Mary Pat's B&B

Since the mid 80s our family has been staying at Mary Pat's B&B on our visits to Minneapolis. It is run by a friend of our family who gladly lets family and friends stay at no charge. At one point, I believe that Mom had a key so we could use it when she was gone. This former school teacher was always super organized. The towels in the bathroom are labeled with the name of each guest. Prayer requests are taped to the bathroom mirror. All condiments (and paint cans) have the date it had been opened written on them. The den is full of conservative political and Christian reading material. (That refers to two separate categories.) The conversation around the table is always lively as Mary Pat has 101 questions and about that many stories as well.

This weekend my parents came to help Mary Pat get her home ready to be put on the market. It is to be ready for showings tomorrow. Dad came with his tool box and paint clothes and Mom brought her organizational skills. I helped some, making a trip to the thrift store and helping to load boxes that we took to her next home. Mary Pat turned down my offered to quickly take care of the paper clutter in the den by getting a few garbage sacks. I guess she wants to see if she will discover any treasures.

Mary Pat may not have long to live. She's made it past 80 and now has an untreatable cancerous growth. With a smile she declares that she is ready to die. "I've had a good life. I love Jesus and I'm ready to see him." Yet at the same time, she isn't eating sugar to try and keep the cancer from growing and it seems it will take her 10 years to do all that she wants to accomplish.

This afternoon as my parents were loading up the car to return home, Dad asked Mary Pat if she had any need for the large pipe wrench he had found in the basement. She responded with an enthusiastic, "O no. Please take it. It's a very good pipe wrench." As he headed to the car, she turned to me and said, "I used to hold tightly to my possessions. But God is good. He has opened my hands and loosened my grip. Now I am glad to see them go." 

Mary Pat is always been a great example of hospitality and generosity. Now she is also an example of someone who is finishing well. She continues to be transformed and she is ready to both die and live.

Acceptance letter

The great excitement of the week was receiving an email from the University of Minnesota saying that it is their pleasure to offer me admission to their Occupational Therapy class of 2014. Needless to say, it is my pleasure to accept. I am waiting for a few days to respond to see if I hear from St Catherine's where I also applied. 

Both schools make their decisions based on grades, references and an essay. My time volunteering in the OT department at a nearby hospital allowed me to get a good reference from one of the therapists there. The essay was to explain why I selected OT as a career, how an OT degree relates to my immediate and long-term professional goals and how my background will help me achieve my goals. Thanks to the help of my English teacher roommate and an aunt I managed to write the following and get close to fulfilling the 4500 character limit. (My first draft was about half that amount.)

Life has been compared to a story. Everyone’s story is unique and compelling. My life experiences, both the joyful and the difficult, shape who I am today and what I desire in the future.

After growing up in northwest Iowa and attending college in Chicago, I moved to Lyon, France to work with immigrants through a church based organization. After 18 years of learning the language and culture and offering assistance to people who became very dear to me, a mentor challenged me to consider a change because of the growing discontent that I felt. She encouraged me to take a deeper look into my strengths, weaknesses and passions. Did I want to continue writing the same kind of story with my life? I had evaluated these things as a teenager but this time my rich life experience allowed me to see myself more clearly.

The organization I worked with in Lyon sought to provide a place where an immigrant’s culture was respected and they could receive practical assistance and friendship. Besides planning cultural activities for all ages I also visited women in their homes. I enjoyed drinking tea with them as I sought to help them navigate the challenges they faced being away from extended family in a new culture. I tried to help the parents and children understand each other as the parents were often viewed as unwilling to change while the children were seen as becoming too French. I enjoyed these relationships but also wondered if I was really making a difference. Others did not always share the few concrete goals for my position so I found it hard to evaluate my effectiveness.

As I looked back on my work experience I realized I most enjoyed helping people in practical ways. It could be as simple as taking a single mother without a car to the grocery store so she could stock up on heavy items or spending two weeks in Tunisia with a friend after her mother died as she closed up her mother’s house. Someone told her it wasn’t right to allow me to work on my vacation. I didn’t mind the work at all since I was there to help.

I have learned I am a doer, not a talker. Long discussions about an issue lead to impatience as I start itching for some action. I grew up in a farm family that did everything together from cleaning the house to weeding the garden to picking up rocks in the field. Someone described our family as having shoulder-to-shoulder relationships. Maybe that is why I derive the most satisfaction from coming alongside people whether their struggle is relational, financial, physical or emotional, and doing things that will make their life better.  In the process I can get to know them better and hear their story.

