BC

well, my last- minute trip to BC might have been more fun without a broken foot. however, there are a lot of things to do here with a broken foot, and great company to do them with. here's me at brohm lake, foot out of water.








i did manage to climb, as well, though it was a trick to hike in there. we alternated crutching with piggy- backing. it turns out, i can climb with my right foot and a left knee pad!! it was tough to find knee placements in this finger crack, though.

i can't remember this guy's name, but he was an enthusiastic member of the team of 10 climbers that ingeniously helped us break into joel's car through the trunk. somehow, it locked itself with the keys in joel's pants pocket. slightly shadowed, note the metal spatula, just one of the motley tools that finally spawned success in the venture.

deep sea kayaking around bohen island; a fun, alternative and foot-friendly adventure. here's joel, looking sexy as always.

Fun in CO . . .

. . . despite the broken foot. here's the gorgeous sun setting over the mountains. although it prevented us from going climbing (realistically, the colorado hikes are heinous and undoable in crutches), danielle and i were able to do lots of things together that we haven't ever done before. such as riding the motorized carts at target. if you have to be a gimpy invalid, you might as well have a little fun, eh?

the foot didn't look altogether too bad once the swelling went down and it stopped looking greenish. i am a bad patient, as it turns out. i took the splint off approximately 5 times a day in order to ice it, to bathe and to see how it was looking. i was wondering why at HCMC we use plaster and weberil instead of these fancy automatic splint forming thingies. my conclusion was it is probably so that patients can't take it off so easily.

i also took my splint off in order to crutch into the water and help danielle teach peanut how to swim. she can swim, but she's still in the stage where she won't unless she's absolutely forced. rocco refused to swim volitionally until i went sailing and left him on the shore. he howled for 5 minutes and suddenly, he was swimming across the lake to catch joel and i in the boat. crazy pooch.

The Incident

Danielle and I were psyched to go climbing at Rocky Mountain National Park on her day off. We hiked up there and enjoyed a pleasant hike that felt really short because we were so intently reviewing medical knowledge (I know, we're big dorks). We were warming up on this beautiful boulder with Long's Peak in the background. We decided to go check out some of the other boulders before coming back to this boulder to work on our project, Potato Chip (V7), on the other side of this boulder that was significantly less scary than normal due to the snow. I was hiking in flip flops because I was lazy and I always hike in flip flops. I was hiking over a rather large boulder in the talus field when my wet-from-snow foot slipped and I fell approximately a foot, my flops fell off, I skinned the toe on my right foot and I landed on the curved point of a rock with my bare foot. I called for danielle, but she didn't hear me. I crawled over to a snow field and set up camp. I felt nauseous and stunned and waited for the pain to subside. Danielle came back and bandaged my skinned toe, which was bleeding everywhere. She'd even brought some saline bullets in her first aid kit. But my other foot was the one that I was worried about. Finally, the pain started to subside and I began to think maybe I would climb some more. Then, I tried to stand on it. I winced, sat back down and knew it was broken. At the 5th metatarsal head to be exact. Shannon and Ben, two of Danielle's friends, came to the rescue and helped me get out. I rock hopped and shoulder assisted most of the way over the talus, and then Ben piggy backed me the rest of the way out to the main trail.
I walked on it for at least 3 miles because I was still in pain when using Danielle's shoulder as an assist and it would have gone much slower. So I just tried to walk on the inner part of my foot and the heel. I always kind of wondered if I would be one of the people who would tough it out hike on a broken bone if I had to. Now I know that I can. I did tear up a bit when at times I could feel the bones grinding. We stopped at DQ because we really deserved it by this point. Danielle took me to the Boulder hospital where we found out that I have an unstable oblique fracture on my 5th metatarsal head. No more hiking in flip flops, especially on talus fields. I already hate the crutches and I'm hating the fact that I won't be able to climb for quite awhile.

Colorado

Hesam and I decided to take a road trip in his 1980 VW westfalia. The trip out was a little long-we had to drive 55 the whole way because there is no 5th gear and we had to stop every 3 hours to cool off the air-cooled engine. We finally arrived, spent a margarita-ful fourth at danielle and EZ's house, and went climbing at Mount Evans the following day.

Here's danielle and EZ's dog peanut in front of the meadow boulder.
Unfor- tunately, after the brutally steep 1 1/2 hour hike in

and 1/2 hour of warming up, we got poured on. And usually in CO, it stops. So we were hopeful, and hopeful and hopeful . . . until we hiked out in the rain, which never did stop.

Gay Pride Festival

the drasler sibs and deepika. her family used to live with us when we were both 2. we were exactly the same age and best friends. we have pictures of us in the wagon together. and i haven't seen her since! she finally visited the states and we took her out downtown minneapolis to celebrate. it happened to be gay pride week, and she will probably forever remember minneapolis as the "home of the most gay people she's ever seen in one place." i guess its not so open in india.

