Two weeks after I walked away from the emergency room with my leg stitched up from a run-in with my chainsaw, there I found myself again among the tubes, monitors, instruments, examining tables, and supplies.  But this time, the hospital was different, and the patient was different too, now not me, but my two year old daughter.  It was eight PM, my wife and I had been trying to keep her entertained for many hours while we waited to be admitted, and she had not had anything at all to eat or drink for over eight hours, an eternity for a small child, except the syringe of cherry flavored sedative that she had just greedily sucked down.  “I want some more,” she said looking up at the administering nurse.  We all chuckled, but the serious truth was that she was headed into unscheduled surgery where she would be put under with a general anesthetic and a scalpel would lance the boil by the side of her mouth that her doctors were saying was an almost undoubted symptom of a virulent staph infection going around the country.  Left undrained for even a couple of more days, they said, could lead to a spread of the virus throughout her small body, and then, potentially catastrophic problems.  Now we had spent a long day receiving, then processing, and now finally acting on this information.  A few days earlier my wife had said our daughter has a pimple on her face.  “A pimple?” I said, “But she’s two years old.  Two year olds don’t get pimples.”  Now, a day that had begun with a pimple at the fine pediatric clinic that cares for our children, had hour by hour moved, aided by the influence and phone calls of her doctor, to the surgery wing of Texas Children’s Hospital.
 
I held her in my arms and watched her eyes start to grow heavy.  She looked over at her mother.  “Mama,” she slurred, “you have two noses.”  She sounded as if she had been drinking martinis for lunch.  Mama asked her how many noses Dada had.  She looked at me, and pronounced that I had “a lot” of noses, apparently more than she could count.  When they called for her, her mother insisted on being in the operating room when they put her under.  I waited outside, and when my wife returned we both retired to a lounge area to wait.  It was supposed to be a quick procedure, but every minute was interminable, our little daughter lying unconscious beneath operating lights with support monitors tracking her vital signs.  Outside the lounge some other parents told me they were there for their son’s staph infection that had spread to his ankle bone and now required major surgery.  Another parent almost eagerly told me her daughter died ten years before of a staph infection.  Great.  Just what I wanted to hear.
 
They came to get us.  The happiest sounds I have ever heard were the sounds of my children crying when they were born.  The second happiest sound I have ever heard was the sound of my daughter crying as she emerged from the general anesthetic.  Her face was bandaged, the doctor declared that he had successfully lanced the infection, and she alternately whimpered, cried, and drank apple juice from a straw box, her first food in ten hours.  At ten pm, we took her home, and put her in her bed.  “Dada,” she said before falling asleep, “I got a boo boo.”
 
The AP reports that we are not the only parents visiting the hospital these days.  From India we learn that:
 
Lakshmi is either revered as a goddess or shunned as a freak. Born with four arms and four legs in a tiny village called Arhariya in north Bihar, the two-year-old’s life has been anything but normal.  Her deformity makes it impossible for her to stand or walk, but doctors in Bangalore will perform a 40-hour surgery that might give her a chance.  She has extra limbs because she is joined to a parasitic twin, who stopped developing in her mother’s womb.
 
Lakshmi’s parents Shambhu and Poonam named her after the four-armed goddess of wealth, and it was their love for her that stopped them from selling Lakshmi to the highest bidder.  “We took her to a hospital in Delhi after her birth but some circus owners got to hear about her. They wanted to turn her into a freak show and offered us money, but we brought her back to the village,” says Shambhu, who has a farm.
 
Too scared to take her to a hospital again, the couple hid her in the village until paediatric surgeon Sharan Patil from the Bangalore-based Sparsh Hospital heard of her and offered to operate for free. After reading about Lakshmi in the paper, Patil went to Patna looking for the girl. “Her parents were extremely motivated and were willing to go to great lengths to separate her from her parasitic twin. We decided to bring her to Bangalore and began conducting tests from October 3."
 
Over the next three weeks, Lakshmi went through a series of tests conducted by Patil and his team to prepare her for the surgery. It is scheduled at 7 am.  A team of 30 medics, including specialist surgeons from the fields of paediatrics, neurosurgery, orthopaedics, plastic and microvascular, anaesthesia and intensivist, will help Lakshmi stand on her own two feet.
 
Yesterday, Mark Landler wrote the following in the New York Times:
 
As the price of oil surges toward a symbolic milestone of $100 a barrel — hitting $96.70 yesterday — it is creating new winners and losers across the globe.  The prospect of triple-digit oil prices has redrawn the economic and political map of the world, challenging some old notions of power. Oil-rich nations are enjoying historic gains and opportunities, while major importers — including China and India, home to a third of the world’s population — confront rising economic and social costs.
 
Managing this new order is fast becoming a central problem of global politics. Countries that need oil are clawing at each other to lock up scarce supplies, and are willing to deal with any government, no matter how unsavory, to do it. In many poor nations with oil, the proceeds are being lost to corruption, depriving these countries of their best hope for development. And oil is fueling gargantuan investment funds run by foreign governments, which some in the West see as a new threat.
 
