1.
1. Respond to the Question: Is "auscultation" of bowel sounds
useful in assessing for abdominal trauma in the wilderness?
Why or why not?
2. List three symptoms of "mittelschmerz" (look it up if
needed) and describe why it may or may not be helpful to
distinguish these symptoms while in the wilderness.
3. Write one "insightful" Peer Review of a classmates response
to the above question or symptoms.
Rubric: 15 Possible Points
1 point for writing a yes/no response to the questions.
2 points for writing an adequate response to the Question
(includes a yes/no answer along with an explanation as to why)
3 points for writing a thorough response to the Question
(includes a yes/no answer, why, and possible treatments)
3 points for listing three correct symptoms of mittelschmerz
1 point for making a positive Peer Review response
2 points for making a positive Peer Review response with an
explanation why it was a good
3 points for making a positive Peer Review response with an
explanation why, and a suggestion of improvement or an
additional insight.
1
Out of the Cold House
Zayda Sorrell-Medina

2.
I was awakened by a loud thump in the middle of the night. The
bedroom doors fluttered
open and the light flickered on. Before me, a tall man appeared
from the back room. His shirt
was torn at the bottom and his hair was filled with lint. He held
my eldest brother, Jonathan,
eleven, mercilessly by the neck. Jonathan’s long and lanky legs
dangled in midair. His cinnamon
brown face slowly turned pulsing red. He scratched the tall
man’s face to fight him off, but the
tall man squeezed harder. Jonathan’s arms fell to his side and
his legs grew limp.
In my four-year-old mind, nothing made sense. The bustle of the
St. Louis ghetto that
normally bled into the night was nonexistent. The world around
me stopped. The piercing sound
of my eldest brother gasping for air echoed in my head. He
could not breathe, and I had stood
there, helplessly watching.
My brothers and sisters were at home that night. Crystal, three,
and Maria, two, both fast
asleep. Ricardo, five, must have been asleep in the other room.
Andres, ten, who was known for
his quick temperament, watched stiffly from the hallway, his
nose flared, and his forehead filled
with veins. He dashed into the other room and returned with a
hammer in his right hand, ready to
pounce. The tall man smirked.
My mother, who was out a lot, was at home that night. She saw
the sinister look on the
man’s face and quickly ran to Andres. “Give me the hammer,”
she said, ripping it from my

3.
brother’s hand. Her terror filled eyes shifted towards the tall
man, whose nails were still planted
deeply in Jonathan’s throat. She leaped into the air and swung
the hammer, hitting the tall man in
the temple. The man stumbled backwards, his cheeks landing
firmly against the wooden floors,
his mouth and eyes wide open, blood oozing from his head. The
world around us stopped. My
mother stood over the bloody body with the hammer in her
shaking hands. She looked over her
shoulder at Jonathan, who lay on the floor gasping for air. She
dropped the hammer and ran up to
him, crouched to her knees, and cradled him in her arms.
I also wanted to run up to Jonathan and hold him, kiss him. I
had never seen him like that
before, lying helplessly on the floor. He was strong, beating all
the boys in the neighborhood at
flipping. He stayed at home from school to watch us when my
mother was not at home. But now,
Jonathan was on the floor choking, trying to catch the sweet
breath of life.
“Come on,” my mother screamed, her voice pierced my ears and
I turned to her. “No one
comes between me and my children!” She clamped her hand
around my tiny wrists and pulled
me out of the bed. She threw Maria on one hip and Crystal on
the other. Andres helped Jonathan
2
up from the floor, and we all ran out of the house, down the
crumbling steps of the front porch,

4.
across the empty lot, past the willows, under the moon’s
beaming light.
The St. Louis ghetto was surreal. The soporific heat of the
Midwest sunk into my skin,
making my palms sweat. I closed my eyes and ran through the
night. I glanced up at the sky,
teeming with stars, and then, I turned to my mother and asked,
“Are we going to the moon?”
“Yes darling,” she said tenderly as we ran along. “We are
going to the moon.”
I was happy to be going to the moon and leaving the ghetto
behind. In my neighborhood,
the houses were dilapidated, boarded up, and crumbling. Empty
lots went on for infinity, filled
with paper wrappings, broken glass, and cigarette buds. The
streets were filled with potholes and
in the crevices of the sidewalk, weeds grew. Crime was an
everyday talk. One could commonly
find on any corner a woeful beggar, a loquacious alcoholic, or a
coquette prostitute. There were
few jobs in the St. Louis slums, if any. To survive, young boys
dropped out of high school to sell
drugs. Young women exchanged their paper food stamps for
cash. Old women sold candy from
their homes, and old men sold random items such as jewelry and
shoes on empty lots.
Inside of our home, the mattresses reeked of urine, the kitchen
was filled with roaches,
and the floors were covered with glass bottles and dirty diapers.
When it rained, the water
finagled its way into the walls of our home, dampening our
floors, clothes, and beds. I called our
home the Cold House because we were always cold. We did not