High School Reunion

whoa, high school reunions are strange things. the entire night was like, "whoa! that's so-and-so!" people i haven't thought about in 10 years, quite literally. minnetonka was a strange place to go to high school, what with all the orange fake-and-baked dolled-up girls and backwards-hat nice-carred boys. i was pretty much a dork in high school. but, i can honestly say that everyone with whom i initiated a conversation was very friendly and it was really fun to talk to them and hear about what they were doing, even if they were rather superficial repetitive conversations. except kim hastreiter, who used to be a popular girl, on the dance team, "the rettes." SHE decided she couldn't handle all the superficial bull-shit and got really wasted and "hated everyone there because she was living in new york during 911 and she knew how life really was." Tracy McKinney and I in the photo above.

collette being funny at the reunion. she's one of my oldest friends. we go back to the fourth grade, where we had a judy blume club for the book, "friends forever." her husband, joe, and andy seng in the background

More Tanzania

nicola and felicity and two of their students. these are two of my good brit friends who were in tanzania doing a photo- journalism project. they have gone to several different countries and taught photography classes to street kids, then asking them to make a photodocumentary of their lives. the kids get to see the other countries through each others' eyes and learn about many other countries in a language-less, equalizing way. it was an amazing project and i was excited to see the finished product. these two girls were especially excited about their project and hung their photos-the first they've ever had-all over the wall.

the ugly side of tanzania is the trash. most people there litter and think nothing of it. and then drink out of and bathe in the trashy river. it makes you realize how global of a perspective we really have to take in preserving the future of our earth.

this is a dalla dalla, the public trans- portation mini-buses that cost a quarter to take. they cram them to the brim with appx 18 people fitting inside each and hanging out the doors. they are quite an experience. you are guaranteed to have an overwhelmingly sweaty and stinky experience and you might get a baby handed to you if you happen to have a seat.

Selian Lutheran Hospital

though all my pics are of animals, the most important part of my trip and biggest part timewise was working at the hospital. here are a few of the docs and interns there at Selian Lutheran Hospital. i didn't take a ton of pictures, because i really don't like being a tourist. working at the hospital was a really cool, but frustrating experience. for one thing, the diagnostic capacity isn't very great-we didn't even have bacterial cultures. so, we'd figure out what we thought they might have that we could treat, and we might treat empirically for all of the above. its a very different approach to medicine and its tough coming from the US to get used to the differences. i learned a lot from the docs there, though. they really do have a very broad range of knowledge as there really are no specialists--they see everything.

i did manage to get one pic of me with a real live tanzanian baby patient. when i did peds, i really did want to be like angelina jolie and take them all home with me. danielle's mom said she didn't want a bracelet as a souvenir, what she really wanted was a tanzanian baby. and with their preciously huge eyes and "hello" choruses when you walk down the street, you can't help but be put in a good mood. really, the people in tanzania are amazingly friendly and will invite you in for tea or try to chat with you on the street in some mix of swahili and english. the people were definitely my favorite part of my trip, although underrepresented in photos.

colleen, esther and i did a day clinic where we were the docs and we had our own translators. we had a mini-formulary of about 10 drugs that we had on hand, so were a bit (okay quite a bit) limited in what we could actually do for the patients. fortunately, many patients just need ibuprofen.

Bouldering

i did get to climb a bit on the trip. here's some makeshift bouldering on the very sharp dead coral at pangani beach.



here's a member of my little tanzania climbing team bouldering in my shoes. we had about 10 kids following us around and trying to boulder in their sandals. they did very well and they were psyched!

below is the best boulder we found in all of tanzania, an FA which i named aptly "maasai warrior." and a warrior of a problem it was. this was in mwanza, which has a ton of rock everywhere. much of the rock is on private land, so you need to get a bouldering community to own some property and climb in eachother's backyards. i wish i had been here the whole time, i definitely would have climbed a lot more. the only downfall is that a lot of the rock is rather egglike and featureless.

here's erine getting beta from a maasai warrior at longido. actually, i think he was very confused about what we were doing, but was curious to watch.

