Legendario! (Legend in Spanish)

Thanks blog owners for giving me a chance to share the books that I've read here 😄

I find it fitting to post my first review here, with a book these lovely ladies loaned to me. I've seen the author's name floating around social media quite a lot, but it did not enticed me enough to pick up his book until he passed away. Silly me. I should have gotten on the band wagon the minute I saw his name! Now, I vowed to collect ALL of his 13 books and also the countless articles he wrote while he was still around. Did I say he was a doctor? Ah yes, a neurologist, a very, passionate one. Not just for his profession and academic interests, but also for people, especially his patients. 

You see I've been stuck in a conundrum of the medical kind and I've been wishing that there are books that could point me on how to be sick and yet not-sick, to see that my life is actually normal in a not-so-normal way, and that despite the condition, I am still a valuable member of the human race. I needed a human face to weird-unexplained-medical-conditions, and for once, Dr Oliver Sacks provided that for me.

The book that I've been gushing about since the last few weeks is titled Anthropologist from Mars, and is a collection of stories of 7 interesting individuals, out of which a few I can identify with. The more I read, the more I see them in me, and also in the people surrounding me. Yes, dear readers, that also includes you!

The more I read, the more I marvel at our brain and it's capacity to land us in extraordinary situations. The more I read, the more I feel that being in grey areas is also OK. Everything need not be black, or white, it can always be filled with shades of grey. And yes, you can be happy and enraged at the same time, you can be intelligent and yet stupid, you can be perfect and have nothing.

Being me, in my own predicament, these are the points that I've gained from the book:

• for whatever 'normal' people's attributes that you do not possess, you are compensated with other even more meaningful attributes in your life. It's either you do not realize that, or that societal pressure become the barrier to your attributes.
• our being whatever we are ('normal', autistic, depressed, blind, with tumors, etc) is already the miracle of God's creation. We don't ever need to look too far off. 
• science, specifically medicine, should never be looked at devoid of the human experiences. It actually is more meaningful when both go hand in hand together. And it is also true for faith. 
• most time, whatever we already have on us, our bodies, our brain, our life's circumstance, it is actually enough to carry us on in this world. You don't need perfection. Duhh.
• we lack empathy. Really, really lack that. In our rush to be whatever, we forget that our circumstances are unique, and so are other people's. So it is unfair to force your dreams, your life aims, your definition of perfection and success on others.
• And it is actually OK to not be the person next to you. You are you. And you are perfect just the way you are. 
• you can be grey, and writing styles can also be that way. Dr Sacks has an uncanny ability to combine technical writing and superb story telling and coming up with a genre completely on its own. I'd love to be able to write like him. 

Medical schools should have a course on its own to study Dr Sacks's writings and maybe glean some meaning on what it is to be empathetic. Maybe then we might have more compassionate medical professionals.