Monthly Archives: October 2011

40 Years after Med School, I am an Author

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I am sitting in style in my room in The Chase Park Plaza musing about my blessings. I am in St. Louis, Missouri for the 40th reunion of my graduation from St. Louis University School of Medicine.

St Louis in the year 2011 is vibrant and celebrating the Cardinal’s victory in the World Series over the Texas Rangers. Hats off to the effort made by Texas. I was swept up in the party last night.

Today I will speak to my former classmates about my heart transplant and my near death experience. A select group of them met last night for French cuisine, and I had French onion soup for the first time in 15 years.

My friends tolerated with interest the stories about my desperate journey through end stage heart failure. The evening capped off with signing several books for dear old friends.

Today I experienced new millennium St. Louis. I toured the Chase Park Plaza Hotel residences at 232 North Kings Highway Blvd. I have always had a passion for Art Deco Architecture, and this hotel residence – recently renovated – offers it all.

In addition, celebrity residents such as Lou Brock and Toni La Russa from the St. Louis Cardinals live there. It is the lap of luxury featuring amenities such as valet parking, concierge services,on site health club/pool and movie theater. It is situated in the midst of the most luxurious residences in St. Louis.

While enveloped in the views of autumn colors and warmed by the bright sun that more than makes up for the 55 degree temperature, I watch with interest the trials of people from New Jersey, New York and New England dealing with the October snowstorm.

Prior to writing this blog I met the president of my graduating class in the lobby of the hotel. He held out the copy of Archimedes’ Claw I signed for him last night. He told me he was totally engrossed in the book and unable to put it down. He said,”I never get a chance to read because I am so busy. But, your book is amazing!”

As a postscript to this blog I want to share that the Graduating Class of 1971 St. Louis University School of Medicine had their reunion tonight and gathered to honor one another. As I listened to their accomplishments I stood in awe and respectful humility. I am glad to have been part of them.

 

What I did with my Second Chance.

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I am a soldier trained professionally to do battle with Death. My art and my skills honed to obsessive compulsive fault in the contest against the will of nature that drains us all to our last breath. In our battle against the entropy of existence fought hard by each of us, I have been groomed by human traditions in scientific method and evidence as a mercenary for hire to assist humanity against the inevitable. I am a doctor of medicine.

Throughout my career I have heard with my own ears stories recounted by patients who have been to and beyond the edge of death and come back to tell about it. They all come back changed and convinced that there is indeed an afterlife and a supreme being. Never have I met a patient equipped with the weapon of scientific detachment commonly used by the warriors against death with whom I share my profession. The weapon needed to shield the doctor from the desperate burden of the knowledge that he can never really win this battle but only slow down and put off momentarily the time when death overcomes all heroics and entropy wins.

To this end I have placed pen to paper to share with you my journey to the other side and the lessons learned there. In telling my story I must relate the details of my inner self, my feelings, my fears, who I am and where I have been and perhaps in the telling of the story I can reach out of the scientific world in which I was trained and explain the spiritual world in which we are destined to exist.

It is said of most medical doctors that they train in their profession for altruistic reasons, fame and fortune, or to fulfill the expectations of their parents. There is another reason. It is so wrapped in the cloak of being human and is often overlooked. That reason is to become armed in a vain attempt to cheat death. That I am sure was one of my most personal causes in the quest for mastering medical science. Doctors essentially are human beings that die just like their patients die.

In some of the future posts in this blog I intend to share with you the compelling thoughts and reasons that drove me to be an author after my heart transplant, I had many false starts and new beginnings in the process of becoming an author. Archimedes’ Claw is not about me but the fruits of my experience.

In the process of crafting the story I wanted to make a statement about strength of character, personal loss, trust, loyalty, failure and redemption. The story line is also about second chances. The central theme is intelligent design based on traditional Christian Theology.

Phidippides and Capt. Caviness, the Modern Marathon Hero

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In 490 BC the Persian army amassed itself outside of Athens on the Plains of Marathon. The Persian Empire was about to attack Europe. Athens was in their path and a man named Phidippides was a hero in one of the greatest turning points in history.

Phidippides was an Athenian soldier and a professional runner. Athenian army generals realizing they were about to be attacked by the massive Persian army sent Phidippides to Sparta to ask for assistance.

He ran 140 miles in 36 hours to inform the Spartans of the impending conflict. The Spartans agreed to join only after a religious holiday was over. Phiddipedes ran back over the same rugged mountainous trail to the Athenian army to give the generals the disappointing news. In spite of this the Athenians including Phidippides marched into the Plains of Marathon and engaged the Persian army by surprise.

Theirs was victory in spite of 4 to 1 odds against them. The Battle ended. The Persians retreated to the sea toward Athens leaving more than 6,000 dead. The Athenian casualties were only 195.

After enduring his round trip 280 mile run and joining the battle all day, Phidippides ran to Athens only 26 miles away to warn the city of the impending invasion.

He paid with his life for his devotion to his patriotic mission and died of exhaustion shortly after delivering the message. The City of Athens was able to defend against the invading Persians. The Marathon race is a memorial to Phidippides heroism.

On October 9th the Chicago Marathon was held and runners from around the world came to compete. Each runner was there, for personal reasons. Captain William Caviness, a firefighter from Greensboro, died just short of finishing the race. He left a wife and two young children. William Caviness too was on a mission. He was running to raise money for IAFF Burn Foundation which helps improve the lives of burn victims. Captain Caviness in the true spirit of a Marathon hero gave his life for a noble cause.

