MAR-B-5
SAMMY GORMAN
AND TWO “JIGMETS” ARRIVE IN TAHOE;
ANOTHER SUNNY
DAY ARRIVES IN THE HOUSE OVERLOOKING LAKE TAHOE—
BUT I SPEND
THAT TIME AWAITING LUGGAGE
March 21, 2004
The arrival
last night around 11:30 of Sammy and
her husband Jigmet as well as a Ladakhi friend of his named Jigmet also was a
good thing to make our connections here.
The connections I had hoped to make by phone and otherwise earlier were
those of a delivery company commissioned to carry my bags to me after losing
them in transit between LAX and RNO. The
time has now passed forty eight hours, and I have been told to stand by for
any-minute delivery of those bags, which contain, among other things
indispensable for any visiting professor, such as multiple lectures for both
the Tahoe venue and the Nanhua University in Taiwan to follow, my running shoe
and shorts—which would have been ideal means of transportation for me to use to
explore the area around me with an inviting hot tub to soak away the miles
after the run.
But, I am almost embarrassed to say, as a
confirmed non-watcher of TV, except for Sammy’s brief visit and the typing of
these chapters while the laptop was hotwired to a land line, I have done little
else but watch what passes for mass culture entertainment in America. That has less to do with ideas and
achievements as the hijinx of the rich and foolish, such as the Hilton sisters,
and just what it is that Pairs Hilton has done today except for pose as a model
for every glossy magazine on the
checkout line stands. It might be a
relief, if I had to put in another full day of TV time—as I often considered
while making rounds on hospitalized patients and seeing the same I Love Lucy
re-runs that I had seen as my first ever TV fare following the 8th
grade entry of the single eyed box into my life space, if there were a
newsworthy event to displace them---even the political campaigns might be an
improvement! But, I have had the TV on
to a few of the wildlife and Discovery Channels as I keep one eye out the
window for the imminent arrival of a delivery van that has not yet made the
scene, to return me back into an active, rather than passive, participant in
life events of others.
VISIT WITH
SAMMY GORMAN
AND HER
ACCOMPANYING TWO JIGMETS
AND TWO LARGE
DOGS, FOR A BRIEF OVERNIGHT
I was
delighted and grateful that Sammy was enticed into making the long drive up
here after her husband Jigmet got out of work at a butcher shop at 8:00 PM last night, in order to make it here
only for the brief overnight and breakfast before going back at 9:45 AM this morning. They were longer in transit than here, and
they also had the two big dogs, 120 pound Katie and only slightly smaller Tiga
with them. This was their trial run for
the long drives they will be making this week Wednesday. As I am leaving for Taiwan,
they will be packing the dogs and the other items they will need for a month of
senior rural elective in Colorado,
a state where she would like to consider a rural or international practice
elective and residency when she applies next year for the match. They drove up in a small station wagon for
this brief visit, but will be driving to Colorado
in Sam’s vehicle—of all things a Dodge Ram 2500 pickup truck! Her father borrowed it today to go to a swap
meet to get rid of some junk, two white kayaks, and old water skis, for
examples, and to get new junk, according to Sam, like better color coordinated
kayaks. I would like to meet her father,
who I already think highly of, since he has the framed waterfowl stamp art work
on the wall and a portrait that Sammy did of his favorite retriever on the
wall. He used to go bird hunting twice a
week, but now goes fishing instead, with frequent trips out for salmon. He had posted a world map on the wall here,
and put into it two pins—to the surprise of Sammy—one in Ladakh and one in
Curacao, where his other daughter is married to a Caribbean Dutchman. He might like the stories of my Alaskan
salmon fishing which I had hoped to deliver to Sammy, but for the fact that
this packet for her is also in the bags not yet arrived.
Jigmet is
accompanied by another Ladakhi friend named Jigmet also. “Jimmie” is the name I had used for Sammy’s
future husband when I had met with him frequently in Leh and on our
expeditions, as the son of the Chief Medial Officer in Ladakh—to which they
will be going for six months beginning in July after here June 6 osteopathy
graduation. She talked with me about the
future and what she would like to do that might include a stint in some other
part of the world than her frequent trips to India, and I showed her the map,
told the stories, and had her look over the computerized slide show of the
travels through Malawi and other parts of the world in my laptop. She might also like to go to Alaska
for residency, an ideal one being the program I know run
by Hickel, the son of the former governor of Alaska
and later the Republican Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel. I had worked with him in Raleigh
Fitkin Memorial Hospital
in Manzini Swaziland,
where he had been for many years before going home to Alaska. I will write letters introducing her to see
if we can work that out, as well as recommend the Providence
Hospital residency in Anchorage
to which I had gone for lectures. Both
her father and I will make a frequent visit there if we know we can see her
progress and to hunt and fish salmon at the same time! Her mother is raising grapes on a ranch along
the Russian River, and her step-mother, Flicka, is a renowned opera star on the
world stage with a schedule for the next three years around which they are
trying now to arrange the visit to Leh and the three day wedding festivities in
which I would surely participate if I were there this summer, as I had been
each of the last five. Flicka had
corresponded kindly with Virginia
when she was working on her doctorate in doing some research. A friend John Keggae will be coming to Tahoe
after I leave the chalet on Monday; he wrote the music for the opera “Dead Men
Walking.”
The second
Jigmet is a Ladakhi from Leh who really had not know Jimmy in Ladakh, but they
met here in San Francisco where he
is in the MBA program at San Francisco
State. He started four years ago in Computer
Science, when the boom in the tech bubble had just begun to burst, so he has
remained in the MBA program. He will
return to Leh this June, and will see the wedding festivities there which I may
have to miss.
When Sammy
and I had last left, meeting in the lobby of the government Guest house in
Chandrigarh two years ago, she and Jigmet were planning a fall wedding in Tahoe
for which Virginia and I were planning attendance, but Sammy became ill, and
was hospitalized for what looked like appendicitis. All these plans were put into some kind of
fluid “hold” knowing that there would be a future Indian celebration (? “Monsoon Wedding?”).
More recently, Sammy was ill again, this time with an arrhythmia known
as WPW (“Wolf Parkinson White”) for
which she was hospitalized in John Muir hospital in San Francisco and a woman
cardiologist did a radiofrequency ablation of the aberrant cardiac conduction
bundles while Sammy was given only a mild sedative. This was an important treatment given one
other problem that Sammy has, and that is allergy to bee stings for which
epinephrine is the treatment, contraindicated in WPW when the heart speeded up
by epinephrine might fibrillate. Now
that she has had this treatment, I will make out an Rx for her to carry the
Epi-Pen or the Ana-Kit
I am
looking out over that magnificent mountain scene over the blue Lake Tahoe from
the deck with the always-100* hot tub at my side, fretting over the sight of
two young women running up hill in shorts and halter tops, along the same route
I should be taking if I were able to do so, with a full weekend of time
available for such activities yet without the gear I had packed along to do
so. Bummer! Well, I may have to resort to further
Discovery Channel re-runs and the one video I had seen here which I was going to
see at sometime when available, “Fly Away Home” which I had been told was filmed
at the Airlie Swan Preservation project “Swanfall.”