TAKEPLACE

ACCUSATIVE ABSOLUTE IN GREEK

2011-07-26T14:31:00.000-04:00

I will not bear a double sorrow, when I may bear but one. They were cheering each other on, it being impossible by night to communicate by any other means. Atoning in turn blood with blood, since it is this blood-guilt that shakes the city. But brother they disregard, on the ground that friends are made from among their fellow-citizens not from brothers.When this happens great distress comes upon the E. While both divisions had decided to retire, but there was no definite arrangement, the M. started off home.

IT WILL BE SEEN IN EXAMPLE 3

2011-07-26T13:59:00.000-04:00

C. pitched camp about three miles from the H. camp. at about 400 paces from that point. The truce shall be valid for a year. Always, by day and night, all chances wait upon us. Whom I had previously indicated as likely to arrive at that hour. You were quaestor fourteen years ago.

SO IMPATIENT

2011-07-26T13:44:00.000-04:00

A bunch of virgins standing with momma i hope your tired of waiting b/c i know i am ; !!!

THIS SWEET COMING

2011-07-26T13:10:00.002-04:00

Plataea is seventy stades distant from Thebes. Caesar advanced a three days' march. Thus having deigned to reveal thyself to me in this sweet coming. Having wandered over all this foreign land. Marcellus said that it would be to the detriment of Rome if he left Hannibal by so much as a single step.

SHE KNEW HIS NAME WAS TOHAMS STONE

2011-07-26T13:06:00.000-04:00

A cross next to the name she took as a sign the patient had succumbed. She found eleven notebooks filled with an economical handwriting with slashing downstrokes, the text dancing just above the lines and obeying no margin save for the edge of the page. For an outwardly silent man, his writing reflected as unexpected volubility. Eventually she found a clean undershirt and shorts. What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books? Turning him first this way and then that, she changed the sheets beneath him and then dressed him. She knew his name was Thomas Stone because it was inscribed inside the surgical textbook he'd placed at his bedside. In the book she found little about fever with rash, and nothing about seasickness.

S HERO'S INJURY

2011-07-26T11:55:00.000-04:00

By evening he was worse. Sister Mary Joseph Praise brought sheets, towels, and broth. Kneeling, she tried to feed him, but the smell of food triggered dry heaves. His eyeballs had sunk into their orbits. His shriveled tongue looked like that of a parrot. She recognized the room's fruity odor as the scent of starvation. When she pinched up a skin fold at the back of his arm and let go, it stayed up like a tent, like the buckled deck. The bucket was half full of clear fluid. He babbled about green fields and was unaware of her presence. Could seasickness be fatal, she wondered. Or could he have a forme fruste of the fever that afflicted Sister Anjali? There was so much she did not know about medicine. In the middle of that ocean surrounded by the sick, she felt the weight of her ignorance.

(i)

2011-07-26T07:41:00.000-04:00

Among the Calangute's passengers was a young surgeon-a hawkeyed Englishman who was leaving the Indian Medical Service for better pastures. He was tall and strong, and his rugged features made him look hungry, yet he avoided the dinning room. Sister Mary Joseph Praise had run into him, literally, on the second day of the voyage when she lost her footing on the wet metal stairs leading up from their quarters to the common room. The englishman coming up behind her seized her where he could, in the region of her coccyx and her left rib cage. He righted her as if she were a little child. When she stuttered her thanks, he turned beet red; he was more flustered than she by this unexpected intimacy. She felt a bruising coming on where his hands had clutched her, but there was a quality to this discomfort that she did not mind. For days thereafter, she didn't see the Englishman.

DISSOLVED

2011-07-25T22:08:00.000-04:00

By the second night, after ten hours of such close and meditative reading, Sister Mary Joseph Praise suddenly felt print and page dissolve; the boundaries between God and self disintegrated. Reading had brought this: a joyous surrender of her body to the sacred, the eternal, and the infinite.

E

2011-07-25T21:56:00.000-04:00

She and Sister Anjali secluded themselves in their cabin, bolting the door against men and sea. Anjali's ejaculatory prayers startled my mother. The ritualized reading of the Gospel of Luke was Sister Anjali's idea; she said it would give wings to the soul and discipline to the body. The two nuns subjected each letter, each word, line, and phrase to dilatatio, elecatio, and excessus-contemplation, elevation, and ecstasy!

CARMELITEN

2011-07-25T21:45:00.000-04:00

My mother was God-fearing and churchgoing; in high school she came under the influence of a charismatic Carmelite nun who worked with the poor. My mother's hometown is a city of five islands set like jewels on a ring, facing the Arabian Sea. It was a good thing her parents didn't know that she was also a nurse, which to them would mean that she soiled her hands like an untouchable!

ALL ABOARD

2011-07-25T14:34:00.000-04:00

This ship wasn't meant to carry passenger, but the Greek Captain did just that by housing "paying guests." There were many who would travel on a cargo ship to save on passage, and he was there to oblige by skimping on crew. So on this trip he carried two Madras nuns, three Cochin Jews, a Gujarati family, three suspicious-looking Malays, and a few Europeans, including two French sailors rejoining their ship in Aden.

