DrBob's Tardis

I entered medical school in 1959 and graduated in 1963.  It was the first year of med school that I stopped by the coffee shop across the street from the school and saw a classmate sitting at the counter.  I sat down and he was mumbling to himself, Never Lower Tilleys Pants, Mother Might Come Home.  I’ve capitalized the words for a reason.  I had to ask what the heck he was saying and he replied “a neumonic”.  I had to ask What is a Neumonic!  And he looked at me astounded.  ”You don’t know what a neumonic is?”  I had to admit that I did not.  It is the way to remember the carpal bones of the hand.  Well, I had already memorized them so it was a little on deaf ears, but I was shocked that such a thing existed.  And I had survived 4 years of pre-med without knowing such a thing…or even needed them.  So, as I sit here ready to type in the answers, I “Googled” Neumonic and guess what came up.  A bit mind boggling.  There are more than one neumonics for the carpal bones.  How did I ever survive without such things?

During my time in Florida I developed some wonderful friends, one of whom was Tom Terpening.  We knew him first and for years as “Tam” but he’s changed it so I’ll go with the change.  Tam was very intellectual in archeological sites that date to about 13000 yrs and I could never understand how he knew.  He showed me sights in the outback of Fla that few people get to see, one of which is this strange structure that I believe dates to Civil war times.  The walls are solid concrete reinforced with railroad track.  All the doorways are vaulted and it seems nobody knows much about it.  I loved to photograph the place and have gone back several times.  I wonder now if I could even find it.  It’s up near Crystal River somewhere.

I met Tom thru my then wife Toni and we travelled around Fla enjoying the sights and scenery.  Tom was working for his Dad who owned a construction company and there was a time when the company was working on the Panamerican highway around Quito Ecuador.  Tam was down there working and as part of his contract was tickets to come back to the states 4 times a year for R&R.  Well, he met a beautiful girl there and decided to get married.  So he sent tickets for Toni and I to go free to Ecuador for the wedding and a week.  It was a marvelous experience almost beyond explanation.  I speak almost zero Spanish, Toni thinks she does.  Tom did quite well, but Sandra spoke zero English.  It was such fun.  The wedding was held in a big old church with an organist and a blind violinist.  I should have taken more photos for Toni to think she should have.  Tom would tell me stories of being the son of a wealthy industrialist, and until I saw the movie “Proof of Life”, I didn’t understand him.  My coming was the first time he engendered to travel out of the city of Quito because he felt safe.  We were in a huge pickup with a machine gun (honest) under the seat.  My eyes were wide open in amazement.

4/4/12…When one drove out of the city of Quito, one would see a pig or a calf hung head up on a tripod of wood, with pieces of it removed.  No refrigeration mandated pretty much that meat be butchered and sold directly as people went by either on foot or horseback or auto.  I have no idea how common refrigeration was in general in the city, but I do know that I was never sold a drink with ice in it, and they always kept the bottle when I was done with any bottled drink.

On my second trip to Ecuador, I was requested to go there because Tams Dad, Tom had a heart attack and I went to see if it was safe to stay or that he be brought back to the U.S..  I went to the hospital where he was, and I saw equipment that I had only ever seen in antique medical books, only I saw the equipment in hallways and rooms….still in use!  The defibrillator in the ICU where he was a patient…was unbelievably huge.  4 FEET by 3 ft, by 4 ft.!!  And some of the doctors had trained in Cleveland Clinic USA!!  The biggest problem they had with Tom was that he was my size…6′ 1″.  He stuck out on Both ends of the bed he was in, in the ICU.  So the first, and probably the best thing I did was get him into a private room with an acceptable bed.   We elected to leave him in Ecuador to rest up before returning to Fla.

