The fight over a pregnant teenager (or how the pro-lifers won me over, I suppose) 

Let me start by saying that I am officially pro-choice. I vehemently do not want to see abortion become illegal. However, I don’t think I would ever have an abortion, and that is based on my… Read full post »

“Miss Piggy” was a cow who saved the lives of hundreds of (perhaps more than a thousand) other animals. How exactly does a cow save a life? Let me start at the beginning…

In 1994, I was a college undergraduate student hoping to become a veterinarian. Admission to veterinary s… Read full post »

This letter to the editor of The Columbus Dispatch caught my eye during breakfast:

 Election has ruined spirit of Christmas

It was nearly midnight on a Saturday night during my fourth year of veterinary school when she was presented to me.  As part of my emergency medicine rotation, I was working in the after-hours clinic of the university veterinary teaching hospital along with three other classmates, a technician a/… Read full post »

Ohio is an interesting place. Much of the area is rural to small town, but vastly more of the population resides in larger towns and cities. The northern part of the state trends liberal, especially in the northeast corner, and the southern part of the state is very conservative and not unlike… Read full post »

In honor of Halloween…

I have already written about my preschool-age son and his spooky/intriguing ability to talk about death and spirits in a manner unexpected for someone of his age here .

The two unexplainable experiences in my life both happened in old houses on college campuses… Read full post »

I voted this afternoon in Franklin County, Ohio, which is the county in central Ohio containing the city of Columbus. The county contains approximately 1.1 million residents, and 74% were white, 20% black and 4% Asian as of 2006.

For some reason, early voting takes place at one central location… Read full post »

On children and “spirits”…

Ever since my 3-year-old son, Patrick, learned to talk, he has been telling us odd things. It started with his insistence that he saw a man “in the wall… go through the wall,” pointing to the wall over his diaper changing table. H… Read full post »

She was a kindred spirit, a breath of fresh air. I met her when we were both 19 years old, college students transitioning from childhood to young adulthood.

She'd had a lazy eye and a weight problem as a child, and she had to work twice as hard… Read full post »