Our Physical Health

Poor diet, lack of exercise, and unhealthy lifestyle choices are responsible for 65% of cancer deaths - American Cancer Society, 06

As a Christian and a Doctor, ahem (ok I'll stop :P) I feel I have to respond to things like these. Our days are counted right? we can't add a day to our lifetime nor an inch to our stature right? So why even worry about things like these? diet? exercise? unhealthy lifestyle choices? Wrong. While we shouldn't lose sleep over these things we should take care of the things God has entrusted us and one of those things is our body. Now I'm not saying that we should go to a gym and hire a personal trainer and have fit abs and whatnot. That is not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that we have to 1. obey our doctors when they tells us we need to lower our cholesterol intake (meaning all that greasy food that loves to stick to our arteries) 2. When they tell us to lower the amount of sweets we eat (all that goody and unhealthy sugary junk we love so much, oh the pancakes with extra syrup! sorry...personal favorite) or eat healthier carbs 3. When they tell us to do some sort of excercise at least an hour a day (remember lazyness is no good, from a Biblical perspective it can even be sinful. The exercise could be something as simple as a walk around the block/park, walking the neighbor's dog/cat/sugarglider/younameit)

So granted we can't add a day to those 10/40/60/90 days the Lord had planned for us to live but we can live out those days in a healthy way, it could even serve to help us practice self control, I know it has helped me. But remember two things:
1. Not to make an idol of your body.
2. What truly matters before the Lord is our spiritual health (meaning don't do one thing at the expense of another).

The Very End

For the past month and a half every 5 days for 24 hours I've had to share my emergency room at Billini with the most unfriendly creatures that have ever existed on the earth since the beginning of time. Yes I have had to share my space, my lunch time, my snacks and even my patients with them. But as of tomorrow they will cease to exist. At least for the next 3 months according to the instructions.
Ah goodbye my dear friends, it is the end, the very end of you. God willing.

Being a Bad Doctor, Being a Bad Christian

Evangelism Adventure of the Day, Wednesday 24th/08

If there is one tough thing doctors must do is tell their patient the bad news that he/she has cancer (of course the toughest yet is telling family members that their loved one has died). Well today while at the hospital in the pre-labour area, we received a patient who was diagnosed as a possible uterine cancer (we're still waiting for the biopsy results). She had been bleeding the day before and even fainted on her way to the 4th floor of the hospital.
She was placed in one of the beds outside the pre-labour area waiting for the doctors to finish writing some orders and things for the medical record before taking her to the 4th floor, where high risk pregnant women and gynecological case are placed.
I stayed by her bedside because we interns are usually the ones who take patients all around the hospital (and of course for my evangelistic agenda which I try to push when possible ;)) she began to cry and I tried to comfort her but what can you say in situations like these? But then I started thinking about my fear of man when trying to preach the gospel and how it relates to what I started writing in this post.
Imagine if I were too afraid to tell my patients that they have a disease or condition that will most definitely take their life, what kind of doctor would I be if I didn't warn them of their disease and the consequence of it, how would I even offer them the cure? Likewise what kind of a Christian would I be if I didn't warn people of the disease we all carry, called Sin, that will most definitely lead them unto destruction in hell for ever? and If I don't warn them of their disease how can I even offer them the cure, the Gospel of Jesus Christ that would save them from an eternity in Hell separated from God?
I'll tell you what kind of doctor I would be, hence what kind of Christian. A bad one and thus an unloving one. And just as patients have entrusted themselves unto us that we may be good doctors and practice good medicine, so has God entrusted unto us His precious Gospel (1 Thessalonians 2:4, 1 Timothy 1:11, ) that we may be good disciples and practice obedience by fulfilling the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20). As Paul once said, woe unto me if I preach not the gospel. (1 Cor 9:16)
With that in mind I realized what a great opportunity to evangelize I had, a divine appointment indeed. So when the docs were done with her medical record, she got on the wheel chair and off we went to the elevator and finally to the fourth floor. I took her to her room, she was the only one there, she settled in and I began talking. I asked her if she was a Christian since I had overheard her say she wanted to glorify God in sickness and health (or something along those lines), she said she wasn't a Christian but she had a lot of faith in God, I asked her if she knew what happened after people died she said she knew very well that there was a judgment day and that there are two options either heaven or hell. I took advantage of what she already knew and explained to her that unless we repent and put our faith in Christ like she said we would all end up in hell. I told her that life is short like a vapor, we're alive today but we don't know if tomorrow may come. She agreed with me and then said that her entire family is catholic (I assumed it was her excuse to reject he gospel, it reminded me so much of my first response to the first time I was witnessed to) and I told her that it didn't matter, that my family is catholic too and I was catholic and went to church and yet lived like the world, but that it wasn't until 2 people, sent by the Lord, explained to me that If I didn't repent I would perish by explaining to me what Christ did on the cross or me and for her, that one that cross he bared all of our sins, died and rose again on the third day beating death and the power of sin so that one day people like her and I, sinners, would have a chance to say "wow Lord what a great Savior!" to apologize and repent and put our faith in Him and be saved; that I was truly saved. Her face began to change, her eyes started to well up in tears.
I kept talking, R (name will be disclosed) I said, you don't know if perhaps the Lord willed for you to be here in this hospital with this disease in this room with me so that you may hear his Gospel and be saved. "Please don't wait another day" I pleaded, at this point she started to cry, I kept insisting and told her she didn't need to go to church to be saved, I explained to her that she could pray right there on her bed, and told her that God's word says that those who call upon the name of the Lord would be saved. (Romans 10:13, Joel 2:32, Acts 2:21, )
It was time for me to go back to my area so I finished our conversation with some last words "Think about what I said and don't wait another day", and a gospel of John tract.
Please pray for her, the Lord knows her name and who she is and her heart. Pray that she may be saved.