During the second trip there, again…Tam and Sandra took me south and then west from Quito in that big pickup.  Gas was having to be shipped from the Amazon area of Ecuador, across two mountain chains of the Andes mountain that split vertically and Quito is in the middle.  Because of all this, we had to pay 16 CENTS a gallon for gas.  Wow.  So the trip to the area we were headed was 5 hours of Downhill on the west side of the Andes.  The scenery can not be justifiably explained.  Awesome doesn’t come close.  We went to a small “city”…where the road entering the city was paved…and one way.  On the exit of the city, the road was dirt.  In that city..I hope I can remember to look up the name…we saw stores and shops that had front doors like metal garage doors, and wares were hung around the opening to what they had inside.  One had to step up a big 2 ft or more step from the street to the opening of the stores.  A restaurant we went to, had us sitting at a table right next to the step down to the street, and the people threw their chicken bones and other garbage from the meal…into the street where it was fought over by buzzards and other animals.  Quaint sure doesn’t come to mind.  We had travelled here to see a “tribe” of indians known as Los Colorados.  This was because the men…put a seed from Aschioto (check this spelling) into their hair and brought the hair forward like the brow of a baseball cap…and the seeds and  maybe a grease turned their hair a deep red.  In my poor understanding of Spanish…I learned that “this is the way it has always been”.  In town, we would see males with pants on, but no shirt and that strange hairdo, and mostly drunk.  The women…would wear a flowered dress and strange (to me) patent leather shoes…but not tied.  The women did not use this coloration in their hair.  When we went out of town to see a dwelling…I’ll post a photo here…the men wore a deep blue and white transversed striped loin cloth, and barefoot.  The women wore a colored striped skirt and were topless and barefoot.  He charged us $ 50 cents to take their picture, and he, the man…put a pink satin cloth around his shoulders..assumedly to be dressed up for the portrait.  Their house, was made of split bamboo logs split and laid flat and then attached to other intact round bamboo trees to form a rectangular building.  It had a thached roof and dirt floors.  There was no stove and no chimney,but a small fire pit in one corner with the smoke going straight out thru the roof.  We experienced this when we went back to them after dark.  There was one oil lamp…raw flame and no protection.  The bed was a small elevated area right inside the door on the opposite end from the fire pit.  I saw no blankets.  I asked if I could buy a mans loincloth and they refused, but did bring out the most basic loom I ever saw and showed me how they make the cloth.  I did understand the spanish enough to hear the man say, “Do it right for the tourists”.

On that same trip, we travelled around trying to find other members of Los Colorados.  We found only a couple, a young girl with a toddler.  She had the same skirt and was topless.  Another was a teenage boy who had his hair in that style and blue jeans, barefoot and topless.  He told us his dad was drunk and couldn’t come out to meet us.  He was under a large roofed structure with walled in area at the far end, but the roofed area was again, about 30 by 50 and there was a wooden marimba suspended by roped/vines in the near corner.  Shortly after seeing him, we were driving on a dirt path thru the jungle when I saw a very large snake.  The jungle was like what I think was a banana plantation.  Very open floor with not much dense vegetation and banana trees separated widely.  I got out to photograph the snake but it took off and I ran to catch up to it.  I was in my 30s at the time, and it didn’t take me long to discover that I couldn’t catch up to it….but more important was the sudden realization that if I couldn’t keep up, if it turned and chased me, I wouldn’t be able to get away from it…it was that fast.  So I immediately stopped and went back to the pickup.  That…is an epiphany!

My first dog that I can remember was Wimpy.  I think he was named after a character from the Popeye Comic strips that Dad used to read to us.  He was the dog I had on a rope while I sat on my first skateboard.  I had nailed the front and back end of metal skates that we first had.  The kind that had to have a skate key on a string around your neck for when your shoe fell out of the skate.  I had a long bamboo pole and a hotdog on a string at the end.  We went about 50 feet before I hit a bump and fell, and Wimpy got the hotdog and ran away.  Not long after that I saw Our Gang cartoon at the movies and he had stolen my idea!

The next dog I remember was Midnight…a black cocker spaniel puppy.  Mom and Dad had made a month trip out west and the very day they returned, Middy had been killed by a car and all 3 of us kids were heartbroken.  Hardly a nice return for the folks.

Next was Doc.  A puppy Weimaraner that Doc Wilson had given me from his female dogs litter.  She was such a good hunter and I was sure excited.  He died from ?Parvo just a couple days after we had him.  I was heartbroken.

Next was Ringer.  A “redbone” beagle.  I have no idea what that means but he was white and two colors of “red” and taller than most beagles, and that’s what Dad said he was.  He was an incredible rabbit dog and many friends asked to borrow him to hunt.  I could watch him all day.  On one occasion, I was on one side of a deep hollow and on the other side almost directly across from me and a couple hundred feet away, I could watch both him and the rabbit he chased do their pattern, the well known figure 8.  Not just once but 3 times did he cross and I decided to shoot the rabbit on the 3 rd pass around me.  Dad still won’t tell me and I never knew what happened to him after I went to college.

