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An attending I recently worked with is a married mother of two kids (now 18 and 20) and just could not fathom what stay-at-home moms do all day. The impending doom bliss of my growing belly has prompted many similar conversations with women at work. Whether you choose to stay at home or go to work while your little one grows up, I think there are a lot of misconceptions and misinformed stereotypes on both sides of the fence.

Organized in an alphabetized list of definitions, this book by Kristin van Ogtrop is fun and funny and easy to read. Brandon picked it off the “Mother’s Day” table at a local bookstore and it’s a good little read.

One of the main themes of this book is that there is no single path in motherhood. Every mom makes her own way as she learns from her mistakes and figures out what works for her family. I like this open, non-judgmental approach. I am probably secretly envious of women that have the luxury(?) and leisure(?)* of making their kids their full-time career.

But, as van Ogtrop says: it’ll probably be better in the long-run for me to be around less because it gives me less of a chance to screw my kids up.

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*Would stay-at-home moms really call their life “luxurious and leisurely”? Not likely. But I consider the ability to comfortably live and pay down debt with one income a luxury indeed.

A kind publisher from HarperCollins sent me a complimentary copy of Katherine Rosman’s book “If You Knew Suzy”. An article by her in the Wall Street Journal received a huge response from the medical community and he figured I might be interested in her book.

He was right.

As most readers know, my experiences with death and dying on the hospital wards has been extremely personal and personally enlightening. Interactions with specific patients have brought up questions about my future place in palliative or hospice care as well as insights to my own capabilities and limitations of compassion. I think that part of the training to become a great doctor includes lessons in awareness of the feelings of others, how to read them, and how to provide what they need.

As we learned firsthand, a kind bedside manner is not merely a quaint characteristic you hope for in a family doctor. A doctor’s attitude toward a patient and the patient’s family colors every moment of a health crisis. It can help a patient to heal, keep those of us who suffer alongside her saner and healthier, and lower costs.

And yet for all the advances in medical technology and research, simple kindness from health-care providers is all too rare. A recent survey conducted by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, which advocates for a respectful bedside manner, asked 600 people to describe their interactions with doctors. Twelve percent said they were taken care of by doctors who didn’t know their names. Twenty percent had met with doctors they found “rude or condescending.” Forty-seven percent said they had felt rushed by doctors.

~ “The Power of Compassion” by Katherine Rosman

Rosman’s mother died of lung cancer. Her book is a journey and a memoir. It’s a reporter following leads and a daughter opening doors.

I was thankful the book arrived just in time for Mother’s Day. How appropriate. I’m thankful that I haven’t yet lost my mother and this book made me appreciate the shortcomings and successes of our relationship.

It was also a good reminder that the fragile little lady in the ICU is someone’s mother, grandmother, daughter, sister, or aunt.

Brandon bought me this book as a surprise Mother’s Day gift last week. Yes, he picked it out on his very own! And he picked a gooder.

I laughed out loud. Elizabeth Gilbert said she did the same, but she probably isn’t Mennonite. And even though my mom could definitely relate more to the anecdotal stories about growing up Mennonite*, Rhoda Janzen wrote about Verenike – enough to make her my very favourite author EVAR. Her Mennonite family currently lives in California, but came to America through Ontario and Saskatchewan. Her great-aunt immigrated to Saskatoon. Probably right around the same time as my great-grandparents.

As someone who has answered the “Mennonite? Don’t they drive around in horse-drawn buggies, shun technology and wear doilies on their heads?” questions every time my family heritage comes up, I especially liked Ms. Janzen’s little history appendix at the back of the book.

Clearly the dominant American culture confuses us Mennonites with the Amish, who in fact began as an insurgent faction rebelling from the Mennonites. The Amish cut away from the Mennonites in 1693 because the rest of us were too liberal. That’s rich, no? A liberal Mennonite is an oxymoron if ever there was one.

So many Mennonite beliefs and practices are conservative that folks are perplexed by what they see as a curious dichotomy. On the one hand, the Mennonites resist change with their narrow doxy and their old-fashioned commitment to family values. On the other hand, those same Mennonites have actually identified with some leftist attitudes over the course of their near-five-hundred-year history. Because they are pro-peace, they are antiwar. Because they are nonviolent, they oppose the death penalty. Because they are anticonsumer, they promote a simple lifestyle that advocates for the environment. It’s a curious collision of opposing forces that even today results in split political filiations among American Mennonite churches. Some are Republican; others lean Democrat.

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*My siblings and I were way more mainstream. I even had a Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox in kindergarten!

“Madame Michel has the elegance of a hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary — and terribly elegant.”

At first this book scared me because I thought I was too dumbed down by science textbooks to enjoy its’ more lofty philosophical and artistic qualities.

But I’m about 2/3rds through now and I really, really like it.

My friend Kev sent me a present in the mail in February 2007, shortly after I found out I was accepted to MUA. Pauline Chen wrote about her experiences as a liver transplant surgeon and hooked me as a reader for life.

As such, I’m immensely thankful when readers (thanks, Jay!) forward me articles by her in the NY Times.

How Mindfulness Can Make for Better Doctors

Looking Beyond MCATs to Pick Future Doctors

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*note: This photo is from February 2007 and boy, do I ever miss my red chair. Oh, and I agree with the way the NY Times pluralizes MCATs!

