My advanced training was in bio-medical anthropology. I had some sub-specialties, but that was my primary training.

A great deal of my training involved working with western medical practitioners and help them more efficaciously treat those patients who were not from a Western bio-medical background. (Hispanic migrant workers and Native Americans, particularly.) This also meant I was trained in non-Western bio-medical health systems. And I was taught to share this information with ye olde doctors and nurses, etc. so they could do their jobs better.

Whilst I was in grad school, the woman who had been my adviser through my undergrad and grad years developed breast cancer. She had to have a mastectomy during the spring break of my last semester.

One day I ran into some good friends of Rice's and mine. (And, damn them, they have moved away, like all the cool friends do. The wife, whom I really, really like a great deal, was an oncology nurse and it turned out my adviser and major prof. was a patient of hers. Now, keep in mind at this time that some of the current health information acts were not currently an issue, but still there was a bit of a breach of confidentiality here.

My friend told me my adviser was a patient of hers (no surprise there, actually), and that they were having a horrible time with her. They didn't know what to do with her. They didn't understand her personality and her culture. (The adviser was from Minnesota/Wisconsin, which does, actually, have a different culture than S.E. Idaho. Promise. And there were other cultural issues.)

I listened to my friend and her concerns. I told her I knew exactly what she was talking about, and then I explained my adviser's personality AND discussed a good deal of how she behaved was related to her culture. This half of what I would have done in a professional setting. Usually I would have spent some time with the patient, but at this point I'd spent a great deal of time with this woman. Hundreds of hours, probably.

My friend noted that my adviser would die from cancer. She may beat it now, but it would get her sooner or later. She said she had been in the profession long enough that to have gotten "that feeling" -- the intuition to know when a patient was going to make it or not. I have heard healers talk of such instincts before, and I knew her well enough to know she didn't just say things like this.

Happily enough, later, after my adviser had died, my friend told me that my adviser had actually become one of her most favorite patients ever. She came to adore her, and what I had told her had helped the practice deal with my adviser more effectively so that it was a much better experience for all of them.

My adviser died during the spring break of 2003 from cancer.
I still miss her all the time. I can't tell you how many times a month I wish I could e-mail her to ask a question or share some new epiphany or to discuss knew anthropological discover (e.g. the so-called Hobbit Man).

But the irony: My adviser taught me to be an anthropologist, she provided a great deal of my bio-medical anthropological training, and in the end I used what she taught me to help her with her medical care.

She was also very encouraging with my academic writing. She was a woman who had no issue with telling you exactly what she thought, and she didn't give praise lightly. She would praise what I had written, praise it highly. And these comments of hers were very influential when I started considering writing as a huge time suck.

I wonder what she would say to the fact that I've been writing fiction instead of non-fiction? :) She was very much the left-brained scientist sort...

She gave me a great deal, and there have been many times that I wished I could have done something for her, and it just occurred to me, whilst doing dishes and cooking Rice's turkey and dumplings, and snacking on edamame that perhaps I did do some good as far as she was concerned.

Moral: What goes around comes around.