04-SEP-A-6
BACK-TO-SCHOOL POST-LABOR DAY, AND
POST-RUN,
IN PREPARATION FOR THE DR/HAITI TEAM
PRESENTATION AND THE TRIP TO
I
labored on Labor Day, but not the same way I had done the day before in running
from Route 28 toward Poolesville all the way up to
Labor Day dawned cloudy and with very occasional droplets of rain. I came down to the library and sat at my desk looking forward to the large amount of work I had to do later on the courses for the ELDP—and started in writing the papers that would be needed sooner rather than later. I also prepared a bibliography for my Cohort subgroup #4 to prepare our brief paper to be developed later into a poster session.
I say I was dong all this, but really I was doing this intermittently while getting up to cruise around the Game Room windows with my eyes peeled for a big varmint that has dug holes under the front door and the back wall of the shed. I saw tortoise on their very slow progress across the gravel, occasional deer coming to the area where the trail camera is set up but there was no sign of a flash of the camera going off. I walked out there and right past the front to the motion sensing lens, and nothing happened. I believe the camera may be turned off rather that out of film. I left a message for Dale Kramer and I promised to change the film if it needed it, but that the big bucks had been posing and I saw no flashes nor any moves of suspicion on their part and they had torn up all the ground around the camera looking for the acorns that are still raining down here. I checked it out to see if there were a sign that the cameras had discovered the fox or woodchuck or any of the multiple deer including the Big Bucks—now all cleared of velvet and strutting proud. We will see what the trail camera has picked up at its new location in the prime hot spot where all the ground is torn up for the acorns.
VARMINT SPOTTING,
AND THE SINGLE SHOT SOLUTION TO THAT
PROBLEM
In the overcast of the holiday, while I was still writing papers, I saw nothing except the abundant squirrels, both the melanism phase and the gray fox squirrel phase of the same species, and the occasional slow-cruising tortoises. I had just finished one of the brief papers and had pushed the “Save” button to put it into the disc for later printing, when I got up for lunch to make a pass by the windows before going to the kitchen. There he was. The beady eyes of the woodchuck were fixed on the windows to see any movement that might indicate he was not alone back there. I raced upstairs and eased the screen out of the upstairs window and the ground hog edged forward over the gravel drive toward the garage. As I cranked the window open, it looked up over the edge of the curved wall toward the garage and spotted the window opening. It swapped end and ambled back to the door of the shed, and ducked through the hole it had chewed in the side of the door. I waited. About ten minutes later, it stuck its head out, and eased out to look around to see what had spooked it earlier. I had already been awaiting this moment and had it head in the crosshairs and at the quiet sound of the pop, the varmint jumped, and disappeared around the side of the shed.
I went down to investigate, and carried the camera. I saw the area it had been and one leaf had a droplet of blood on it. I walked around to the backside of the shed which had been completely excavated with a warren of tunnels and mounds of dirt excavated from beneath the shed, with a throughway to the hole in the front door. I picked up rocks to plug the tunnels at the backside, and as I was gathering these rocks I saw one gout of clotted blood. Down the hill another ten feet below the shed was the rolled up ball of the fat woodchuck, stone dead with the hole where the scope said it ought to have been. So, at least one varmint has been cleared from cohabiting in the “historic “structure (according to Randy Hill, who is going to be coming back to shoot the shed in its current status with moss and leaves clustered over its slanted roof.
MEDICAL STUDENTS PRESENTATOIN ON THE
DR/HAITI PROJECT
Sara Caton
had put the Power Point program together and Siavash who had made the date and
time for the Ross 117 presentation showed the slides and I moderated and
fielded questions from the participants who might want to try the next medical
mission to
I also got an email from Project MediShare saying they insisted that every four medical students be accompanied by a board certified physician, which they have never had and never will—the only physicians they can hope for would be residents, and like the Himalayan Health Exchange which frequently had no single licensed physician except me, they called the first year residents or even senior students the “physicians” who would supervise the operation. So, we will see what they insist upon on their next suggested mission to see if I want to participate—the only lucky coincidence in which they could get a board-certified practicing physician, who is an anthropologist who also had credentials in public health and tropical medicine—and who had already absented from this year’s Himalayan adventures, which by the large number of GWU students I had recruited were a total bust as to the second of the three parts of every such mission: 1) A rip-roaring adventure, 2) a high quality medical care with integrity that cannot be compromised, and 3) the most intensive medical education experience they would ever have in medical school or beyond it.
NOW, I AM ON
THE WING ACROSS THE CONTINENT,
LEAVING A
RAINY
FOR A THREE
FOLD VISIT TO SFO:
VISIT WITH
THE HARKENS, GIVE THE UCSF GRAND ROUNDS, AND TO ATTEND THE HALSTED SOCIETY
MEETING
I have come by
way of Metro, Washington Flyer and now the mobile lounge to board this U/A 239
for SFO to meet the Harkens and go out to dinner with them and Pat Twomey, who
had worked with me at NIH in the Cancer Institute Surgery Branch. It will give me a chance to see Laurie Harken
and Alden, and then we will see if we can be going for some part of the Halsted
Society’s meeting at the