12.23.2004
Cherry Blossom Girl
Feels like snow. Theres a cold front roiling east across the country, from Indiana weather reports of highways frozen into solid parking lots. Here on campus theres a whiteout, steam running from the buildings and disappearing into a white sky. The air is wet, temperature has been dropping all morning, and if I weren't in Georgia, I would swear its going to snow. My flight to Boston is tomorrow AM and I think the airports going to be hell frozen over.
Since I moved to GA I've been reading in the mornings. Last year it was fiction from the library, then books borrowed from the boy, then the NY Sunday times which I stretch out through the week. Lately its been a book called by a surgeon I used to work with. Its about medical error, medical decision making, which is a little bit iconoclastic. My impression of doctors as a profession comes from sitting invisibly in rooms where they talk together about their contract with society - us and them, shibboleths and all. I was usually permitted to be a fly on the wall; overhearing them in elevators, listening to them vent behind closed doors, handling delicate issues like sexual assault in the wards, noticing their affairs with one another and when they moved into a single apartment downtown, hearing stories about how their children thought 'dad' meant 'telephone'. But the weekly conferences about medical error I was never, ever allowed to attend. They are for clinicians only and are undiscoverable by law.
Theres something strange about the book I've been reading, something unconcious that is unsettling. I was at the authors graduation from residency program, where he gave a 30 minute presentation. His farewell was neither funny nor touching, he was... unsettling. At the time he was the most famous surgeon in a hospital crowded with rich men, entrepreneurs, geniuses, superstars, pioneers. I never tire of telling his star-studded story, which probably gets grander each time: Rhode scholar, triple masters at Oxford in Econ, Philosophy and Politics, worked the first Clinton campaign, then the Clinton health care plan, published first in Slate, then in the New Yorker, then his book Complications was a finalist for the National Book Award. Shortly therafter he published a study on gross surgical errors like leaving instruments in a patients body in the NEJM which made it onto my Yahoo medical news.
Most unusually, he was taken on as an attending almost immediately after graduate to work with some of the nations leaders in public health and quality in healthcare. Anyways, he was our prize possession. At his graduation, he discussed his flirtation with leaving our hospital and going across town to Mass General, which is nothing short of betrayal. And then he spoke about his son's illness, which is his closest approximation of being a patient, I suppose.
Buried in the center of the book he veers away from surgery to talk about pain and nausea, specialties other than his own, in order to explore a non-mechanistic model of the body. Something interesting in there. My favorite essay, I think, is his description of the American Convention of Surgeons and its carnival atmosphere. It is a very strange fair. Reminds me of a cross between star trek and - oh, I don't know.
Having trouble sewing my thoughts together this AM. In the back of my mind I'm laying out all I have to do for my trip, but refusing the urge to hurry. I don't know why I hate haste, but I won't do it. I probably have left too much undone for this trip - gifts, cash on hand, clean the house, cart myself to the airport - should I bring my hairdryer, my running shoes, do I want carryon luggage or no?
Sent the boy a list of questions yesturday, which I will not be able to read a response to until Monday at the earliest. I don't think he can or will answer them, but its nessecary to let him know how volatile things are. My feelings for him are incredibly unstable. I am not the most constant of people - I am prone to doubt - and his affection for me is incomplete, it lapses and whole portions of it sink into stubborn, brave silences. I veer up and down depending on how I slice the situation, which half of my brain I'm using. Theres no uniting my experiences into a cohesive whole - the events are too inconsistent and I don't have enough information. So I've been searching for a core of something, something constant and unchanging, and well, I think I've found it. Its lodged in a teapot. The shape and heft of it, the spirit in which he gave it, indicates permance to me. I'm not sure where to go from there, but its nice to have a sense of center.
Since I moved to GA I've been reading in the mornings. Last year it was fiction from the library, then books borrowed from the boy, then the NY Sunday times which I stretch out through the week. Lately its been a book called by a surgeon I used to work with. Its about medical error, medical decision making, which is a little bit iconoclastic. My impression of doctors as a profession comes from sitting invisibly in rooms where they talk together about their contract with society - us and them, shibboleths and all. I was usually permitted to be a fly on the wall; overhearing them in elevators, listening to them vent behind closed doors, handling delicate issues like sexual assault in the wards, noticing their affairs with one another and when they moved into a single apartment downtown, hearing stories about how their children thought 'dad' meant 'telephone'. But the weekly conferences about medical error I was never, ever allowed to attend. They are for clinicians only and are undiscoverable by law.
Theres something strange about the book I've been reading, something unconcious that is unsettling. I was at the authors graduation from residency program, where he gave a 30 minute presentation. His farewell was neither funny nor touching, he was... unsettling. At the time he was the most famous surgeon in a hospital crowded with rich men, entrepreneurs, geniuses, superstars, pioneers. I never tire of telling his star-studded story, which probably gets grander each time: Rhode scholar, triple masters at Oxford in Econ, Philosophy and Politics, worked the first Clinton campaign, then the Clinton health care plan, published first in Slate, then in the New Yorker, then his book Complications was a finalist for the National Book Award. Shortly therafter he published a study on gross surgical errors like leaving instruments in a patients body in the NEJM which made it onto my Yahoo medical news.
Most unusually, he was taken on as an attending almost immediately after graduate to work with some of the nations leaders in public health and quality in healthcare. Anyways, he was our prize possession. At his graduation, he discussed his flirtation with leaving our hospital and going across town to Mass General, which is nothing short of betrayal. And then he spoke about his son's illness, which is his closest approximation of being a patient, I suppose.
Buried in the center of the book he veers away from surgery to talk about pain and nausea, specialties other than his own, in order to explore a non-mechanistic model of the body. Something interesting in there. My favorite essay, I think, is his description of the American Convention of Surgeons and its carnival atmosphere. It is a very strange fair. Reminds me of a cross between star trek and - oh, I don't know.
Having trouble sewing my thoughts together this AM. In the back of my mind I'm laying out all I have to do for my trip, but refusing the urge to hurry. I don't know why I hate haste, but I won't do it. I probably have left too much undone for this trip - gifts, cash on hand, clean the house, cart myself to the airport - should I bring my hairdryer, my running shoes, do I want carryon luggage or no?
Sent the boy a list of questions yesturday, which I will not be able to read a response to until Monday at the earliest. I don't think he can or will answer them, but its nessecary to let him know how volatile things are. My feelings for him are incredibly unstable. I am not the most constant of people - I am prone to doubt - and his affection for me is incomplete, it lapses and whole portions of it sink into stubborn, brave silences. I veer up and down depending on how I slice the situation, which half of my brain I'm using. Theres no uniting my experiences into a cohesive whole - the events are too inconsistent and I don't have enough information. So I've been searching for a core of something, something constant and unchanging, and well, I think I've found it. Its lodged in a teapot. The shape and heft of it, the spirit in which he gave it, indicates permance to me. I'm not sure where to go from there, but its nice to have a sense of center.
