Fanagrams

Girls’ grade school sports in the pre Title 9 days of the late 1960s were a decidedly low key affair, and presumably were included in the curriculum on the basis of the “sound mind,
sound body” principle.  There was no such thing as traveling teams, no parental involvement and no aspirations for college scholarships, simply a bunch of kids playing field hockey in the fall, skating in the winter (just skating around for the pure exercise of it) and softball in the spring.  However, beneath this benign surface there boiled all sorts of jockeying for identity and social stature.

I think that our class grouped itself into several cliques: the boy crazy girls, the horse crazy
girls, the sporty girls, the brainy girls and everybody else.  Of these only the sporty girls could be self defined.  The boy crazy girls were defined by the fact that boys pursued them, the horse crazy girls were defined by the fact that they had a horse, and the brainy girls were defined by the honor roll that was read and posted each quarter.  Perhaps this is why divvying up teams was such a high stakes affair.

These cliques were pretty much mutually exclusive.  I don’t think that any of the boy crazy girls would be considered brainy, in part because academic achievement was not a big turn on for the boys.  And the horse crazy girls, well they were just in their own world as they galloped across the field whinnying.  Although I occasionally flirted with being brainy, my identity was pretty much based on sports,.  Therefore it was a big honor when the sports
teacher selected me, along with my friend Kit Spaulding, to be captain of the softball team one afternoon.  There in a row in front of us stood all our classmates squinting in the afternoon sun, wearing baggy green cotton shorts, and cute white button down shirts with Peter Pan collars, this being in an era before t-shirts were ever considered appropriate outerwear for girls.  Some of my classmates were hopefully punching their fists into their mitts, some staring directly at me, some looking down and rubbing their shoes into the
dirt.

At this instant, I felt the weight of responsibility that had been thrust upon me. Kit and I quickly made our selections, moving through the athletic, marginally capable, and then the
totally inept.  With horror, I realized that when there were only two left it would be my turn to make my selection.  I felt like I was taking out a dull needle and stitching the scarlet letters “LOP” onto a fragile adolescent psyche – “Last One Picked,”
the eternal stigma of schoolyard shame.

And there it was.  Ty Winterbotham and Gale Runnells stood before me. Ty was relatively new to our school, and her almost translucent skin and thin frizzy hair made her an unfortunate target of casual adolescent cruelty.  But the odd thing about Ty was
that she was totally oblivious to our scorn, thought that the “kick me” sign pasted to her skirt was a laugh riot, and tolerated other meannesses with amazing good humor.  She was the type of person who would not realize that being sent to play right field without a mitt
was a form of damage control, rather than an affirmation of her fielding abilities.  Ty would not understand the horror of being the last one picked.  I did not know Gale Runnells particularly well, other than I seem to recall her nickname was Punnells.  She was tall,  clunky, totally unathletic and always seemed to have an unhappy look on her face.  I had no idea what to do.  Kit stood quietly next to me.  Although the last one picked would be on her team, her hands would be clean and blameless.  On an impulse, and perhaps in atonement for past sins, I picked Ty, who gratefully skipped over to my team, while Punnells trudged over to Kit’s team.

I have no recollection of the sad little game we probably played, but as we were filing back to the locker room to take our showers, Punnells came up to me and said, “I didn’t appreciate that you didn’t pick me.  I know that I am not good at softball, but my mother told me that there was an accident when I was born and my right arm is weak and that is why I cannot throw well.”  I was stunned.  In the tight gossipy world we lived in, I felt sure that I would have known that Punnells had a birth mishap.  For example, it was common knowledge who was adopted, whose parents were getting divorced and I had even overheard at the grocery store about a mother’s affair with the golf pro.   I felt that I had been put into an impossible situation and it was utterly unfair to spring a disability on me
after the fact.  Even the meanest person would not make a disabled person the last one picked.

I struggled with my guilt for years, until I ran into Punnells at some black tie event, where she had emerged as a stunning, slim, glamorous beauty, a real boy crazy girl at last.  I began to think that Punnells was brilliant and had skillfully invented her “damaged at birth” story to inflict maximum revenge. Mission accomplished.

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters, like stop, post, spot, etc.)  The number of asterisks indicate the number of letters and one of the missing words will rhyme with either the preceding or following words, giving you a big hint.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.

The day * ***** up as  captain, I thought it would be fun,

Until I realized it meant that I had to cruelly single out someone.

