Being Anesthetized By Saifee
Featuring Saifee Rashiq
Anesthesiologist, Father, Dancer
February 3, 2014
University of Alberta Hospital
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Saifee is never sure what to say when people ask him where he’s from. His heritage is the Gujarati-speaking Muslim population of Tanzania, but he was born in England and has lived in Canada for two decades. Usually, he just says “Edmonton”, which most people find confusing. Or funny. When his children were small, they’d ask him to “talk normally” with their friends’ parents, by which they meant for him to de-Anglicize his speech. Unfortunately, despite being pretty good at most other accents, his attempts at “Educated Urban Canadian” sound more like “Billy Ray Cyrus”.
He has this to say:
Giving Miguelito’s Little Green Car a general anesthetic would be a very tough proposition because of its size. Placing tubes in its blood vessels and lungs would be very difficult and if they moved even a millimeter out of place, they’d stop working. Drugs would have to be measured out precisely in fractions of a drop, while keeping the car from losing too much body heat would be another major challenge.