Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Pleasure of Meeting Dr. Barry

         The other day I had occasion to visit the emergency department at our local hospital. There are about twenty doctors who staff the department twenty-four hours a day seven days a week.

         So it was a real treat to have Dr. Barry drop in to see me. Why Dr. Barry a special treat? Well Barry was a former student of mine in junior high school.

         Now whenever I meet a former student I truly enjoy the contact. I knew that Barry was an emergency physician and that he worked in the local hospital. However, I had never bumped into him. I hadn't seen him since he left the junior highschool. Barry is now 40 so it's been awhile since I've seen him. I had kept bumping into his parents so I kept up with Barry's whereabouts.

         I remember Barry as a quiet, bright and  pleasant person. I had Barry for language arts which probably wasn't his favorite subject since if he was moving toward medicine I would think he would like science. I remember him being an extremely keen student. In those days we still taught spelling. I didn't mind using a few gimmicks. If you got 105%  five times in a row you could miss the next spelling assignment. Barry liked this idea and I think he got 100% all year. I would also bonus assignments that were done above and beyond what was called for at that level. So I didn't have any problem giving kids 11 out of 10 or even 12 out of 10. Barry could think ahead so he asked me if his average was over 100% would it show on his report card? So you see that he was not just bright but keen.

      So we had a little visit the other day which I enjoyed. I was also looked after very competently...probably 110%!

      Now you can see what happened to me. There was spontaneous bleeding in my eye. I had the same thing about 10 years ago and I thought that's what I had now but I didn't want to self diagnose so that's the reason for my emergency department visit. It's not a serious condition and the blood will absorb in ten days. There is no risk to my eyesight. It's a little hard to look at.