, musicals and jazz concerts
Beach trip
A full course of antibiotics
25 scoops of ice cream
2 personal cheese pizzas
22 eggs
A taxi ride from one city to the next
2 sangrias or mojitos
72 condoms or 48 condoms and 24 packs of lubricant
A full plate of food with fried fish, rice and beans, salad, and a second side dish

- Seeing people everywhere of all ages walking (and running to mostly catch the bus)!

- Seeing Tai Chi circles all over the city!

- Urban gardens with affordable vegetables!

- Seeing doctors everywhere!

- Seeing men with their children everywhere! Just the father and the kids...

- Cuban beaches... the only water that I can actually float and sort of swim in because it is calm, warm and salty!

Just an update... 6th year so far!

So, I'm in my last year of medical school, year 6! This year is our intern year, which in the US is the first year of residency, but here it is the last year of medical school. I will have to complete another intern year when I start residency, which will be different and challenging in its own ways.

How have things been so far this year? Hard! Not really hard as far as the course content, but the workload is killer! In my first rotation, Pediatrics, I was working 6-7 days a week from 7:30am to 4:00pm, and if everything was done at 4, I could go. If not, I stayed until everything was done or took my work home with me. I also had overnight call shifts every 5 days, and often times more often because I was making up calls that I missed by missing the first week of school. Also, I was doing early completion of calls so that I could participate in a medical conference back in the US. On top of all of the call and normal day time work, I also had to study like crazy for weekly exams in different areas of pediatrics. I am happy to report that Pediatrics is now over, and I finished well. For us in Cuba, Pediatrics is the most labor intensive and draining rotation. There is more documentation required than adult medicine, which is all written by hand, and is time consuming as well as hard on your wrist tendons.

This year, I feel at peace with everything in my life, even though I know I am about to experience a major life shift. Now that this experience is almost over, I want to make the most of it, regardless of how tired I am from all of the work I have to do. I'm already starting to miss all of my friends in Cuba, who have been with me for the past 6 years. Whether they are Cuban, American, African, Caribbean, Latino or otherwise, our relationships will be greatly affected by graduation. I hope to stay in contact with everyone, but things will surely be different, and I know it.

I've been thinking quite a bit already about where I want to go for residency, and where I want to live just in general. Do I go back to California? If I do, do I go to San Bernardino where my family is, or do I go back to the Bay area, my favorite area in California? Do I go to a place with even more need than California like Mississippi or Alabama or Detroit since I know I am called to serve an underserved community? Will I even be able to afford to apply all over the country? I'm just not sure about a lot of things. I know no matter what, everything will be fine, but my life is once again about to go into flux.

Everyone says this year passes faster than any other, so even though I still have 8 months, the two that have passed, BLEW by like they were 2 days! I just hope I can hold on to peace, love and positivity as well as productivity and the adrenaline that has kept me going so far!

New Perspectives on Old Topics

For me a huge part of growing up and maturing was/is realizing how much my perspective influences my understanding and my experiences. Before very recently, I feel like I just went through life forming opinions about different things without really thinking about where that opinion came from or how that very same opinion influences how I feel, how I remember, how I experience, and really everything about my life because life really kind of boils down to a series of experiences that we then remember in a particular way. Well, now I try to be very conscious and intentional about how I feel about things so that I can have more positive experiences and thus more positive memories, and as a result a more positive life.

To give everyone an example of what I'm saying just in case it's too vague to for people to really grasp, I didn't like avocados for a long time. I wouldn't eat them, and when I did, I had already decided in my mind, without even knowing that I had decided, that eating them would be an unpleasant experience, that I wouldn't like. And of course, I would never be disappointed, and would always have a horrible experience eating avocados and so would avoid them. Then, little by little, I started to open my mind to the idea of eating avocados mostly because I didn't have access to the same sources of protein in Cuba that I had in the US, and they have really great proteins in them that are important for me to eat as a vegetarian person. Now before I even buy an avocado, I'm thinking about the savory, delicious, smooth taste of them, how much they do for my body, and how pleasurable it will be when I get to eat them, which in turn makes the experience that much better. It takes time of course to change what I thought the first 25 years of my life, but I LOVE avocados now, and eat them as often as I can! My initial hatred for them was really just a lack of experience with them, and a prejudice that I had against them as a result of only tasting them a few times without any context.

I've decided to apply this ideology to many areas of my life, food being one of the biggest examples. I now eat mangoes, eggplant, raw onion, garlic, and bell pepper, fish, plain unsweetened yogurt, unsweetened tea and all sorts of things, that I thought I would never be able to stomach, just because I've changed my perspective on them to include their importance as part of a healthy diet which will then lead to longevity, vitality and health.

Another area of my life is my medical school experience. I LOVE studying medicine in Cuba. I love it even when I hate it. The reason why I love it even when I hate it is because I know in my heart and mind that my medical school is a wonderful place to study and practice medicine. My medical school and Cuba as a country are not without fault, just like anything else. My struggle is to always take the positive aspects of my school and Cuba as a nation with me in order to apply those things to my future life as a healthcare provider and to use the things that I perceive to be negative as lessons in what not to do. It's hard. It's really hard when I feel like I'm being treated unfairly, or being deprived of things I need, or promises to me have been broken, but I have decided that it is more important to me to be continuously growing and to have positive and healthy life experiences than it is for me to feel sorry for myself or wallow in negativity. At the end of the day, what real value does feeling sorry for myself really have? I don't feel better after I've gone on a rant about how I've been wronged. I don't grow from it. There is no more justice in the world afterwards. What really calls me to action is not a long speech about how terrible my life is. Not at all. I am motivated by my hope that I and all people can change. That all people can feel compassion. That we can learn from our own and other people's mistakes and strengths in order to create a better world for all of us. And for me that better world starts with first having a positive self image and a positive image of other people and things that I value. Then forgiving myself and others for our faults, and instead of judging, using those qualities or actions or whatever to improve ourselves, and finally always being open to have a new perspective on an old topic, because it will in fact change my experience and thus my life.