I would designate the last one picked, and certainly it couldn’t be ******,

That I would stigmatize, humiliate and likely destroy someone’s precious pride.

******, Ty and Gale stood before me, the last two left and I had to name a name,

I don’t know why, but I picked Ty and poor Gale was never quite the same.

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Answers:  I ended, denied, indeed

Flipping through the channels one evening, I lucked into the Australian Open tennis tournament just as the announcer said, “The effortlessness of Federer’s game belies his mastery of his craft.”  The replay showed Federer gliding along the baseline, flicking a lob over a flailing opponent, with gasps and applause from the adoring audience.
I surfed a bit more and ended up with Bruce Springsteen.  Far from effortless, the Boss was strutting, sweating, and displaying a burly athleticism that contrasted with Federer’s
cool elegance.  And the audience response was more muscular as well; in contrast with the hushed appreciation of the Federer audience, Bruce’s fans were yelling and swaying.  Both audiences were adoring and I felt a tinge of jealousy.

Now I should say I have been very blessed to have sustaining support from my wonderful husband and friends and family, and a job that suits me, so it may seem unseemly to ask for more.  But momentarily I thought – what a kick to have someone clap for you.  Could
I conceive of any circumstance where this could happen? If I really wanted to put this notion out of reach, I could additionally hope that people would have to buy a ticket to see me glide or strut to public acclaim.

When I mentioned this challenge to Nick, he snorted in disbelief.
He could only come up with one scenario.  “What if I got a ticket to a Blackhawk hockey game, then if I was selected as one of the fans who could take a mid-ice shot at a tiny target and then if by some miracle I scored, people would probably clap and they will have
bought a ticket.  Would that count?”

“Well, yes,” I said, “that would technically count, except that people did not buy the ticket specifically to see you, and the clapping would be too dependent on chance alone.”  However, I agreed that this scenario was probably the most likely single event for either of us.  Then I thought perhaps I could meet the challenge if I cobbled together separate elements of the challenge into one total experience.

Step 1.
Strangers Gathering

Once when I was visiting my cousins Ned and Susie they asked me if I would assist them with their llamas in the local 4th of July parade in Cabot,  Vermont.  All I had to do was lead the llama down the street and hold up a sign for Maple Leaf Llamas, the name of their farm.  As I stood in the parade readying grounds, I realized that this was a major community event; the place was swarming with jugglers, stilt walkers, ballerinas, Boy Scouts and our llamas.  As I walked down Main Street, USA, I flushed and my heart might have skipped a beat as I experienced the strange sensation of thousands of eyes staring at me; a few strangers even pointed and waved at me.  Well, okay, maybe they were
staring at the llama that had a large translucent globoid drip precariously hanging from his cavernous nostril.  Or maybe they were staring at the sign I was carrying, I could even see some lips move as folks strained to read the scrawled words.  But it wasn’t too hard to make myself believe that I was the center of attention.  I raised my head and proudly kept pace with the llama, but I resisted the presumptuous temptation to wave back at the crowd.

Step one:  √

Step 2.
Strangers Clapping

For my entire ice hockey career, our record was 2-5 and by that I mean 2 for 5 years.  I played hockey goalie, primarily because I realized that after a 35 year lay off, I had forgotten how to stop and turn on skates and I could use all the protective padding that I could get.  Besides nobody else on our rag-tag team of hockey moms volunteered.   Although I showed a few good instincts in the goal, I did have a chronic problem with a
gaping “5 hole,” where even slow moving pucks could dribble between my legs.  This was aggravated by an unfortunate habit of reflexively tensing up and raising my stick off the ice
every time I saw an incoming puck.  Then one day my teammate dropped off a DVD titled, “The Puck Stops Here,” with all sorts of tips for younger agile goalies. The elaborate splits and body flops made all my joints cringe.  But one section described some sort of upward
sweeping movement with the gloved hand to catch a blistering slap shot.  At least this move was within my physical capabilities and I dutifully practiced the motion in tandem with the DVD to try and create some muscle memory.

We always played during the day when husbands were at work and kids were at school, so we never had any spectators.  But for our season finale we managed to schedule a Friday night game.  Thinking that there would be a real crowd, I even arranged to have a
deep baritone come and sing the National Anthem.  I also asked him to sing the Canadian anthem, not because we had any Canadians in the house, but because I have always
thought that it is the best anthem, and nothing says hockey like “O Canada!”