The basic calculus of expensive oil still holds: exporters enjoy a windfall and importers bear a heavier burden. But some unexpected countries are reaping benefits, as well as costs, from higher prices. For developing countries, oil can be a tool of national transformation — whether the goal is a middle-class standard of living or a utopian society.
 
In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez is pouring oil proceeds into a socialist revolution, creating free health care, free education and cheap food; enabling heavy public spending that has helped fuel four years of economic growth.
 
Oil-rich Angola is taking in two and a half times the cash it did three years ago. Hotels in the capital, Luanda, are booked months in advance, largely by foreign oil companies. Sales of luxury cars are booming, and the International Monetary Fund projects the economy will grow 24 percent this year, one of the world’s fastest rates. Yet analysts for the Catholic University of Angola’s research center say two in three Angolans live on $2 or less a day, the same ratio as in 2002, when the country’s decades-long civil war ended.  The government is eager to show that oil wealth is benefiting ordinary citizens. It has rebuilt 2,400 miles of roads, refurbished 4 airports, and laid 430 miles of new railroad track.
 
Norway, the world’s 10th-largest oil producer, wants to guarantee every child a subsidized kindergarten spot by the end of 2008.  It has increased spending on kindergarten to $3.3 billion this year, from $2.75 billion, partly using money transferred from its $350 billion State Pension Fund, once known as the Petroleum Fund. Most of the fund is earmarked to pay the future pensions of Norway’s 4.6 million people.
 
Perched on the Persian Gulf, Dubai has taken a similarly long view. Treating its oil reserves as temporary, it used the proceeds to expand pell-mell into tourism, trade, real estate and construction. The oil sector now accounts for only 5 percent of Dubai’s gross domestic product.
 
But perhaps no country has reveled in its oil wealth like Russia. Back home, Russia’s oil wealth is trickling down. Mr. Putin is using it to finance “priority national projects,” like improved health care and education, and access to affordable housing.
 
 
It may seem like the issues that the world faces are separate from each other.  But they are not.  As the Buddha understood through his own enlightenment, we – all beings, all things - are all connected.  The subject of macroeconomic investment may seem dry and beside the point, but it directly affects billions of very human stories every day.  And the very subject of investment and its major elements – opportunity costs, return, risk – provides a framework for us to help in designing our future.  At its basic level, it says to us that each step is a choice, each step will have a cost, each step will have a result.
 
Will we export our medical doctors, or will we export our soldiers?  Will we invest in our schools and hospitals, or will we invest in weapons systems?  Will we create systems that generate large amounts of waste, or will we use our resources efficiently?  Will we restore our environment, or will we continue to degrade it?  Will we inspire each other, or will we terrify each other?
 
In news just out of India, ABC News reports that "[Lakshmi] has withstood the procedure in an excellent manner," Dr. Sharan Patil, the team leader who planned the surgery for more than a month, told reporters outside the Sparsh Hospital. "This girl can now lead as good a life as anyone else."
 
It took more than 30 surgeons 27 hours to not only remove two of Lakshmi's arms and two of her legs but also to rebuild much of her body and save her organs. They say the chances of death were as high as 25 percent.  The cost of such a complex procedure would have been $625,000, far too great for Lakshmi's family to afford. The hospital's foundation paid.   "We are very grateful to all the doctors for seeing our plight and deciding to help us," Tatma's father, Shambhu, told The Associated Press. The doctors "worked relentlessly through the night to make the operation successful," Patil said, adding there had been "no setback at any stage of the surgery."
 
The Hindu newswire reports that:
 
Anxiety gave way to jubilation as Sharan, looking tired but happy, came out of the operation theatre and informed the media about the "successful completion" of the surgery.  Sharan's voice was drowned in the overwhelming applause that he and his teams received from the media for accomplishing an arduous and complex feat.  SMSs started pouring into his cell phone not just from commoners but from top Bollywood actors too, hospital sources said.  Sharan, still in medical  uniform, was hugged by media personnel and a number of people who had thronged the hospital just to get a glimpse of the doctor.
 
The Telegraph of London reports that:
 
The surgery had proved too traumatic for [the mother] Poonam who collapsed and required sedation after watching her daughter going under general anesthetic. When Dr Patil went to tell the family about the success of the operation he was met with dumbfounded silence from Lakshmi’s mother, who had not eaten for two days due to stress. Later, after being admitted to the intensive care unit, both parents tenderly touched Lakshmi, appearing scared to move too close after doctors warned of the dangers of infection. After applying antiseptic soap to their hands, they gently lifted up the covers and saw their daughter, swathed in bandages, but for the first time with two legs. After leaving the intensive care unit, Poonam slumped against the wall and shed tears of relief as her husband comforted her.
 
Back here in Houston, we got the results back from the lab the other day.  The culture turned out negative for staph infection.  At this point, they don’t really know what it was.  We’re just calling it - a pimple. 
 
I’m Leo Gold.  This is The New Capital Show.