This is creativity, sustainability, and just overall great! 10 Uses for Newspaper!!!

Cubans use and re-use newspaper over and over again in ways that are both official and unofficial, which I think is cool. I thought I would blog it! I hope to upload pictures soon!

Here's a list of all of the uses I've seen for newspaper in order of what I think are the most common uses to the less common uses...

1. Toilet paper (both as recycled paper that you buy in the store and just crumpled up paper that people use in their homes)

2. Bottle insulator (you wrap your frozen water bottle in newspaper and then put it in a plastic bag, which keeps it cold and from wetting everything in your bag)

3. Hand towels (just grab one and dry your hands!)

4. Moisture keepers for fresh herbs and flowers (you wrap fresh basil, cilantro, oregano, lilies, etc in newspaper to keep them moist and fresh)

5. Seat covers (if a chair or bench is wet, you just fold some newspaper and put it down to sit on top of it so you don't get your clean dry clothes wet and dirty)

6. Wrapping paper (for gifts, packages, storage, etc)

7. Window shades (in lots of buildings, you will see newspaper taped to the windows I think to keep the sun out)

8. Hand held fan (with the write folding, newspapers can create a pretty nice breeze)

9. Dust pan

10. Book covers

Monogene!

This is a very personal post, but I would like to share this with the world because I believe that others will relate and hopefully grow from my experience. I heard the word Monogene for the first time today on the gospel singing reality show Sunday Best, and it made me think of myself. I'm not sure if it's even positive or negative, but something about it touched me and made me want to post this...

The thing that's harder for me about practicing medicine than anything, is feeling like what and who you is so different that it couldn't possibly ever be good enough...

Just so people have an example, sometimes I have full conversations with people in Spanish, and I'll make one or two grammatical errors, like putting the wrong gender on a word, and the person I'm talking to will tell me, "You don't speak Spanish, huh?!?!" I don't know if I hold my face as if I'm confused, or if I give people blank stares, or what it is, but it's like, sometimes I just feel that some people, not most, but some completely misjudge me. It would be like me telling a healthy normal young person who locked their keys in their car once that they have dementia. It's like huh?!?!?! That's a gross overestimation of forgetfulness that anyone can see. You don't have to be a doctor to know that someone who forgot their keys doesn't have dementia. Imagine forgetting your keys one or twice and being told that you have dementia, and that'll kind of give you an idea of how I feel.

I am the only person in my family who has ever pursued higher education. My life makes simple questions like "Where do you live?" "What do your parents do?" and "How many siblings do you have?" "Where is your family from?" complicated. Of course people have no idea that they are complicated when they ask, but for me, they are. I feel uncomfortable around people because at any moment, I might get asked one of these questions. I don't know how to make small talk simple and be honest so I usually just simply my answers and say something that I know will be easy for the other person, even if it's not 100% accurate. Then sometimes I feel distant from my family too because I've lived away from them for so long, that sometimes we don't understand each other either. It's like being stuck between two worlds. It's rough...

Then being not only the only person who's a first generation college student, I'm also often times the only black person. I'm also usually the only person who's parents together gross less than $20,000 a year. I could go on, but I don't want to put my whole life on a blog. It's not just the material and educational things either. I feel different. I think different. I am different. I am truly an individual. I started to think maybe 10 years ago that I was an alien. I never felt like an alien growing up, but people would ask me how are you so different from your family? Where did you come from? Things that didn't make sense to me at the time, but somehow made me feel less human. I like to think that I'm a very confident person, but really, I have a deep deep inferiority complex. I know I am intelligent, capable, savvy, compassionate, empathetic, and overall just hard working and very HUMAN, but somehow I'm uncomfortable being successful. I have a hard time when people call me Dr. Dupree. Even after all these years of my patients in Cuba calling me Dr. Dupree, it just sounds wrong... I know I can do better to and for myself though, and I will! I deserve it!

For me, I know what I have to do is practice seeing myself as a successful person. Practice loving and accepting myself. I'm not perfect. But I am wonderful just because! I was born wonderful, and I deserve love and respect for being human and exactly who I am. It's hard to convince yourself of that when you're always being judged, misjudged, sized up, qualified, not qualified, and just spun through the ringer in "successful" America where difference is usually rejected. I want to encourage everyone out there to do the same. Visualize yourself as a leader! Power pose! Love and accept your talents!

I would like to hear from people who have felt the same way and what you did to fix it! People who know me know that I'm not a big blame placer and I'm very solution oriented, so I'd love to hear ideas about how to feel and be more than just scores, titles, status, income, etc, and how to love yourself despite all the worldly things that people use to decide your worth! I recently watched a TED talk about a woman who felt what I feel. And she actually dedicated her life's research to teaching people how to be more confident. Check her out because she's a cool chick! http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?language=en