Occupational Therapy allows me to combine my love for people with a specific way to help them. Almost everyone who needs therapy is at a point of crisis. For some reason, a stroke, a hip replacement, an accident, this chapter of their story is filled with tension and struggle. As a therapist I will have the skills to help them reach their goals and obtain the best physical and cognitive functioning available to them. I know from watching therapists interact with patients that I will probably have to sit on my hands so my desire to help doesn’t lead me to do things for my patients that they can do for themselves even if it is painfully slow. I also believe that my demeanor and encouragement are an important part of my skill set and can assist patients and their family as they navigate these new challenges.

I enjoy working as part of a team, making an important and valued contribution as we address problems. I don’t want to be in a solitary occupation during the next chapter of my life. As an occupational therapist I will have a shoulder-to-shoulder relationship with a team of medical professionals as well as my patients as we all work toward the same goal.

I have lived happily in a rural community, and in large cities both in the US and abroad. As a result, a particular location for employment is not a requirement.  Wherever therapists are needed, patients are writing compelling stories. The time I have spent volunteering in the OT department at Hennepin County Medical Center has shown me that through an Occupational Therapy career I will be helping one person at a time, in a concrete way. And the best part will be going back each day to learn more about the characters and find out how this chapter in each of their stories will end.

Physiology 101

My only class this semester is physiology. The best part of the class was not having to buy a textbook. The professor promised that everything we needed to know would be in her notes. The section I am in is basically online. We can attend a weekly 90 minute session if we want but after attending twice I decided it wasn't worth the time. So my study time is simply reading our professor's notes and answering some questions. We have a weekly test on Thursday which keeps any of us from falling behind.

I do need to attend a weekly lab which is usually interesting. We were randomly assigned to groups the second week and my group is learning to work together and what is expected of us. This past week we did the experiment we designed using an EEG which looks at brain waves. We were looking at beta waves which are most prevalent when we are awake and paying attention. The theory states that alpha waves are more common when our eyes are closed and beta waves are more common when our eyes are open even if we are trying to see in the dark. We wondered what would happen if we blindfolded our subjects and compared the beta wave frequency of when they were just sitting there and when they were listening to a story. Based on the theory it would seem that beta waves would become more frequent when we focused on listening. In reality the opposite happened. Beta wave frequency actually dropped as we listened to the story. Part of my role in this lab report is to come up with some theories as to why we obtained those results. Hopefully I can find a few reports from similar experiments to help me out. I have an extra week to do the work since this week is Spring Break.

A Week with UPS

When I think of shipping something by air I think of small boxes from Amazon, an envelope with some important paper that needs to quickly arrive at its destination, or something that is perishable. The run up to Valentine's Day with way more flowers than usual and numerous Shari's Berries boxes reminded me that some people have to rely on air to make sure that all important gift arrives on time. One of the pilots said he had never seen so many flowers - even for Valentine's Day. The steady stream of King Cakes petered out with the beginning of Lent.

Day to day reality is a bit different. The most common boxes come from Amazon and Zappos. Every Wednesday and Thursday we see a series of plastic orange containers with the movie of the week. This week it was Dr Seuss. I wonder at the boxes that declare their contents to be "human tissue." Daily there are little boxes of machinery parts that somehow manage to weight at least 30 lbs. Due to my job of making sure the packages are sorted to the right side of the belt I've learned that the large white boxes of liquid genetics go to the hog farms in the Morris area and anything with Chinese printing is headed for Thief River Falls and the Polaris or Arctic Cat factories. Long rolls of fabric are addressed to Brainerd. Every day we see a few irregulars which is anything that isn't in a box or weighs over 70 lbs. The most unusual one that I've seen was 32 car tires all headed to the same destination.

This week added some excitement to our routine. On Wednesday I arrived to see one of the supervisors talking with two men in suits. I figured they were the auditors we have been warned about and hoped they would move on to another belt by the time we actually started. It turns out they were from Wells Fargo whose truck is at the end of our belt. It was a perfect day for them to watch how things work. The items addressed to Wells Fargo are almost all copy paper boxes and they tend to be rather heavy. If there are too many of them on the belt at once, the weight causes the belt to stop. The only way to get it going again is to stack some of the boxes on the side and put them back on when there is a break in the action. However, there was no break in the action on Wednesday. The Wells Fargo boxes just kept coming. There were so many that the weight stopped the belt that feeds our belt. That had never happened before. I've never seen so many supervisors in one spot. Add to it a 124 piece special for Thief River Falls and a 24 piece special for Grand Rapids and a sub at the position across from me and we had quite the morning. I actually worked up a sweat.