Far from the raucous crowds that I had hoped for, there was a smattering of familiar faces but also a few legitimate strangers – loyal supporters of our opponents.  The game progressed with the usual scrums in front of the net, occasional wobbly passes, inadvertent goals and a few competent saves that earned appreciative nods from my team mates.  And then my moment of glory. At the top of the circle, an opponent sent a screaming slapshot at the gap above my left shoulder.  My next move was based on impulse alone; the synapses did not venture above my brainstem.  I never saw the puck but only heard a
smacking sound.  Play stopped and I looked around for the puck in its usual place in the back of the net.  Then the ref skated over and opened my glove, and there it was nestled in its depths.  He plucked the puck out and waved it around for everyone to see.  Strangers burst into wild applause, and the opposing team was clapping and slapping their sticks against the boards.   Apparently, I had done a very heroic sweeping motion right from the DVD.  Clearly the pinnacle of both my hockey and entire athletic career.

Step 2: √

3.  Step Three:
Strangers Buying Tickets

Ten years ago, my mother and I managed to get a children’s book published.
Ned’s Journal consisted of poetry written from the eyes of a 10 year old boy, and was organized as a journal with a cute poem for each day.  The project appealed to my mother, who was always up for some sort of cottage industry, particularly if it involved word
play and doggerel.  The original goal did not including publishing, but was just to have fun with my mother in her waning years of “in compos mentis.”  But then a work colleague said that her brother had a cottage publishing industry of his own.  His only other experience was publishing a guide to men’s clothing – when to wear a cummerbund, that type of thing – but he was excited to expand into children’s poetry.  He had a miniscule budget for publicity, but managed to cajole a Barnes and Noble into sponsoring a book signing, so off I went toBrooklyn to read some of my poems.

There I was 3 PM on a Friday afternoon, and as I looked at my audience, I did not see a single 10 year old boy; in fact the audience consisted of au pairs with limited English and their toddler charges.  I had planned to read a poem about Ned who was afraid of his soccer coach, so I madly flipped through the book to find something more age appropriate.  When I looked up, I had lost my tenuous grip on the audience, and in fact one of the au pairs was changing a diaper right in front of me.

“Well at least someone will buy a book,” I thought, and I left behind several autographed  copies. Perhaps I could consider this the last piece of the challenge, since buying a book was like buying a ticket – and an autographed ticket to boot.  Later that year, Nick was
buying some books from Amazon and saw that he was close to getting free shipping if he just spent a bit more money.  He decided it would be cute to surprise me with a copy of Ned’s Journal arriving in the mail.  I was indeed surprised to open up my own book but was even more surprised to see that book had a sticker on it announcing that it was “autographed by the author.”  How could that be, had the packer in the Amazon warehouse faked my handwriting?  After all, who would ever know?  I opened it up and startled at a very familiar signature – there was no mistaking it, it was mine.  In a circuitous route around the country, Barnes and Nobles in Brooklyn had foisted off my unsold books to Amazon in Seattle, who then sent it back full circle to me in Chicago.  Unwittingly, I had bought a ticket to my own performance.

Step 3.  Maybe not.

The missing words in the following poems are anagrams (i.e. share the same letters like spot, stop and post) and the number of asterisks indicates the number of letters.  One of the anagrams will rhyme with either the preceding or following line, giving you a big hint.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above rules and the context of the poem.

Is there any situation that I could possibly ********

Where people would cheer and clap for what I could do.

Like the tennis play who ******** his opponents with pinpoint aces,

Or the singer who enraptures every audience he faces

But the support of family and friends ******** any appeal of public acclaim,

So I count my blessings and hope my good fortune remains the same.

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construe, trounces, counters

This summer our daughter headed off on a very rigorous hiking and camping experience in Alaska.  The website didn’t try to sugarcoat the experience, warning that participants would carry 50 to 60 lb packs over mountain ridges, that it could continually rain or even snow, and that due to the threat of grizzly bears, absolutely everything would be done in groups; there would never be an minute of privacy.  Furthermore, there would be no bathing for a month.  I tried to prepare her for the struggles ahead and mentioned that this trip might be the hardest thing that she would ever do.  She calmly looked at me and said, “I have already done the hardest thing – I went to that soccer camp in Wisconsin.”  She stuck to this story even when she returned happy and healthy from Alaska, suggesting that we had inadvertently sent her to a hellish soccer camp that should be investigated for child abuse.