"For "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!"" Romans 10:13-15

Why do we sit still?

I'm currently on my last year of med school, i'm on my ob-gyn rotation, I have the privilege of watching little human beings being born and through ultrasounds observe how human beings develop in time inside the mother's womb.
This little human being
that you are seeing in the picture with her little face and tiny arms and legs and little body,

this human being is 24 weeks old, and weights 500 grams. Now this little girl will probably not make it because she was born in this country, in that hospital which is not fully equipped to handle babies at such a young age. And they're going to tell me that her best option is death? The worst part is there are charlatans bold enough to approve the murder of children at her age and older outside the womb(not in my country though abortion is illegal thank the Lord).
Honestly now how distorted and misplaced are people's line of thinking, although we shouldn't be surprised because their thoughts are under the slavery of sin.
It truly is the answer to Jeremiah, an if this(and more):

"Why do we sit still? Gather together; let us go into the fortified cities and perish there, for the LORD our God has doomed us to perish and has given us poisoned water to drink, because we have sinned against the LORD.
We looked for peace, but no good came; for a time of healing, but behold, terror."

is what befell the people of Israel whom Jeremiah was warning, God's wrath, we can only expect God's wrath to befall those who approve of such a heinous act, my hope is they (especially the Christians who support abortion) will see their sin in time and repent and put their faith in Christ.

