what's in your bag?

I find the "What's In Your Bag?" phenomenon a weird voyeuristic sociology experiment. It's interesting to see what people find so important that they carry it around day after day.

As I've gotten older, I've learned to be more mindful about what I carry. To pay more attention to the baggage I bear and how it changes the way I approach the world. I try to make sure that the contents of my bag reflect the kind of life that I am trying to lead - no more, and no less.

One of the reasons that I adore my iPhone is because when I first got it, it replaced my iPod, camera, GPS, calculator, and Blackberry, all of which would be crushed in the bottom of my bag with binders and pens and the old TI-83 that any good engineering student carries. It's a good example of how clever design can replace a hundred other things that we are liberated from lugging around with us.

So, here's my "What's In Your Bag?" post - feel free to psychoanalyze.

What's in my bag.

From top left, moving in horizontal rows: Macbook Air + Incipio case, pink Play-Doh, water bottle, gold Club Monaco pouch to hold various cords & cables [laptop charger, camera transfer cable, camera charger, headphones, etc.], 4 x 4 gridded notepad and LePen pen, Kate Spade sunglasses + case, hairbrush, black eyeliner, chapstick, Neutrogena compact, wallet [4 credit / debit cards, $21.17 in cash, Starbucks card, High Museum membership card, health insurance cards, ID], dog bag, business card case, keys, camera + case, iPhone.

Now that you know what's in mine, what's in your bag?

the hospital doesn't have to be a place where they go to die

If you want to understand a culture, listen to the stories that it tells.

MedShare is an organization that turns stories of despair into stories of hope. They donate discarded or surplus medical supplies from hospitals and companies to hospitals that have requested them in the developing world.

During our volunteer session this evening, Lindsey told a story of a hospital in Nigeria that was able, for the first time, to perform a c-section on a woman in labor due to the supplies that they had obtained from MedShare. Afterwards, the mayor of the town threw a party for all the surrounding villages to celebrate the milestone:

"It wasn't just that this one woman's life got saved. It was hope for the entire village. If something ever went wrong, there was a place they could go for help. And the hospital doesn't have to be a place where they go to die."

Sometimes, it's amazing how one small thing, can change the stories of a people forever.

it's amazing what you hear when you take the time to listen

I used to think, when I was young, that to be a good doctor, you have to be a good listener (from the time I was five, I wanted to be a doctor). Then, when I got my first job, I learned that to be a good gymnastics coach, you have to be a good listener. When I came to college, I learned that to be a good public servant, you have to be a good listener. And now, when I design products, I absolutely know that to be a good designer you have to be a really good listener.

The moral life, the life that transforms lives, begins in the ear, in the act of listening.
                                - Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, To Heal A Fractured World

If you want to design the kinds of things that remove shackles, that empower people, that transform people's lives, you have to start in the ear - with the act of listening.

We pay lip service to listening. We all know how important it is, but we don't always do it. We get too busy; we want to make our points; we want to win our arguments. Listening solves problems. It creates white space. It fosters creativity.

Here's a video I took in Decatur Square last weekend (in 75-degree March weather). It's amazing what you'll hear when you just take the time - no iPod, no text messages, no notepads, no agenda - to listen.

the lottery of birth

From getrichslowly:

As I’ve mentioned already, at times I felt guilty too. It’s hard not to feel guilty when you’re staying at a hotel where the average room runs $618 a night — and meanwhile, half a mile from this posh palace, men and women are scratching to make ends meet.

On the road outside of Dharavi, Asia's largest slum.

Four miles from Dharavi, is the Intercontinental Grand Mumbai.

What is my moral obligation to these people? Do I have one? Should I feel guilty for spending money on tourism? Or, as our guides suggested, should I be comforted by the fact that I’m participating in a transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor? What productive ways can I help aside from just throwing money at the problem?

I don’t have answers to these questions.

Ultimately, however, I’ve realized that guilt is not productive. Guilt doesn’t accomplish anything. I can’t change who I am or the circumstances I’ve been born into. I’ve made the most of what I have: I’ve been lucky, and I’ve worked hard to build upon that luck. I can’t change this, and I can’t regret it.