Next was…Pepper.  when I was 12, Dad brought home a male Dalmation I called Pepper.  He and I bonded so very tightly.  I had to complain he always had to have his head on me in bed when we went to bed.  He would go canoeing with me and jump out and swim for a while and then bark and I’d have to go to shore to let him jump in.  Even in water with large ice floes.  He love the water and would jump off a diving board to get to me and even off the top of the dam down to the lower level, just to swim with me.  He got hit by a truck when I was in college.  It hurt.

While in college at Bucknell,  my wonderful biology professor Roy Tasker PhD, arranged for me to get a spider monkey from one of his former pupils.  Wow.  What a learning experience that was.  Fannie, was a female golden spider monkey with the  4 fingered hands and huge clitoris that most people thought was a penis.  She was a baby and I had All the details and more that one would have with a for real human baby.  Change diapers and feed and exercise and cuddle.  You had to be sure the hole for the tail was tight enough or you ended up with monkey poop all over your arm and shoulder.

At the same time I had Fannie, I had a parakeet, Diffy (as that was the sound he would make for unknown reasons).  Diffy was a challenge too.  You could not leave an open box of toothpix on a table or he would take them one at a time and walk to the edge of whatever he was on and drop it and watch it fall, then go back for another, until the box was empty.  He would sit on a glass and sway front to back until the glass toppled over and then with his head, he would roll it to the edge and watch it fall.  We had to completely change to metal and/or plastic glasses.  We also had to watch how we put toilet paper into the holder.  If the paper rolled out across the top and down, he would fly onto it and while flying would run the paper under his feet till the entire roll was on the floor.  Which brings me to a partial end of this post…I can vividly recall coming home one day, and up the long flight of stairs to our house which was the whole top floor of Dads machine shop.  And here comes Fannie running upright with her funny waddle gait and her tail held high behind her and the end of a roll of toilet paper flying from her tail back to the bathroom, and Diffy trying to get the paper from her tail.  No camera could possibly do that scene justice.

Oh, I have more pets, but that’s another day.

There is a tv program series on History channel that I get via satellite.  I am both angered by and enchanted by, it.  Having been to a place that can only imprint into your mind that it is real, you are witnessing it directly and therefore it exists…and it can only have been made by an intelligent being or beings.  My place was Chichen itza in the peninsula of Mexico.  I have also been to The Anasazi cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in Colorado.  The latter are much more primitive and fairly easily to justify from what little we know of the people that built it.  Chichen itza is a bit more of a struggle as is easily shown on the program I’m discussing.  Just now, they demonstrate that the people who built Chichen itze, were aware of the precession of earth demonstrated in their writing and of their knowledge of astronomy.  This is Many hundreds of years ago.  The precession happens once every 72 yrs, and these people apparently were so knowing of the heavens that they knew of and wrote about it.  When I visited the Pyramid of Kulkulkan, I was definitely in awe of the people building such a massive structure.  When we arrived there by bus, the guide said “we’ll visit the pyramid last, if there’s time”.  Ha.  No Way was I going to miss that.  It was over 100 degrees F, I drank 6-8 bottles of soft drink and didn’t urinate all day!!  But I was alone…all by myself as I climbed to the incredible top of the pyramid.  There was a chain running down the steps so one had something to grab onto if necessary.  The steps were not deep enough to allow a full foot placed on it and were higher than our usual steps at home.  I stood up there and could see out over the jungle for a long distance.  Then, having seen Mel Gibsons movie, Apocalypse (many years after my visit to the pyramid), I can imagine them cutting out the hearts while still beating and throwing the victims down the steps.  It would be easy to fall/slide/bounce all the way to the bottom.  I am unable to comprehend the need to kill and sacrifice and still wonder why.  There was a Lot of ruins and ancient sites in the area.  A large building for astronomy, a ball court, a covered painted wall.  Easy to get frustrated in not being able to read the hieroglyphs.  Thankful that someone did uncover/translate them, and then even more awe at their communication.  There was a wide pathway to a cenote…a well or large hole in the ground, where, on the edge, sat a stone structure said to be the site of execution and the bodies or hearts thrown into the water about 80 feet down.  As I approached the cenote, I noticed a very loud racket of birds and the moment my head was visible over the edge, they became silent and I only got to see a few large parrots as they flew to hide in the crevices.