Open Air Preaching

If preaching the gospel aloud inside a hospital counts as open air preaching then I open air preached for the first time in my life yesterday! Glory be to God!!
The first Sunday of every month we go to Robert Reid Children's Hospital to pray for the children and their mother, to evangelize, and give away cookies and juice to children and sometimes to both children and mom. Every Tuesday the week before we have a general meeting in which we pray for the ministry, for everybody who's participating, and if there are special prayer requests we include them in the prayer as well, we discuss which verse(s) we will be sharing with them and Flora, the leader of the ministry, updates us on any child we wanted to follow-up after the last visit.
After much prayer I decided I wanted to preach this time and so last Tuesday when Flora was assigning the different tasks to people, she asked Marisol to preach and since I wanted to be on Marisol's team Flora put me on her team AND made it clear that I was going to be preaching as well with Marisol! I was quite nervous but nodded in agreement. Needless to say I prayed for boldness and courage I also prayed that the gospel would be preached correctly and that souls would be saved. Because I like to write so much I did a little outline on what I would be preaching from the verses we were to be sharing with the people at the hospital.
The verses were, from Romans my all-time favorite, Romans 6:23, 3:23, 5:8, but sometimes things don't go as planned, as Christians we should all know that while we make our plans the Lord we serve is Sovereign, I forgot my outline at home and the notepad I was planning on taking to write down the names of the children I wanted Flora to follow up, but I had read the outline and the verses so many times before that I can safely say the Holy Spirit engraved it in my heart and mind.
We got to the hospital, as usual gathered in a circle on the parking lot and prayed. We divided into teams and divided the cookies and juices in bags so that each team would get a bag of cookies and a bag of juices. Our team got the right wing of the third floor but we ended up taking the left wing, Marisol preached on the first 2 rooms of 12-18 beds and I got the other two rooms. A revival didn't break loose and people didn't fall on the floor crying in repentance but the gospel was preached and the seed was planted, there were a few kids and mothers who seemed receptive I only pray that the may be saved.
The Lord is so good! and I say that because, well its true, this is truly an honor and a blessing to be able to freely preach the gospel without being stoned, mocked, or persecuted. Not only that but we get to glorify God through the preaching of the gospel and souls are saved!
Other things happened at this monthly visit. Because I live in a nation that endorses idolatry and superstition a lot of these mothers or family of the patients have their children wear these red bracelets called Azabache, its basically a red bracelet with a black rock (the azabache) which hangs from it, that supposedly has magical powers and protects against evil spirits (the irony of it) and so it is quite the battle when going to share about Christ to confront these mothers and tell them that it is wrong in the eyes of the Lord, that they're putting their faith in an idol when they should be putting their faith in Christ, and that they're opening doors to the evil spirits those things are supposed to protect their children from. Well during our visit one of the other groups had such an encounter and by the grace of God the mother took the bracelet off of her child, she claimed her mother had put it on her child.
Please pray for the children of this hospital and their families who heard the gospel, pray for their healing and for the ministry I belong to at church, thanks in advanced!

Being a Med Student

So there we were, walking down the parking lot of the very huge, new and pretty Herrera Hospital. All we needed was the music on the background and a space on WB and we could've been the newest hit TV series "Herrera ER". LOL! It felt so great, in case you haven't quite understood yesterday was my first day as an "ER Doctor" at a hospital and the experience was too awesome!!! Being a med student rocks! And for all of you out there who are studying medicine and are thinking twice about it because of what you have to learn, the books you need to read and the countless hours of your life you spend studying it is WORTH IT!!
Yesterday I sutured my first Px and it was wonderful, I was very nervous and I really did not want to do it because I was afraid of doing it wrong but in the end I agreed to. So there I was in the hallway in front of my Px remembering what to do: "Gloves, Instruments, Clean, anesthesia, suture, knot, cut, suture, knot, cut, clean" I could see his foot moving as I inserted the needle into his skin time after time, but to his luck it was a very tiny cut and I only gave him 2 sutures, so after I cleaned all his other wounds and covered them, removed the blanket of the bed, my colleague finished writing his Clinical History, and I finished writing order for and x-ray of my Px's left foot, he went on his way but not before thanking me. It was sweet because he knew it was my first time, and he realized that I didn't know if I was doing it right, but in the end it was all well. The day was not slow at all, a lot of Pxs came in, most of them were car and motor accidents, and just one case of an at-home-accident, a kid who had wounded his left thigh. The saddest case of the afternoon was one of an old man who was run down on the street, the guy who ran him down was decent enough to bring him to the hospital, but shameful enough to abandon him there. All in all it was a great first experience and it makes all the trouble i've been through as a Med Student worth it.