Reading+Reflections



__My Sister's Keeper__ Pages 1 -72
 * ​Reading Reflections**
 * During this section I was not particularly fond Cambell. It bothered me that he was using Anna's case to get ahead in his career. It was a very hard thing for Anna to do, to come to him with such a difficult goal (medical emancipation) in mind. Cambell did not consider how difficult this case would be because it would be between a girl and her parents when he took the job. I think he should have given Anna advice and sent her to a counselor perhaps, instead of throwing the family straight into a lawsuit, especially because Anna had never discussed the issue with her parents.

__My Sister's Keeper__ Pages 73-139
 * I am enjoying this book alot, it seems to be one of my favorites. I am happy that Cambell is changing and trying to get to know Anna. I am not sure how i feel about Sara because I feel bad for her since she has to take care of Kate. But at the same time I don't sympathsize for her during the trial because she brought this burden on herself for never including Anna in any medical dicision making. I cant wait to read what happens next in the book because it seems Anna may change her mind about the lawsuit after her latest visit to her sister in the hospital.

__My Sister's Keeper__ Pages 140-240
 * While reading this I feel Brian did the right thing by taking Anna to the station and letting her stay there with him. It let her get away from her mother and find out how she truly feels about the lawsuit without any other influence. However she still doesn't have a good grasp on her true feelings, which bothers me. Telling Cambell one thing and telling Julie another thing is annoying. I am starting to sympathsize for Sara slightly more during this section because she has been through alot. One of her daughters was basically taken away from her and she needs to be with her other daughter all the time because she is sick. I realize that it was Sara's fault that Anna left but now she has to care for Kate and work on gaining Anna back. I like Jesse because even though both his parents ignore him he keeps his own life going. It is also good that he helps Anna when she needs the help that only he can provide.

__My Sister's Keeper__ Pages 240-340


 * Brian was the character I favored most in this section of the novel. I thought it was brave of him to stand up to his wife and tell her that he would defend Anna in court. He has always done what he thought would be easiest and would help everyone out in the long run, but this time he is taking a different route and standing up for what he truly believes. Cambell has me torn about what to feel about his character. On one hand he is a selfish guy who sleeps with the guardian ad litium of his case and on the other hand he is this nice, sensitive man who is starting to warm up to Anna even more. I was happy when i found out that Brian figured out Jesse was the one starting all the fires. This is because it finally gave Jesse the opportunity to show his Dad how he felt about his sister's illness and how it was affecting him.

__My Sister's Keeper__ Pages 341- 423 (end)
 * I found the end of this book really sad. It was sad because, of course Anna dies, however I think she died happily. My reasoning is because she won her case by finally being able to convey her feelings to her parents, and she got to give her sister a chance at life. The whole family seems to have fallen back into the routine of greiving. Sara is in denial because she is crying all the time. Brian is in depression because, just like he did when Kate was sick, he is working all the time in order to displace his greif. Kate has reached a stage of acceptance because she knows she will always have her sister with her. Lastly I would like to reflect on Cambell's seizure. I think it was a good thing for his secret to come out, everyone needed to know it because otherwise it would have stayed as a constant tension between him and the world. In his and Julia's relationship they can now stay together because he has changed into a less selfish and more social person due to his secret being revealed.

__Hiroshima__ Chapter 1
 * This book seems like it will be interesting. I like how it is giving all the different vantage points of the bombing. The fact that everyone was going about their daily lives when huge bomb fell and flattened their buildings and killed so many people is astonishing. Just imagine what it would be like if a bomb fell while you were sitting here, right now at your computer. Its a weird feeling, you are totally unprepared and a person has to think quickly because it could mean life or death, for yourself and, in the the book, for the children. I was thinking that same thing (what if a bomb fell now) while reading the book.

__Hiroshima__ Chapter 2
 * I was happy to see that Dr. Sasaki started to help others after the bomb hit. Its great that he realizes that he has this knowledge of medicine that others don't therefore he needs to help the severly wounded, after he helps the severely wounded then he can help the people who are not as hurt as they are. The other person I am starting to like in this book is Father Kleinsorge. Father Kleinsorge also tries everything to do the right thing for others however he realizes at the right moment when you must let go. For example when he was called to help the woman find her husband under her burning house; there was no way he could find the man in time to save his life therefore he just gave his condolences to the woman and he went to help the others. He may have died in the effort to find the husband. Father Kleinsorge was also a great man when he saved many of the people from the fire by ferrying them across the river. This took alot of determination to do, condisering he had to move 5 dead men out of the boat before he could use it, and it took alot of energy to keep paddling but he did it and alot of people were very greatful.

