jjablkowski's blog

Happy 60th birthday to the writers, editors, designers, and all others who create the BC Medical Journal! This journal forms a common bond for the doctors of our province. In addition to presenting valued medical articles, the journal’s humanistic messages come through the often light-hearted editorials, and by way of submissions from my fellow physicians to the Letters, Premise, Good Doctor, and Special Feature sections. These sections offer readers medical history, biographies, comments about medical practice, and even humor.

My beloved wife is in the unreachable depths of her dementia. She often wakes up in the middle of the night with moans and groans of unexplained etiology. She is being looked after by our highly valued caregivers, but her cries do wake me, and my mind goes in all directions before I fall back to sleep. The other night I was tossing and turning and somehow (how?) Rubik’s cube came to my mind. That clever puzzle has always defeated me but its challenge keeps reminding me of the human condition: facing bewildering problems and triumphant intelligence to solve at least some of them.

Recently I have been reading about the not-too-distant future when our toilet tissue will give us a reading on the microbial chemicals in our intestines, with recommendations of foods that we should eat to correct for any imbalance.

A BC Parks Foundation Initiative

With people increasingly glued to phones and computers, a walk in the park might be exactly what the doctor ordered, and on 21 July they’ll be doing more than just ordering it: they are going out there and leading it. Doctors want to send a clear message about how important it is to get outside, and the best way to do that is to go out and share the experience, so 100 doctors and health care providers will be leading Outside & Unplugged walks in 100 parks across the province on 21 July.

Hungarian being my mother tongue, I often wonder about the use of certain words in my adopted English language. With the approach of the summer season, I took interest in the word holiday. In the Hungarian language there is one word for government-ordered and religiously or culturally observed days off, and a different word, equivalent to the word vacation, to describe taking time off from one’s duties.