This got me thinking about the hardest work that I have ever done, which sent me back 28 years to the sweltering summer of 1980 when I was a newly minted medical intern at the VA hospital in Chicago.  I timidly arrived at the grey decaying building and was immediately given 8 cases by former interns who were giddy with excitement in their new supervisory roles.  I was totally unprepared for the physical, emotional and mental challenges.  Actually, the only thing that I had prepared was my signature.  I knew that I would have to sign my name on medical orders multiple times a day, so I had experimented with different signatures.  With nothing better to do, I randomly picked one of the cases and as my first act as an intern, I ordered a routine blood count and signed it with my peppy and curvaceous “E Brown, MD” signature that I still use today. 

We had a punishing work schedule, which involved being on call every third night.  This meant that you had a 12 hour shift, followed the next day by 36 hour on call shift when you would spend a sleepless night careening between exhaustion and the sheer terror that you might actually kill someone due to ineptitude.  I remember one night following my 36 hour shift when I attempted to go to a play featuring the juggling team the Flying Karamozov Brothers.  I tried to hold my head up, but it just fell like a dead weight on my shoulders.  One of the performers stopped the play and announced to the audience, “Look at that women, her head just tipped over!”  My husband tried to wake me up amid the titters and stares. 

When you were on call, you were responsible for anything that might go wrong with any of the patients on the entire floor, plus be responsible for any newly admitted patients from the ER.   There was some shadowy woman who was in charge of “bed control,” which meant that she theoretically assigned newly admitted patients (called “hits”) sequentially to each floor.  There was nothing more depressing than getting “hit” early in the morning, since this meant that you were first up and would likely get more admissions than anyone else, plus you had to work up a new admission in the middle of the hectic day instead of the afternoon or evening.  It occurred to me that savvier residents were probably plying the all powerful Bed Control woman with sugary treats to cherry pick the easier admissions.  Actually, I would have eagerly paid her cash, but was too exhausted to find out where her office was located. 

My ward was on the un-airconditioned 8^th floor and each day I wore fewer clothes as I tried to cope with the overwhelming heat.  I remember one day hunched over a rummy old man trying to start an IV in veins obliterated by drug abuse.  I looked up to notice that the man was looking directly down my braless unbuttoned shirt, revealing a modest cleavage glistening with rivulets of sweat.  I was wearing some sort of wrap around skirt that had splayed open and was threatening to reveal my fuzzy-wuzzy.  I could not have cared less and just as I found a vein, a drop of my sweat fell onto the patient’s previously sterilized skin.  

Aside from my limited medical skills, I quickly realized that I had to multi-task as a social worker to arrange for discharges.  The intern was frequently the only person with a vested interest in getting a patient out of the hospital.  There were some patients that seemed to virtually live there with no interested family members and no place else to go.  So it became my job to try and find a nursing home, or cajole the family into taking some responsibility.  These patients generally were not too much medical work since they were not receiving any active treatment, but the longer they stayed in the hospital, the more likely they would become newly sick in the toxic atmosphere of the general ward.  A beeper could go off in the middle of the night, prompting a nauseous knot in my stomach as the nurse would announce that 2 or more John Does were running a low grade temp.   This would set in motion a search for the cause of the temperature, which could take hours.  Several years later when I was an inexperienced mother, a crying baby would provoke the exact same wave of nausea, as I feared that I would never be able to figure out why the baby was crying.  I did, however, learn one great trick in curing a low grade fever.  You simply do not take the temperature.

I had one semi-comatose patient who had multiple insurmountable medical problems.  The previous intern had asked for an infectious disease (ID) consult on the theory that the patient could have TB, along with kidney, heart and liver failure.  Antibiotics had already been started but every day the ID resident would show up and earnestly ask me if I had managed to obtain a sputum specimen to confirm the presence of TB.  He sometimes would grab me by the shoulders and look deep into my eyes and futilely try to convince me that this was the most important thing in my day.  However, he did not provide too much advice on how to coax a hock out of non-responsive patient.  When I saw him coming, I used to hide in the other semi-comatose patient’s room across the hall.  Actually, this was a great private room for general relaxation; this patient had the advantage of having the opposite of a fever – his temperature was too low due to some damage to his brain thermostat.  At  94⁰ he was actually cooler than the ambient temperature and I thought of him as a human air conditioner.  Actually, his temperature could have been even lower, since the thermometer did not record anything below 94⁰ .  