5.
have hot water so we took cold
baths, or no baths at all. We had no covers and so our bodies
were always cold. When I saw the
man choke my brother, my heart grew cold.
We did not go to the moon that night. Instead, somehow, we
ended up at my
grandparent’s house around the corner. I remembered that night
my mother was restless. She
stood by the window in the living room peeping through the
blinds. I pretended to be asleep, but
from the slit of my eyes I studied the geometry of her face. Her
copper yellow skin filled with
freckles, high cheekbones, and paper-thin lips. Her deep brown
eyes stared fiercely out the
window. This was the only memory of my mother before my
siblings and I were taken away by
the state due to my mother’s drug addiction. Some of us were
adopted, others went to foster care,
and I was sent off to live with Aunt Doris.
I wanted to say goodbye to the park: its avocado green grass my
brothers and sisters ran
through barefoot; the scented flowers at the entrance; the hot
rocks that burned our feet and made
us jump; the old women who gave out free summer lunches in
church hats with feathers, ribbons,
and flowers; the girls with their tightly fitted jeans and hoop
earrings; the children from the
neighborhood who ran frantically when we played tag; the
swings, the slides, and the tire that
hung from the tree.
I wanted to say goodbye to my neighbor Jasmin. We were
around the same age. I knew
that she was rich because every day she wore a different outfit.

6.
Moreover, her clothes were
always neatly pressed and her thick hair nicely braided. When
my toilet did not work, I used her
bathroom. Her restroom had two toilets; one for big people, and
another one for small people. I
loved the feeling of the steaming hot water, foamy bubble gum
soap, and thick towels against my
skin when I washed my hands in her bathroom. The air
conditioning blowing from the wall. The
beach wall paintings hanging above me.
One day when I used her bathroom, a brown critter crawled into
the faucet. I jerked back
and pointed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I saw something brown.”
“A roach?”
3
“You mean, you have roaches too?”
Jasmin rolled her eyes in annoyance. “Everybody got them.”
“Everybody?”
“Everybody.”
I couldn’t believe it. Rich people had roaches too.
***
I later learned that Jasmin was not rich, as she lived in the same
insulated ghetto that I
did. The only difference was that her home was well groomed.

7.
The lawn neatly trimmed and the
bed of flowers plump. Inside of her there was frosty air
conditioning. Despite these material
things, Jasmin was subject to similar environmental woes that
the ghetto brought. Street gangs,
violence, and crime.
It was nonetheless better in my young imagination to
experience this kind of poverty.
The kind of poverty that was loose, relative, and not socially
defined. One that could be
eradicated through the acquisition of wall paintings and air
conditioning, rather than generations
of intentional dismantling. It was a poverty that was marked
with a deep sense of resilience,
community, and strength. Similar to the look on my mother’s
face when she escaped the tall
man. This was the poverty that knew. However, this new kind of
poverty for which I later
discovered, penetrated identity, culture and politics. It was
relative. Social, politically, and
scientifically constructed. Pervasive. Reinforced and reproduced
through legitimate means.
It was not until some years later when I moved to the suburbs
with my new family that I
became aware of the true extent of my childhood poverty. This
spatial movement from the ghetto
to the suburbs was met with a new set of cultural values. For
instance, my suburban high school
was in what people referred to as “the good part of town,” much
different from my previous one.
For instance, for fun, students read books, played chess, and
studied Latin. They were
connoisseurs of classical music and English literature. It was
plausible that, for them the ghetto

8.
was a faraway place that existed only in the imagination. I
quickly adapted to my new existence,
neighborhood, and school. Reading books became a hobby, a
practice that was stigmatized in the
ghetto. I became vegetarian—because it was stylish—listened to
Avril Lavigne, used high
phrases such as recoil, perpetuate and per se, and wore exotic
colors such as neon white, burnt
orange, and electric indigo. This was the new me.
My understanding of poverty continued to evolve throughout
high school. Namely,
spending a grand portion of my high school years homeless,
bouncing back and forth between
families of disparate economic and cultural back grounds, had
me questioning the degree of my
poverty. Was my poverty based on my family’s income? Which
family? My birth family, or my
adopted families? How does one measure poverty? On the flip
side of the coin, moving from one
neighborhood and family to the next, also meant that my life
experiences were remarkably rich.
It was through these adventurous journeys, that resilience and
tenacity were cultivated.
Education, something that I hadn’t valued previously, became
incorporated into my value
system, thanks to the mentors and teachers who molded me. In
fact, it became a means for which
I transcended poverty.
***
The ghetto nonetheless never escapes me. It continues to appear
in my imagination just as
real as it did in reality. This place, that which is poverty
stricken, continues to bring me zeal,

9.
strength and fond memories.