__Hiroshima__ Chapter 3
 * This chapter was very well written because it gave the reader a very good view of what the actual bombing was like for the civilians. The Kataoka children are a good example of this because they have been seperated from their mother for a long time and it took quite an emotional toll on them, fortunatly for them they did get reunited with their family. Father Kleinsorge also showed how tragedy changes a person. This was when he saw the soldiers whose eyes had melted, even though it made him slightly queezy it made him realize how if he would have seen something like this before the bomb landed, he would have most definetly had a worse reaction. About Miss Sasaki's leg, I think some doctors can do more for her they just are tending to more needier patients before her and when they see something is terribly wrong with her they pass her off to the next doctor.

__The Sea and Poison__
 * The character I liked the most in this book was Surguro. This is because he always tried to do the right thing. He tried to help the old lady in the ward in the beginning of the novel but he inevitably could not. He was trying to help the surgeons by doing the vivisection however when it came down to actually performing the operation, he had to do what was morally right and not hurt the prisoner. He was also not involved with any adultrey or hatred or sinful acts, like Ueda and Toda were. Surguro kept himself clean and always did what he thought was right even if he lived to regret it later. Surguro's life seemed to work out ok because later in life he gained great experience and now has his own clinic.

__The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat__
 * The disembodied lady seems to have a very tough life. It is hard to imagine being without proprioception. Her way of coping was great. It was good news to hear that she found a way that she can watch her body move therefore moving her way. She can take public transportation and go places on her own, when before all she could do was sit as a puddle and have other people feed her.

__The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat__
 * Phantoms seems like a disease you would either really love or really hate. It would be good to have for example, if you got your leg amputated you would want to have the feeling that it was still there so that your brain would think of the prostetic one as a real leg. It would be bad if you lost a finger and everytime you went to use your hand you would not be able to control the finger you lost. It seems like a disease a person could live with and eventually adapt to, just like the disembodied lady did. The man in the book who slapped his thigh-stump had a way of dealing with it, he would slap his thigh-stump down until his phantom leg woke up and only then would he put his prostetic leg on.

__The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat__
 * The chapter Murder was about a man named Donald who killed his girlfriend while under the influence of PCP. The twist about this story is that he does not remember anything about the murder. He was convicted and spent 4 years in a institution for the criminally insane despite doubts about weather he was a criminal or insane. While on parole from the institute, he is riding his bike and gets in an accident and gets a severe head injury. It was after this that he began getting nightmares and started to remember the murder he had commited. When I read this I was amazed because I could not believe something like that could happen to a person. It sounds like it would be a good movie instead of a case study.

__The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat__
 * The young girl from A Passage to India seemed to had a really bad disease for a young person. I would see something like that happening to an older person but not a 19 year old. Every time the nurse or doctor had to wake her from her "dreams" they must have felt so horriblei That is, especially after she told them she was on her way home because she was dying. At least in the end she died in peace.

__The Yellow Wall-Paper__
 * In the first few pages of the reading it seems to be like the wife is clueless into the reason she is coming to this place. I believe the reader gets this feeling because the book is written in the voice of the wife. For reasons like, she could not have the bedroom she wanted, leads the reader to think that she thought they were just moving. John told his wife that they came there on her account and that she must take the nursery uptairs as her bedroom because that gives her the perfect rest and all the air she could get. The reader knows better than to believe this but the woman does not.

__The Yellow Wall-Paper__
 * As the reading continues it seems that the narrator begins to get clued in that she is here to get better. She know that John is keeping her here to get better and that she is restricted to what she can do until she gets better. For example John said when she gets alot better they will have Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit. This gets her excited and gives her something to look forward to. Telling her this is a hard decision because on one hand you can tell her to give her a reason to get better. The con to telling her is now she may get depressed that they aren't coming.