Eventually, I got up the energy to get this patient discharged to a nursing home, and spent many hours filling out forms and arranging for transportation.  Somehow I had grown fond of this man, probably because he was so undemanding, and I managed to filch extra PJs for him in the remote possibility that he would snap to.  I triumphantly awaited the arrival of transport and had him all propped up in a wheel chair ready to go, but transport took one look at him and told me that he was not qualified to be transferred since he wasn’t wearing shoes, even though there was no way the man could walk.  I certainly did not know what had happened to his shoes, and it was entirely possible that he had arrived at the hospital barefoot.  I was devastated as I saw all my hard work go up in smoke.  I then got a tip that I should go down to the scary basement where they kept all the old unclaimed clothes and effects from dead patients.  I rushed down and rustled around in the dusty bins.  I joyfully returned with a pair of random shoes, placed them on his lap, and transport had no choice but to take him.

I had my share of down-on-their-luck alcoholic and bitter vets.  One patient arrived so filthy that my first order of business was to insist that he take a bath.  When he returned he hurled all sorts of epitaphs at me, and seemed particularly pleased with his last – “Why don’t you go play in traffic,” he snarled.  Another patient arrived with DTs; I started an IV, gave him some drugs and vitamin B6 and was momentarily pleased when he appeared much improved the next day.  He could even tell me the date and who the president was.  However my joy was short-lived as I noticed that he was intently reading the paper upside down.    There were others that broke my heart.  One gentleman came in with anemia and was discovered to have extensive colon cancer.  A medical student was assigned to me and she was way too weirdly excited about telling this man that he had terminal cancer  – I think that she felt that was one of the signature moments of her medical education.  I told her that I would tell the man, who took the news with astonishing grace – I think he knew all along that his time was limited.  However, he thanked me for my care and presented me with a paper ring that he had made out of a dollar bill.  He said that he had learned this skill in Korea.  Another man was dying of pancreatic cancer and I got to know his wife who visited every day.  It was easier for me when the patients were somewhat anonymous, so I almost wished that she hadn’t told me that her husband was an accomplished guitar player and singer and in general was the life of any party.  We cried together when he died. 

I quickly realized that internal medicine was not for me and immediately took the steps to transfer to a pathology residency, which was my initial interest anyway.  In fact, I had only pursued internal medicine because pathology had the reputation as the sanctuary for misfits who could not hack clinical medicine.  But as my 9 month tenure ended, I had indeed become an accomplished intern who could juggle 10-15 patients and not freak out every time my beeper went off.  On one of my last nights on call, I got “hit” at the absurdly early hour of 8 AM, but I took this piece of bad news in capable style.  I was told that they were sending up an immensely obese man with severe asthma and that the pros down in the ER could not get a blood gas to determine his oxygen level.  A blood gas requires a sample of blood from an artery in the wrist, unlike the more accessible veins.  No problem.  I walked into his room, buttoned my shirt, tightened my skirt and went to work.  I located the artery from the faint pulsations through the layers of fat, and then slipped the needle in.  I will never forget the slight resistance as I hit the muscular artery, the give as the needle went through the wall, and then the spurt of bright red blood filling the vial.  I emerged from the room as triumphant as Rocky and danced down the hall with fists pumping.  

Sure, plenty of patients had died while on my watch, but thankfully it wasn’t because I had killed them.  Many of the patients were in the hospital for the express purpose of dying, and I took some satisfaction in providing them with the best comfort and care.  For other patients I provided a slight detour on their path of self destruction, and finally a very small subset were cured.   On my last day I was called into the office of the chief of staff for my exit interview.  “I didn’t give you much of a chance when I saw you the first day, kid,” he said.  “You looked like a deer in the headlights.  But I have never seen anyone make better progress.  Great job, doc.”

The missing words in the following poem are a set of anagrams (i.e. like spot, post, stop) and the number of asterisks indicate the number of letters. One of the words will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the above words and context of the poem.

As a new intern on the ——- floor I was nervous every single day

That I could make a mistake and kill a patient in a dozen different ways.

 For example, a misplaced ——- point when calculating a dose

Could leave a patient violently ill or even comatose.

And what would happen if a patient fraudulently ——-

That I let the scalpel slip and left him totally maimed.

But once – —— myself down and vowed not to go nuts

I began to develop the necessary emotional, mental and physical guts.

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Answers:  medical, decimal, claimed, I calmed

Answers:  medical, decimal, claimed, I calmed