I got COVID for the first time this week - three years into the pandemic and three months after I left clinical medicine. It seems ironic that despite all the time spent caring for COVID-positive patients (and my family, who all got it earlier in the pandemic), it was a regional meeting with other family physicians that finally did it. Figures. That’s the ‘rona.
Read MoreCooking has always made me anxious. It’s not that I produce horrible food when I do make a meal, I just don’t seem to have the knack of getting all the parts of the meal to be finished at the same time. One thing my career change created was a little more time for projects, and I decided that would be my opportunity to work on reducing my anxiety and improving my cooking skills.
Read MoreI had a come-apart this week. Not familiar with the term? I first heard it many years ago from the nurse who helped me grow up as a doctor. It exactly describes the feeling when you lose hold of your emotions, previously tightly pulled together by the edges and held in check, and let go of all of them, all at once. If you witnessed it happening in a small child, you might call it a meltdown.
Read MoreSo many things during this pandemic have been scary and negative: the overwhelming sense of something big and bad coming, the all present not-knowing of a new virus run amuck in the modern world, the fear for loved ones’ near and far, the anxiety of wondering if each decision made was the right one. It’s easy to get sucked into the down side of life and just stay there, wallowing in the worry.
Read MoreLife is full. For everyone. We schedule each minute of our days, from waking up in the morning to going to bed at night, and are even encouraged to ensure our hours of sleep are adequate…everything is budgeted carefully. There is very little time to “just be” in most of our lives.
Read MoreI am blessed with a fabulous boss/mentor/friend on the ACO side of my work life, and this year during my evaluation, she challenged me with some leadership stretch goals. A couple of them weren’t surprises to me; I have been working on them for a while and need to keep honing my skills. One of them struck deep, though: use empathy for points of view different than your own in framing your plan. I do that already…don’t I? The feedback presented an opportunity to up my game.
Read MoreI tell my children that they will be able to share firsthand stories with their children and grandchildren about a significant piece of history: the pandemic in their lifetime. It gives me perspective for this very interesting time in my own life and helps me slow down and appreciate all that is happening and everything I am learning. COVID19 has made a big impression: in 2020, in the world, in the US, in Kansas, in the healthcare community, in my own work, family and life. Some changes are negative (fear, economic impact, morbidity and mortality). And some are positive. Those useful changes are the ones I am working to recognize, learn from and pivot toward in the longer-term.
Read MoreI am a work in progress and frequently enjoy trying new things to better my life. My latest self-help read encouraged me to improve in small, incremental ways. The book is subtitled “tiny changes, remarkable results: an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones”. Content is easy to understand, intuitively makes sense, and holds the usual challenge of self-help books: you have to actually do the work in order to see the benefits.
Read MoreAs an early career family physician, I was blessed with three incredible mentors. From these family docs, I learned the science of medicine, and more importantly, I realized the necessity of practicing the art. I’ve been working on sharing my gratitude with those who make my life better on the regular, so I’m taking time to say thanks to those who shared so much with me and helped “grow me up” to be the family physician I am.
Read MoreI’ve “had my snorkel up” the last couple of months. My senior partner introduced me to the phrase after I started practice in Rooks County, so perhaps it is unique to our group. If you take a minute to reflect on the words, you’ll know what they mean: I was underwater and one big wave away from losing my lifeline to the surface.
Read MoreThe first time I heard that computers would revolutionize the way we take care of patients, I was all in. As a family medicine resident, I served as the champion for our newly-installed electronic health record (EHR). I volunteered for any committee, task force or board that had the words “health” and “electronic” in the name or the mission. It took more than 15 years to disillusion me, but eventually, the shortcomings of electronic health records outweighed my enthusiasm. Should computers be a tool used in and by the house of medicine? Yes! Will we achieve success by iterating on today’s EHR options? Hmm. I have my doubts.
Read MoreI like to say “yes” to new opportunities. It is fun to try out different types of work, learn new information, stretch my brain and grow my abilities. Sometimes “yes” leads down an exciting new path and sometimes it results in a dead end; either way, I always learn something about myself and frequently about the subject.
As I took on more projects (and got older!), there were various points in my life where I could no longer stretch the hours in the day to cover the volume of work to be done. Initially, I did the same thing we all do: I tried to work harder + faster + better + longer to get everything done. Eventually, I realized my life needed a reset and sorted out a way to prioritize the current things on my plate and make room for the next new thing I really wanted to do.
Read More“I am so sorry for your loss.”
Words I say not infrequently in the course of my work.
“Everyone’s timeline for grief is different.”
I must have said the phrase a hundred times over the years.
Good things to say. My head knew they were: true, helpful, kind. Now my heart knows more.
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