To this day, I stand in awe of such ancient sites.  And they exist literally all over our planet.  Every continent has more than one such site and many archeologists are trying to uncover the secrets.  I wish I could stick around long enough to hear what they learn.  When you see something that can have no other explanation than it was created by intelligent beings…you are forced to believe your eyes.

And to this day, I am totally baffled by the thought that the builders of the Egyptian pyramids didn’t have pulleys!

Our science is making big leaps in finding how our brain works.  I wish I could keep up with the studies.  I’ve always wondered why we have a loss in our memory at a certain young age. It seems to happen to everybody but I wonder if there aren’t a few who didn’t lose theirs.  What’s the earliest memory you have?  I can remember my youngest sister coming home after she was born.  I would be 4.  Why is that memory “lost”…or is it really lost?  How can we study it and for what gain?  A few years ago, there was a special edition of Scientific American about the brain.  Even before I retired, and possibly fairly learned, I could only make it thru about a third of the studies.  They did a study, showed how that part of the brain worked and so on.  Devising the study would be as intriguing as the outcome in my book.  It’s been a few years now, and so much has been advanced in that arena, I expect a new edition should be coming again soon.

Fascinating.  Many years ago, in Tampa Fla., I was talking to a patient at his bedside and while talking, my attention came to a publication…paper, thin magazine type and though I don’t remember, something on the page made me ask about it.  He said, take it, you might enjoy it.  I was totally taken.  I have subscribed to it for almost 40 yrs now.  Science News is such a marvelous subscription.  It covers all of the sciences (some of which weren’t even sciences at that time) and it never fails to get my attention in one or more of it’s subjects.  Barely a dozen pages thick, but uncommonly informed.  Ever since writing the above about consciousness and memory, I’ve read of a bunch of studies being done and in progress and to be further examined.  Sort of predestined for me to read that.  Only in the past very recent time (weeks, maybe month)…there is an offering of a program that states one can learn a foreign language in 10 days.  Haven’t gotten it yet, but I most definitely will.  The study of language alone is intriguing.  The number of different languages in seemingly small and compact areas, alone, is fascinating.  I can remember my son going to Paris for study and I kept tell him to learn French.  Of course he didn’t but he did get to know that they teach the language French….IN FRENCH.  Ha!  Until one has experienced being alone in an area where obviously people are communicating even in generalities, and you can’t imagine how alone you are because you can’t speak the language.

I’ve experienced my soul being surrounded by children on Bonaire.  They spoke almost zero English and I spoke no Papiemento (sp) or Dutch, or Portuguese, yet we communicated about snakes and fish and the island and school and more for a couple hours.  It was REally special for me.  I never ever enjoyed haggling over the price of something, till I was in Mexico, in Merida, and I got to haggle for something in Spanish.  And I was able to do it.  Pretty minor in language arean, but the act itself was wonderful.

One other experience I had that is remarkable was going thru the countryside after leaving Chichenitza by bus, and we had to stop at a little village along the way.  I saw a man getting his hair cut…outside under a banana tree.  I can’t imagine a better experience in getting a haircut.  In that same village…no electricity…I had a Polaroid camera and they were pretty rare at the time.  There were teenage girls there dressed in everyday clothes that almost appear as a national or traditional dress.  I took a picture and handed them the developing print.  They looked at the blank sheet like what is it or what to do with it.  Then, in Mayan language…they became aware of changes happening on the print and chattered wildly.  They certainly had never experienced this before.  And when the image finally came out to full development…and they realized it was them….I will never forget that experience.

I am still wondering about consciousness and sentience.  Doubt that it will be uncovered in my lifetime, but they sure are working hard at it.  The ability to do MRI studies on the brain and follow paths is surely heading the the right direction. Follow that design and then watch Ancient Aliens and the logical course will follow.

The series on History channes of Ancient Aliens sure brings home how we just do not know much of our past.  I’d recommend everybody to see it, but know forehand that some of the narrators are speaking with forked tongues.  We certainly can not deny the presence of these Very obviously technological sites and entities around our planet, but to give ones own thoughts as gospel, that’s just wrong.  Wish someone would state that at the beginning of each episode.

4/12/12  Just read today that they have brain scan proof of actual function of acupuncture.  Wonderful.  How long has it been around?  I wrote an earlier post of Chapmans reflexes..and here it is with acupuncture.  Wonderful.