SAINTLY AMMA

2011-07-25T13:53:00.002-04:00

It was 1947, and the British were finally leaving India; the Quit India Movement had made the impossible come about. Saintly Amma slowly let the air out of her lungs. It was a new world, and bold action was called for, or so she believed!

CHOCOLATE

2011-07-25T13:09:00.001-04:00

i don't pretend to know anything, whether there is a wife waiting for me, or if there is anyone waiting at all, i just hope there are some incredable woman to share and explore the rest of our lives together whether it's one to infinity i have love for all of you, i just want to feel that love already!

THROUGH STUPES AND POULTICES, LINIMENTS AND DRESSINGS, CLEANSING AND COMFORT COMES CHRIST LOVE

2011-07-25T12:52:00.000-04:00

The two young nuns-her brightest and fairest-were to be the torchbearers: Indians carrying Christ's love to darkest Africa-that was her grand ambition. In her papers, she reveals her thinking: Just as the English missionaries discovered when they came to India, there was no better way to carry Christ's love than through stupes and poultices, liniments and dressings, cleansing and comfort. What better ministry than the ministry of healing? Her two young nuns would cross the ocean, and then the Madras Discalced Carmelite Mission to Africa would begin.

FOR THE SECRET OF THE CARE OF THE PATIENT IS IN CARING FOR THE PATIENT

2011-07-25T12:30:00.000-04:00

What U owe Shiva most is this: to tell the story. It is one my mother, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, did not reveal and my fearless father, Thomas Stone, ran from, and which I had to piece together. Only the telling can heal the rift that separates my brother and me. Yes, I have infinite faith in the craft of surgery, but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed. To begin at the beginning...

ALL IN A DAYS WORK

2011-07-25T12:25:00.000-04:00

Twin brothers, we slept in the same bed till our teens, our heads touching, our legs and torsos angled away. We outgrew that intimacy, but I still long for it, for the proximity of his skull. When I wake to the gift of yet another sunrise, my first thought is to rouse him and say, I owe you the sight of morning.

TIME TO PAY DUES R-E-S-P-E-C-T

2011-07-25T12:17:00.001-04:00

Some nights the crickets cry zaa-zee, zaa-zee, thousands of them drowning out the coughs and grunts of the hyenas in the hillsides. Suddenly, nature turns quiet. It is as if roll call is over and it is time now in the darkness to find your mate and retreat. In the ensuing vacuum of silence, I hear the high-pitched humming of the stars and I feel exultant, thankful for my insignificant place in the galaxy. It is at such times that I feel my indebtedness to Shiva.

BORN IN AFRICA GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY

2011-07-25T12:04:00.000-04:00

Born in Africa, living in exile in America, then returning at last to Africa, I am proof that geography is destiny. Destiny has brought me back to the precise coordinates of my birth, to the very same operating theater where I was born. My gloved hands share the space above the table in Operating Theater 3 that my mother and father's hands once occupied.

SHIVA DOESN'T SPEAK IN METAPHORS OR FABLES

2011-07-25T12:00:00.001-04:00

According to shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. Fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for out profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

PRAISE STONE FOR DR. SHIVA

2011-07-25T11:55:00.000-04:00

Dr. Shiva Praise Stone-to seek him out, to find his reflection in the glass panel that separates the two operating theaters, and to nod my thanks because he allows me to be what I am today. A surgeon.

ACCUSATIVE OF PART CONCERNED

2011-07-24T19:33:00.000-04:00

Thou art blind-ears, mind, eyes alike. Handsome body, kind of heart. The women are dressed in linen smocks, with both forearm and upper arm bare.

ACCUSATIVE OF MANNER AND EXTENT

2011-07-24T18:05:00.002-04:00

Do you from where you stand answer instead of them!

INTERNALS OF AN ANGEL

2011-07-24T00:51:00.000-04:00

I'm ashamed of our human capacity to hurt and maim one another, to desecrate the body. Yet it allows me to see the cabalistic harmony of heart peeking out behind lung, of liver and spleen consulting each other under the dome of the diaphragm-these things leave me speechless. My fingers "run the bowel" looking for holes that a blade or bullet might have created, coil after glistening coil, twenty-three feet of it compacted into such a small space. The guy that has slithered past my fingers like this in the African night would be now reach the Cape of Good Hope, and I have yet to see the serpents head. But I do see the ordinary miracles under skin and rib and muscle, visions concealed from their owner. Is there a greater privilege on earth?

ADDIS ABABA

2011-07-24T00:32:00.000-04:00

Knives are flashing and rocks and bullets are flying, and when I feel as if I am standing in an abattoir and not in Operating Theater 3, my skin flecked with the grist and blood of strangers. I remember. But you don't always know the answers before you operate. One operates in the now. Later, the retrospectoscope, that handy tool of the wags and pundits, the conveners of the farce we call M&M-morbidity and mortality conference-will pronounce your decision right or wrong. Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.

REMEMBERING HIS WORDS ON FULL-MOON NIGHTS IN ADDIS ABABA

2011-07-23T16:01:00.000-04:00

I followed. "Dr. Stone," I said, using his title thought I longed to cry out, Father! "An operation is his only chance," I said. In my heart I knew the chances was infinitesimally small, and the first whiff of anesthesia might end it all. My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently, as if to a junior colleague rather than his son. "Marion, remember the Eleventh Commandment," he said. "Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient's death."