Instead, I feel like it’s my responsibility to do something with this hand that I’ve been dealt. Do what? I don’t know — and I’m not sure I need to know right now. As I travel, I’m becoming more aware of the world around me, and I feel like maybe there’s something I can contribute to make it a better place. I’m not sure what that something is, but I’m willing to be patient until I discover it.

I could have been born to any family, anywhere in the world, under any set of circumstances. I could have been any Indian girl - one of 600 million others.

But I wasn't. I was born to incredibly intelligent and educated parents. Who had families that supported them and career choices that made them successful, in today's terms. Who left the country of their past in hope of a country that could change their futures.

A man sleeping on a makeshift cot placed on a pile of trash near Loni Road in Delhi.

The Bah'ai Lotus Temple is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Delhi.

In Warren Buffett's words, I (like most of you) have won the lottery of birth. It's an incredibly humbling thought. As he describes it, if just before your birth you were put in front of a barrel containing 6.8 billion balls, and you pick one ball - one ball that would determine your gender, your birthplace, your parents - that determined the circumstances of your life. If you had that chance, would you put your ball back in hopes of something better?

I know I wouldn't. That's the hand that I've been dealt. All I can do now is give something back for it.

we're about to be surrounded by 7 billion of our closest friends and family

Check out this interesting map from good.is:

See the original here.

The top five in population as it stands today: China turns into Russia, India takes over Canada (which, the authors joke, would make a great arrangement for American companies who outsource technical expertise...), the US stays where it is as the third largest country in both population and land area, Indonesia moves to China, and Brazil stays where it is. Pakistan takes over Australia, and Japan displaces Sudan. Interesting stuff.

When I was born, world population was just under 5 billion. Today, it is almost 7 billion - with some estimates that nearly 99% of that growth takes place in the developing world.

How will we feed everyone? Care for everyone? Where are these people going to go? Already, Indian cities, as well as urban centers in Bangladesh, Pakistan, southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and Brazil are overcrowded. Around 50% (depends on which estimate you use) of India's population lives below the international poverty line - $1.25 USD a day (even in India, with a relatively low cost of living, that's a mere 55 rupees or less).

Mumbai is a good reminder of what 1.1 billion people really looks like. July 2008.

And bigger questions: how can we foster a world with more people and more perspective? How can longer lives mean more meaningful lives? Can we balance urban development with sustainable outcomes?

monday is hug an engineer day

There are conflicting reports about which day is actually Hug An Engineer Day (and this year, according to facebook it apparently coincides with Pi Day), but you should never need a designated day to hug engineers.

If you're thankful for your roads, your bridges, your electric grid, and your sewer systems, hug an engineer (or two). If you're jazzed about your laptops, cameras, smartphones, or xboxes, hug an engineer. And if you're grateful for your medical devices, hug an engineer :).

On Friday night, in celebration, I got to hug one of the most amazing engineers I've ever met.

Pictures with G. Wayne will never get old.

He's won the Norman Medal (twice), served on the President's Council of Science & Technology, and been inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. Also, it's been rumored that Chuck Norris is envious of Dr. Clough's beard.

experience needed to vote

I don't post often about politics, and I'll leave my own political philosophy out of blogging, but there is something to this video that, as a "Gen Yer" I had to share.

Old Glory, Centennial Park, downtown Atlanta.

The Speaker of the New Hampshire House was speaking at a Tea Party rally (see the video and story here - around 9:30 to get an idea of what I'm talking about) where the topic of same-day voter registration in college towns came up. Whatever the sentiment, Speaker O'Brien uses these words:

"...  and basically doing what I'd be doing as a kid - voting as a liberal. That's what kids do - they don't have the life experience, and they just vote their feelings."

It's amazing to me that you can give your life for your country at the age of 18, but you can't have enough "life experience" to give your voice and your vote.

the conflict of hurting to heal

Elli was in town this weekend (he hates it when I call him that, but some habits die hard). I've been meaning to share his post for quite some time, but haven't found the right words to introduce it. I remember it often when I'm in the hospital. Sometimes I get the thrill of seeing my designs and devices on patients, but I'm often immediately brought back down by the realization that to see my success is to see their suffering. Elli's words are humanizing - a reminder of the "conflict of hurting to heal."

