Incurably Curious

NEW MUSIC FROM MIA –

Whether you’re someplace that relies on just one kind of banana, or someplace like Puerto Rico with great banana diversity, this fruit is vulnerable everywhere.

There’s a deadly fungus that attacks banana plants. In the past century, an earlier version of this fungus wiped out commercial plantings of a banana variety called Gros Michel that once dominated the global banana trade.

Now history may be repeating itself. A new version of the fungus, called Tropical Race 4, is killing off the Cavendish variety.

Our Favorite Banana May Be Doomed; Can New Varieties Replace It?

At a Tent Theater Near You: Traveling Tent Cinemas of India

Nomadic cinemas travel to remote villages in India, far from fixed-site theaters. Films are shown in large tents, often using makeshift equipment, with the audience seated on the ground. Although India is home to the most prolific movie industry in the world, producing around 800 films a year, it has one of the lowest ratios of screens to population – 13 screens per million people. The traveling cinemas show mixed fare, including regional language films, Bollywood blockbusters and Hollywood movies, but they are facing a fight for survival as DVDs become more easily accessible and cable networks penetrate further into the country.

(World Press Photo, Arts and Entertainment, first prize stories, 2011)

Constellation of 69 bees, the symbol of the Empire and the emblem of the Guerlain family of “Eaux”.

When the movie Suffragette came out in October, critics noticed something off: The film’s struggling women were all white. In fact, one of the most important women in the suffragette movement was an Indian princess, Sophia Duleep Singh. But she didn’t make an appearance in the movie.

“Suddenly there was this sort of tidal wave of outrage from people who were saying, why wasn’t she in the movie?” says Anita Anand, author of the book Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary. “So my first response was, why are you so angry? You hadn’t heard about her until fairly recently.”

Anand herself knew nothing about Sophia until she saw an interesting face in an old magazine photo. “It was black and white, but something about it just told me that this woman was as brown as I was,” she says. “She had the same sort of features as one of my aunties, and I just thought, you know, I’ve been a political journalist for 20 years; how is it that I don’t know about an Indian suffragette?”

Here’s how the suffragette princess disappeared from history.

With ‘Sophia,’ A Forgotten Suffragette Is Back In The Headlines

She was in her 40s. Relatively young compared to the other patients in the ER today, and much more kind than I would have been had I just waited in an emergency department waiting room for three hours.

Like many of the patients, I went to see her without the physician at first. She was excited to be seen by a medical student, and challenged me to figure out why she was in pain. She had been seen by other doctors and “finally” wanted to get to the bottom of this issue.

Her abdominal pain had been off and on for well over two months, from her mid epigastric region to her umbilicus. The pain would come and go at random intervals, sometimes staying for minutes - other times hours. As hard as she thought, she never had been able to figure out exactly what (if anything) brought the pain on, and certainly nothing made it better, including the GERD medications she had recently been prescribed on her last visit to the ER. The only symptom that was always present, she complained, was that she couldn’t eat or drink. She always felt full, and when she did eat (the rare times she had an appetite) she would find herself vomiting or getting very close to doing so. Her exam normal, I briefly told her my plan and went to present her case to the attending.

He wasn’t impressed with her symptoms, for some reason. Not in the slightest. It was a horrible day at the ER, with more patients than we could handle, and I think that made this normally passionate physician much more cold than normal. When we both went to go see her I could tell that she was bothered by his tepid mood. No matter his mood, he still did a thorough exam, and told her we were going to try and figure out what was going on. She got the usual ER workup: Labs, UA, and a CT of her abdomen.

I stayed to answer her questions. I liked her. She was kind, funny, and didn’t seem to mind how overrun we were. Her temperament was a nice change of pace from the day to day ruckus of the emergency department.

She stayed in the back of my mind until I looked at her CT scan several hours later.

Going through the images, I was stopped early on by the mass sitting in the head of her pancreas.

The report came back. A mass in the head of her pancreas, with some abnormal appearing lymph nodes. The doctor commented on the rapport I had built with the patient, and asked how comfortable I was telling her the results. He had no issues telling her himself, but remarked that he felt it was something I could do. We had practiced this before in school, and I couldn’t even recall the amount of times I’d been present for similar conversations in the past. Nervous as hell, I accepted. I felt that it was something I should do, and that my rapport with her would make this easier for the patient.

The walk to her room felt longer than normal. I replayed in my head all the steps we had been taught, all of the suggestions my standardized patients and instructors had given me.

We walked in, and for the first time she finally looked comfortable. I started, and with as much compassion as I could, I told her the truth.

It wasn’t easy for me to have that conversation with her, and for the rest of the shift I couldn’t get the words I had said to her out of my head. Then, I remembered a line from The House of God, “The patient is the one with the disease”. I was not the person who walked into an emergency department one afternoon and walked out with a cancer diagnosis just hours later. I was not the person who’s had drastically changed today. I was not the person who had to ask themselves if they were going to die. As depressed as I might be feeling, I was not the one with cancer. I needed to be able to be there for my patient, and not let her diagnosis prevent me from being present for her. As hard as this conversation was, in my future there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of other conversations just like this one. In all honestly, most of them will be just as heartbreaking. While it is okay to emotionally feel for my patients, I cannot let how I feel get in the way of how I will treat them.