A 10-year old could learn how to read EKG’s from Dubin.

That’s how I know this book is good.

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sidenote: I’ve never liked using “apostrophe-s” to pluralize acronyms. I realize EKGs looks funny, but EKG’s looks possessive and doesn’t make sense to me.

So, I got an email the other week from a publisher wondering if I’d like a review copy of Atul Gawande’s new book, “The Checklist Manifesto.”

I responded, “Heck yes”. I LOVE LISTS.

I am a big fan of Gawande’s other two titles, “Better” and “Complications” and was considering investing in his next book. Once it came out on something cheaper than hardcover, of course.

And then it showed up on my doorstep. Hardcover and all. I’ve burned through the chapters in a couple of days, but can tell I will go back and re-read most of it. It’s a simple but inspiring solution to succeeding at highly complex and unpredictable jobs: make a checklist so you don’t miss anything.

“We have accumulated stupendous know how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, highly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is often unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mentioned demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields — from medicine to finance, business to government.

… the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.”

Gawande is a surgeon. And nowhere is this more true than in medicine. In med school we joke that it’s like trying to take a sip of water from a firehose. There is just so much information to memorize. As physicians, you may not need to know tiny details of the glucose degredation enzyme pathway on a daily basis, but there are still a ton of details to manage with an emergency case of DKA in a patient.

Right now, as a student, I’m practicing an established set of checklists that were created by people who studied medicine before me: labs, reviews of systems, medications, allergies, etc. I ask a predetermined set of questions in a history & physical to make sure I don’t miss anything. I check the same CBC and BMP values every morning. Pre-rounds have a different set of questions for a patient with pancreatitis than frostbite. The checklists evolve according to each situation, but I still feel certain things falling through the cracks with my lack of knowledge and experience.

I’m curious to see how the book ends. And I’ll be sure to share the checklist I come up with to help organize my daily 3rd year med student tasks.

“… one could even consider it a minor defect given the chaotic syntax, the absence of full stops, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas and, most unforgivable sin of all, the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter, which, can you imagine, is even omitted from the actual signature of the letter and replaced by a lower-case d.”

~ José Saramago

Abolition of the capital letter! Unforgivable!

this photo is of the OKC skyline on our way home the other day. i kind of like how there aren’t a ton of tall buildings and condos clustered together. downtown is relatively short. maybe that’s the way it has to be in Tornado alley.

but i digress. i’m leaving for the clinic in 7 minutes and i don’t really want to go.

Doing what you love should be a good thing, right? Who hasn’t dreamed of taking their hobby and turning it into their business? But what happens when that act of joy becomes the thing you wake up to every morning—the thing you have to do? Or, even worse, the thing you dread doing?

Our hobbies are hobbies because we enjoy doing them. If ever that changes we give them up and go on to something else. But what to do when the hobby becomes a responsibility? How do you cope when your joy becomes your job? How do you stay inspired, stay creative, how do you keep up the momentum?

~ Tea & Cookies via Col

i love learning and i love medicine.

while i don’t need to stay inspired or creative to do either of those things, i understand the dread and burnout. i was falling over myself excited to PRE-READ anatomy textbooks the summer before i started MUA. i bounded out of bed at 4am, excited at all the NEW THINGS i would learn that day. sure, class was always sort of boring because i didn’t get to set the pace, but i was LEARNING. flashcards AWESOME. textbooks smell so GOOD.

and now, 5am feels earlier than it should. my gas-pedal foot drags a little as i hit the interstate each morning. i am eager to leave the clinic at the end of the day. i think about doing things that are totally ANTI-learning, like watching TV for more 30 minutes at a time.

i have been asked before if i would ever try to “go pro” in photography and make a job out of something i love to do. it’s a popular route with a few Flickr folks in our economically down-trodden depression-recession society. my answer was always a resounding “no.” to back it up, i would quote the study i read in one of my undergrad psychology classes: they rewarded kids (with stickers or whatever) for colouring and found that with the reward in place, kids actually colored less.

and now i went and turned my very favourite hobby of reading and learning into a job. i don’t want a sticker. i just want to colour for the sake of colouring.

more Tea & Cookies (because i don’t have a conclusion or answers and don’t expect one to magically appear):

I’m not entirely sure, I’m trying to figure it out. The more writing becomes my work, the more arduous it sometimes feels. I’m not sure how to retain that bit of wonder that made it so special in the first place. I don’t want it to become the thing I dread. When I first started writing about food it felt dizzying, thrilling, like falling in love. Now I’m afraid I’ve hit the seven-year itch.

So perhaps you could do me a favor, if you don’t mind. I’d love to hear about what you do that you love—be it hobby, job, or dream—and how you keep the spark alive. Whether it’s cooking, writing, a relationship, or underwater basket weaving—do you ever run out of steam with the things you love? What do you do to avoid/get over the burnout? Do you take a break or plow through? Is it better to churn out something uninspired, or wait for inspiration to strike? Have you taken a pleasure and turned it into a job? (and how did that work for you?). You can even tell me what you’d like to see on this site. I’d love to hear. These days I’m looking for inspiration.

“I cry when my goal always outweighs my greatest ability.”
~ Bonnie Richardson

i got caught up reading this story in Sport Illustrated over lunch yesterday. then i read it again.