Having a thug contest at Cypress Street. The Lou is no match for A-town.

Current location:	Third Floor Carrels
Current mood:	thankful
Current music:	Pandora

Sport

In the past two days, I've had a lecture/case study and read about ALL. This reminded me of my first patient, our anatomy cadaver. Although we couldn't help him in any way, I certainly hope that all he taught us will help countless patients during my career. I wrote this about him for the Cadaver Memorial Service at the end of our first year.

For Sport

We have been told that our patients will be our greatest teachers, and we will always remember him as our first patient and surely one of our greatest teachers.

The bulletin board called him, “African American male, age 20, acute lymphoblastic leukemia.” We found that we wanted to know him better than that. We started by looking at his face. Some of us needed to see his face the first week, so we pulled back the cloth and stood in silence, taking in his features. Others just saw the contours through a freshly wetted cloth at the end of the day. Either way, he became more than a body to us, he was a person, and as we pulled him apart piece by piece we felt the conflict of hurting to heal, of having to harm and invade our patients to try to make them better. With him the conflict was even more poignant as we harmed a man we could never heal. On the day we began to dissect his face, one of our group members cried. The rest, though stoic, understood why she was crying. We called him Sport. It took some time for this nickname to catch on. We first spoke of him in hushed tones, with no name at all. We came to know him too well for him to not have a name, so we gave him one. Eventually, we found that the nickname Sport fit him much better than anything else we could have thought to call him, short of his real name. I hope he would not consider it irreverent that we called him by this nickname. It was not given out of callousness or even convenience, but it was more like the way you sometimes find that you and your friends no longer call each other by name, but rather by nicknames that just fit after spending long quality hours together. Sport became a friend after long hours together, and he deserved a friend’s name.

Had he been a real patient in the hospital, there were many times we would have called him a “Difficult Patient,” or even “Noncompliant.” Our note in his chart might have read, “Patient is uncooperative with the week’s prescribed regimen of completing pages 53-67 in Grant’s Dissector.” We struggled with his 20-year old connective tissue and with the fat and lymph tissue that coated and invaded his body during the course of his disease. We left last almost every day and stayed late on other days, and we still never seemed to finish a dissection. Even TAs and professors seemed to occasionally leave our table in frustration in search of an easier dissection with clearer structures. And yet, we toiled on. Our struggle was rewarded when we discovered beautiful structures not yet broken down by long years of life. We became more confident in our dissection technique. We felt that we would be prepared if we ever operated on a young body. Through our “noncompliant” patient, we learned to work hard for our patients, and we learned that the extra time and effort will pay off in the end.

We all wondered what led a 20 year old man to give his body to be clumsily dissected by untrained, awkward hands. We talked about it often as we went about the business of anatomy lab. For other tables, the conversation may have been similar as they pondered whether or not they would give their body after death. Still, I imagine the thrust of the conversation was significantly different…as other tables wondered whether they would be willing to give their bodies after a long life like so many of the cadavers, we wondered whether we would be willing to give our bodies now. As one of our group exclaimed on the first day, “he could have been on Facebook.” That really hit home for me. I hope we would have been facebook friends, but instead of checking his status updates, we were exploring his innermost parts. We did not know him during his all-too-brief life or during the illness that unfairly shortened his days. I wish we could have known why he gave his body…what his hopes were for the future doctors who were with his body during its last few months as a body. We speculated that maybe he wanted to give something back to the medical field that we hoped had treated him skillfully and compassionately. Maybe he was just young and rebellious and wanted something extraordinary done with his remains. Maybe after such a short life, this was a chance for him to have a legacy carried on in time by the four of us who so benefited from his gift. We will probably never know who he was, what he was like, or why he gave his body. Our great hope, Sport, is that we will become the kinds of doctors that will make whatever reason you had completely worth it.

Thanks friend, and godspeed.