__The Yellow Wall-Paper__
 * This woman has come to a conclusion that there is a woman stooping down and creeping behind pattern on the yellow wallpaper in her room. She has convinced herself of this to a degree that this woman is creeping in the pattern and at night she actually shakes the pattern. The main character gets out of bed at night to see if the paper is moving because of the creeping woman's shaking. When she does this it forces her and her husband to talk about her condition and them staying here in the country. She wants to leave because at this point I think the woman in the paper is freaking her out, however John is convinced that she still needs to stay to get herself better. She needs to sleep as much as she can.

__The Yellow Wall-Paper__
 * At the end of the reading the main character becomes completly obsessed with this creeping woman in the yellow wallpaper. She convinces herself by the end of the reading that the creeping woman is herself. The last night that they are staying in the house she says she is helping the woman get out from behind the bars of the wallpaper and she rips off alot of the paper from the walls. Jennie finds her and thinks nothing of it. She thinks she is just destroying it because it was so hideous. When left alone again she keeps ripping and ripping until all the paper that she could reach was off the walls. She said then that she could creep throughout the room now and could fit her shoulder in the smooch on the wall. When John sees his wife in her pile of wall paper and when she says to him, she has peeled off most of the paper in spite of him so he can never put her back, I thought to myself that he must be thinking she has been getting alot worse instead of better all along.

__The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time__
 * What a crazy twist! Mrs. Alexander told Christopher about his mother's affair. I agree that it is best Christopher's father not know that Christopher has this information. If he had wanted him to know about the affair he would have told him about it himself. Maybe the father will still tell him the truth. Hopefully Chistopher doesn't show any signs that he knows something thing.

__The Curious Incident of The Dog in The NIght-Time__
 * I was very happy once Christopher noticed the black boxes in the train station. HIs being scared and acting strange was upsetting him and all of the people who tried to help him. This also got him confidence to get onto a train. If this never would have happened and Christopher had never reasoned about the big central computer, he would never have gotten the life he has today. The end of the book was perfect according to me.

__The Hot Zone__
 * I got so upset when I read about the nuns in Yambuka hospital and their five syringes. They would only occasionally rinse the syringes and these were used on hundreds and hundreds of people throughout the day! This was done to remove the blood on the needle, the only reason this was done was because of the visible uncleanliness. Any person who got stuck with that needle between rinsings was vulnerable to any virus that spreads by bodily fluids. When the schoolteacher went to the hospital to get his injection, it was the fault of the nuns that the people behind him in line had a much higher chance of catching Ebola. This was due to their airborne exposure and their now sharing of bodily fluids.

__The Hot Zone__
 * It is facinating to hear how the ebola and marburg virus work. Once it gets in the body the virus multiplies so rapidly the infected cells become crystal-like blocks packed of virus. These "bricks" are first near the center of the cell and as they move toward the surface and reach the cell wall they start to discintegrate into hundreds of individual virus particles. These particles puch through the cell wall and get into the blood stream of the host where now they have access to all the cells in the body. This virus now starts to cling to cells everywhere and continues to multiply and form bricks. This continues until a droplet of the host's blood contains a hundred million virus particles. It just seems so smart of the virus to be able to cling to the cells and just start using them as a way to continue their infection process.

__The Hot Zone__
 * The expedition made by Gene Johnson and his crew was a good idea as a chance to make progress toward finding the roots of marburg. I was impressed with the ideas the crew came up with such as leaving monkeys and guinea pigs in cages surrounded by electrified wire along the way in Kitum Cave. Also collecting bugs/insects and marking their path was a smart idea. It was a shame that the scientists could not test the larger animals from the area to see if they had already been infected however they must be realistic, it is extremely difficult to collect elephant blood. It was a shame that they got no signs of marburg from that trip.

__The Hot Zone__
 * Tom Geisbert was the intern disecting the monkey cells from the monkey O53 who died in room F of the quarentine facility. The suspected diagnosis was simian hemorhagic fever. The morning after his Thanksgiving hunting trip he came in and found evidence it was a filovirus, possibly marburg. When he found this out he got very scared and started taking pictures of the cells with the electron microscope. Geisbert reacted most likely similarly to how I would have. He automatically ran into the dark room and thought back to his past experience with the virus such as smelling/ inhaling it, just like I would have. He was thinking things such as, Did I have a headache yesterday? Do I have a headache now? Did I snap the cap?