Safari

cute lil baby baboon. aw. remember the baboon from "the lion king?" his name is rafiki which means friend in kiswahili. little did you know disney was such an educator. and he sings, "asante sana, squashed banana" which i sang every time i drank raha, the locally made banana beer, which cost 30 cents a bottle. which means thank you very much. mmmmmmm.

i don't really know if these giraffes were playing or angry, but they were whipping each other with their ninja necks. did you know that when giraffes walk, they move the two legs on the same side of their body at the same time, which makes them rock back and forth like . . . i don't think i've ever seen anything else walk like that. its crazy.

hippo yawn. so lazy, so terrifying. and quite ugly. We saw two dirty rocks in a mud puddle that turned out to be hippos and started running when we got close.

the medical students (me, erine, mike and katie) getting ed-
jumacated on safari. we saw like 300 different animals and our tour guide, with his wealth of memorized information about every single species, probably has his head crammed with more facts than we do. i wonder which ones i pushed out to make room for the sexual habits of lions (see other entry)?

a beautiful female lion lounging next to small bush. little did we know, her buddy was lounging within said small bush. once this impressive lady sauntered over to drink from the river, i thought maybe it would be a good moment to pee. however, beware of peeing near bushes as there may be lions within. they are much more incognito than i would have imagined.

this is the post-coital frustration experienced by male lion after an appx. 3 seconds of intercourse whereafter he is kicked out by woman because he has a spike on the end of his very small penis that is quite painful for her. this occurs 200 times per day during mating season. wow.

oblivious male lion doesn't really care that we are 3 feet away. he's grown accustomed to humans and knows we're no threat in the serengeti, which is basically a really large zoo. the "wild" is so small nowadays that the animals can't really just go wherever they want to go because outside of their large regulated habitat is civilization. and people are an everyday part of his existence. not that this is necessarily bad, just different. and not altogether "wild."

cheetah chocolate per our tour guide, these are thompson gazelle. stripey and cute.

we did see a cheetah (below), albeit kinda far away and not very photograph- able. every so often, we caught binocular glimpses of her feeding her baby some nice fresh meat.

this hyena either just ate or is pregnant. supposedly they are the most mis- understood animal. and "the lion king" made us all discriminate against the poor scrappy creature. did you ever wonder what would happen if you mated a coyote with a cheetah?

elephant. makes saggy grey skin and obesity beautiful.

black rhinos (below) are poached for the reputed aphrodesiac properties of their horns. now, few are left so they hire 24 hour guards with guns to watch them and make sure no other animals kill them. natural selection at its best.

wildebeests and zebras are symbiotic buddies. supposedly, one eats the tall grass and one eats the short grass and one has good hearing and one has good vision. they make a good team. however, the ugliness of the wildebeest is even more apparent when viewed in stark contrast to the optically illusive beauty of the zebra.

when male vervet monkeys reach sexual maturity, they get blue balls to let the ladies know they are ready for some action.

the baby vervet monkeys are soooo darn cute i really wanted to take one home with me.





baboon lady with a baby on her tummy.












one of the "big five," the leopard. the big five are the animals that, if they're coming at you, you'd better get them on the first shot or you're toast. they are: the cape buffalo, the lion, the leopard, the elephant and the rhino.

we worked with a lot of maasai warriors and women at the hospital, which was an awesome experience. however, they hate having their picture taken and i don't like being touristy and rude, so i usually don't ask. this is not actually my photo, it is erine's. she went on a tour where you pay $12 to take pictures of maasai people. this kind of disturbs me--that there is this sub-population of maasai who's main occupation is as a tourist attraction. i mean, in some ways it is good for both parties. they get money and tourists get to see how they live. but the other part, the part where you feel like you're going to the zoo to see people on display, is quite disturbing and i can't say i really like it or wanted to partake.

this is probably the coolest animal i saw, the serval cat. typically, they are shy little furballs, but this one was for some reason not afraid of us and was walking within 8 feet of our vehicle. it was all swatting butterflies and drinking from the water and being cute. too bad small domestic cats are never completely un-feral or i would probably want a pet serval cat.

Kilimanjaro

this is the gorgeous mountain which is soon to lose its snow cap. i wanted to climb it, but kept going back and forth because of the extreme financial commitment. i wasn't as concerned about the physical stamina commitment, though i know it would have been extreme as well. climbing kili costs $900 at the cheapest and then you have to tip the porters. most of it is park fees, which go to support the corrupt government of tanzania's continued luxury living. several my good friends climbed it and had a drenched but wonderful experience. i do wish i'd had the experience. but, of course, since it has no gorgeous sheer rock face, its slightly more passuppable.

Slacker

i haven't updated my blog in a long time. but, i have a mediocre excuse. i have been in tanzania, where the internet is infinitely slow and frustrating. i do not have the time or patience to attempt to blog in said country. love the country and it was actually quite liberating to be not so dependent on the net. however, going without power for a week was not so much fun. my other excuse is that i didn't actually realize that anyone read it except for danielle and i talk to her on the phone. my parents informed me that they didn't understand that a blog was something that you had to log into periodically to read. they thought it was more like email, wherein i sent them stuff every so often. but, aunt cindy and uncle jeff, quite a bit more internet savvy, have informed me that they did mourn the absence of any recent photos or random stories. so, for my few but loyal readers, i will attempt again to be an at-least-weekly blogger. and i will go back in the life for anyone who wants to see my pictures of tanzania.