When I researched the history for my book Archimedes’ Claw I became a great fan of ancient Greek heroes. They were thinkers and philosophers, artists, scientists and men of vision and strong character. We owe most of our modern civilization to their legacy. It is inspiring when a modern hero like Captain Caviness rises to their level of greatness in personal achievement.  It is with sorrow that we recognize him posthumously.

Theodore Morrison Homa MD

What has changed in New York City since the Great Depression?

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On a recent visit to One Fifth Avenue to research my novel Archimedes’ Claw, I toured the premier residential skyscraper built in 1927. The Great Depression followed its erection beginning with the Stock Market crash of 1929. Many people lost their lives and their dreams as a result. Could this have come full circle in time?

Candice Bushnell chronicled the essence of this luxury residence in her fifth best seller titled “One Fifth Avenue.”

Ever since I was a young man in New York City I have had a love affair with the architecture of this landmark. Here is what I observed:

  Hauntingly beautiful she walked head up, shoulders back in proud humility. Pushing an old wheelchair, possibly scavenged from the lobby of a local hospital waiting room. Indeed it was marked with some partially scraped off  bar code sticker giving unidentified capital letters followed by the barely readable word “Hos ital” on the right handle bar. It was weighed down heavily with the remnants of a once luxury suite of baggage with the classical trade mark Gucci inscribed everywhere.

Jet black hair flowed down her back almost to her waist and was patiently groomed. She had sheet white skin with long eyelashes and well done make-up, only her running mascara gave an indication of her recent tears.

She wore a new suede coat with sheep skin lining pulled tightly across her ample bodice suggesting perhaps the coat may have been acquired in haste or even stealth. She wore it open in the front, the buttons not reaching on the warn October day. Clearly she valued it and had no room in her luggage to keep it safe. The dress was black with a high neck and fit her well. The trailing hem was as a collection of overlapping black sheer banners that went to ankle length where her stylish outfit became an oxymoron due to the contrast of well worn New Balance walking shoes.

The homeless woman pulled a small white envelope out of her oversized purse and rechecked an address: One Fifth Avenue, NYC. The old invitation was yellow on the edges representing much elapsed time since written. Gilded with margins of gold it was as iconic as the art deco tower which she was attempting to enter.

Gently, with the class one would expect of the doorman of New York City’s prestigious residence, he patiently listened. The uniformed man comforted her with a gentile pat on the shoulder as he politely said no to her request. She turned away from him and began to march slowly behind her wheeled chair conveyance toward Washington Square Park and Greenwich Village.

One could only notice the fresh tear in her eye as she strolled away from the landmark building. The doorman stood at attention until she was out of sight.

 

Will the Neutrino Enable Time Travel?

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I am aware of the recent news about the neutrino. It is compelling to think the Einstein relativity equation and all the subsequent research may be at risk. The bottom line is that the experiment like all evidence based science must be repeated for verification.

At the moment the plausible excuse for the deviation from expected science may be the fact that our equipment used to measure speeds such as light 186,282 miles per second may be a bit off.Technology being imperfect may have resulted in this error.

On the other hand it may now be so much better that the speed of light is a bit faster than the original calculation. In all seriousness if the speed of a neutrino is in fact faster than a photon, we are at the dawn of an entire new science.

Perhaps the Galileo phenomenon of mainstream scientific thought being centrally governed may repeat itself. If that occurs we may see some very serious delay in recognition of the new evidence as pure fact. Textbooks will have to be rewritten and we will find ourselves on the verge of very consequential new science.

I can only hope that science will lead us to new understandings of the universe and the dimensions in which we labor. Certainly time is to date a dimension that has been traditionally assigned a unique direction. That direction being the past proceeds to the future and at any given moment we are at a place in time called “now.”

It is the dream of all science fiction fans that free travel from now to the past or the future be possible. No one has been able to demonstrate that yet. But if it were to occur it would certainly be more plausible to venture into the past than the future.

That is the reason that I demonstrated in my novel Archimedes’ Claw, that the making of an ephemeris was integral to the directional time travel that Finn McGee was to navigate on his journeys. It also became obvious to me that the only real solution to the development of the time travel paradox that has been postulated by many sci-fi theorists, is that if a person in the “now” actually travels back in time and interacts with history the reality of that history will not be observable to that time traveler or his peers. The reason for this effect is that the interaction in the known past must have already been accounted for by the very nature of time travel.

My thoughts on the interesting dilemma of traveling into the future are not yet solidified in my own philosophy and I am sure that theorists who muse about time travel into the future will agree with me that the prospects are wide open.

If we use conventional astrophysics to postulate the possibility of time travel I would have to defer to the real shakers and movers in the field. Stephen Hawking seems to have said it all very succinctly in the book The Brief History of Time. Here he suggests that time travel may be possible if the subject enters a black hole and virtually encounters an event horizon. The chances that the subject will survive such a journey are beyond predictable. Elsewhere he postulates the presence of extremely small wormholes that connect two distinct times and places.

Not being an astrophysicist but a real time dreamer about the possibility of time travel, I prefer to believe that man will someday succeed at such a venture. The issue of Intelligent design comes into play at this juncture, for if you really believe in a Creator with the ability to design the set of rules that govern our universe then that Creator must by definition be outside of the designed universe. Intrinsic to the design of our universe is time. Assuming the Creator has a passion for rules, then the rules of eternity which must be the realm of the Creator must also be learnable.

Man has been given dominion over all of creation. Perhaps that includes, at the will of the Creator, the ability to understand eternity.

Theodore Morrison Homa MD