Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Uncategorized”
I describe myself as an unrepentant Californian. I grew up hiking along coastal foothills and spent my youth learning respect for the Pacific Ocean. I’m at my happiest sporting shorts and sandals. When I wanted to impress girls in high school, I’d wear my good flannel (that was really a thing). I love it here. When you live in Eden, …
My sense of gallows humor, honed over decades of emergency medicine, is bound to infuse my writing. I hope it will not be mistaken for making light of substance abuse or the pain it causes individuals and families. As a common final pathway for many in crisis, the ED at best serves as an inflection point and support for those …
I awoke this morning inspired to describe the interesting and unusual pharmacokinetics of a drug I have deep experience both using and abusing: the doctor salary. Absorption Doctor salaries have a delayed onset from the time of initial ingestion. 4 years of university education plus 4 years of medical school plus 3-7 years of residency creates a situation rarely encountered …
July started with a bang, and I thought I’d share it with those few of you who read the blog despite not sharing DNA with me. It was a weird “moons lined up with Jupiter” sort of situation where several of my invisible friends through blogging bestowed kindnesses that happened to occur in roughly the same one week period. For …
I Recently Overheard Someone At A Table Near Mine Order Something That Wasn’t On The Menu Docs who cut back demonstrate an aptitude for envisioning possibility where others cannot. They sacrifice income to gain time to pursue balance. They create and sustain unconventional arrangements with employers and colleagues, and find ways to package these arrangements fairly so all affected parties …
Dr. Academic To Community (ATC) is an emergency physician who was on an express track to an academic career when she and her husband started a family. Her goals evolved and she recalibrated her life accordingly. My fascinating interview with Dr. ATC proceeded in a non-linear fashion. A central theme was the struggle to balance career aspirations and intellectual passion …
Guelaguetza By sheer dumb luck, our trip coincided with the annual Guelaguetza celebration. It began in pre-colonial times as an event where representatives from far-flung villages came together in shared worship of corn and the deities that brought the harvest, and included exchanges of food and textiles as a form of reciprocity between villages. The event brings rural indigenous cultural …
I have a mea culpa: last summer was a huge experiment in family travel, and it’s only now dawned on me that I never wrote about the second installment of that adventure. Thanks to strategically cutting back my clinical load and obtaining advance approval from the scheduler in my physician group, we were able to travel for 5 weeks total, …
It was late at night when the bartender called last round. She was wearing a sophisticated little black dress, seated alone at a small table, when our eyes met across the room. Full of liquid courage, I made my way over, asked what she was drinking, and ordered two. I’d heard rumors about her before in the books I was …
I recently spent a weekend visiting my parents, and as other compulsive readers may relate to, I found myself sifting through their bookshelves in search of brain fodder. I became intrigued by the book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain The Rise And Fall Of Cultural Groups In America. The authors were Yale Law professors Amy Chua (who …