Progress Report

Hello all,
School is going well. It's hard adjusting after four months off, but it's getting easier, very, very slowly. I am not at all a morning person so that is the hardest part right now.
I went to a seminar tonight on palliative care. I found it informative, personally and professionally. It seems that medicine is making progress too albeit at a snail's pace in some respects. In the 1960's, the one speaker said, women who had lost babies were not allowed to see them. Neither were women who were giving them up for adoption. The idea was that it would be easier on the mother that way. We know now that that only leads to a life of eternal torment for many parents who regret not seeing and making real the child they had carried and come to love. Under the same philosophy, people who were terminally ill were secluded and pushed away. It seems like they thought somehow that not seeing a person whether elderly or very young made them somehow not exist and therefore their loss negated. What this did though, to the detriment of everyone who cared for the person, was negate the pain and grief that their loved ones felt by denying the lost individual their personhood, the fact they existed, were loved, felt, touched others and had lives. I'm glad that medicine has come to understand the flaws of this kind of thinking, but there so much more progress to be made.
In other news, one student in the new class may have left already. I'm hoping it's not too late to help her stay. Wish me luck.
*UPDATE - She's already gone AND been replaced. How's that for efficiency? *shakes head at insensitive program* Not that they shouldn't have filled the spot, but man, they could do so much more to support us sometimes, even if it just means asking other students for help. I thought about setting up peer counselling at one point...maybe I should look into it.