“I never questioned the integrity of an umpire. Their eyesight, yes.” – Leo Durocher, baseball manager By Anu Dev On Friday night, when I looked at our Warriors vs Trinidad Knight Riders game and that umpire missed that straight LBW on Munro (who went on to clobber us over the boundary again and again), I knew exactly how Leo “the lip” Durocher felt, and saw that umpire developing glaucoma? I was fuming! For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been in my “ENT and Ophthalmology” rotation. We didn’t rotate through…
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CPL 2017!
BY ANU DEV “Rally, rally round the Amazon Warriors Never say never Pretty soon the runs are going to flow like water” – adapted from David Rudder, “Rally Round the West Indies” Cricket’s always been one of the things that has brought us together as a Caribbean people – never mind that it’s the source of some of the fiercest arguments you can imagine. Now that the Caribbean Premiere League (CPL) is back – and we’re all rallying around our own Guyana Amazon Warriors to raise the trophy this year.…
Read MoreThe Werther Effect
“Hope is a necessity for normal life and the major weapon against the suicide impulse.” – Karl A. Menninger The past couple days, after the passing of Chester Bennington, lead singer of Linkin Park, my newsfeed has been inundated with articles about the him in the period leading up to this death and reactions from his family, his band-mates and fans in the most excruciating detail. This forced me to reflect not just about the individual Bennington and his own ruminations about suicide, but also brought into focus for me,…
Read MorePaediatrics: Take 2
Now that I’m in Year 5, I’m having my second go at Paediatrics. One would think that, this time around, we’d be more prepared and comfortable in the rotation. Well, the senior doctors certainly assume we are; they keep saying things like, “Well, you should’ve read that book from cover to cover back in Year 4.” To that I usually shift guiltily in my shoes and try to avoid making eye contact, because I never did get around to finishing that textbook! Another new development, since we’re now in our…
Read MoreMindfulness
“The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.” – Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times For me, yesterday was just one of “those days”. You know that type of day — when you’re all in your head, you’re just a tangled knot of anxiety, and it feels like nothing is going your way. It’s the type of day wherein…
Read MoreShots!
‘Vaccines are the tugboats of preventive health’ – William Foege Vaccines, shots, immunization – so many names for this agent of childhood trauma. But apart from making little kids terrified of anyone with a stethoscope, why do we need vaccines anyway? Well, diseases are caused by various micro-organisms, like viruses and bacteria. When the micro-organisms breach the body’s initial defences (like the skin) and infect the body, the body fights back internally with its own arsenal of defence mechanisms that it creates, and eventually beats off the infection. Vaccines have…
Read MoreFighting disease with antibiotics
“Antimicrobial resistance: no action today, no cure tomorrow.” – World Health Day 2011 theme Growing up in Guyana, I now realise that our rather casual approach to antibiotics – in prescription and usage – has a serious downside risk. Back in high school, we learnt about microbes like bacteria that cause so many diseases and illnesses. The discovery of these microbes after the invention of the microscope led to the search for an agent – an “anti-biotic” – that would destroy them and cure the diseases they caused. Last week…
Read MoreAppreciating mothers
“A mother’s arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them” – Victor Hugo Sunday, the second Sunday of May, has been set aside as Mother’s Day. Kids all over the world will try to do whatever they can to make their mothers feel special. Some will give their mother flowers or cards. Some might even prepare a home-cooked meal, or take their moms out for dinner. When Mother’s Day became a recognized holiday in the US in 1914, it quickly spread to the rest of the world.…
Read MoreNostalgia and movies
“HakunaMatata, ain’tno passing craze. It means no worries for the rest of your days” – Timon and Pumba, The Lion King We all have heroes and heroines from movies we saw as kids. Some of these movies we can re-watch and they take us back, even just for two hours, to that time, when things were so much simpler. Much of the appeal of those movies comes from the nostalgia accompanying our memories of when we first saw them, and what things were like back then. Movies and songs can…
Read MoreWomen and the end of Indentureship
“Remember one-third quota/Coolie woman./ Was your blood spilled so that I might reject my history?”– Mahadai Das, “They came in ships” During last May, “Arrival Month”, I wrote some pieces about the contributions of women during the period of Indian Indentureship, which lasted between 1838 and 1917. With the 100th anniversary of the End of Indentureship coming up, I thought maybe I could share a few thoughts on the role women played to bring about that end. In the line from Mahadai Das’ poem above, she’s referring to the quota…
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