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Today was the first day of a new chapter in my career. Yesterday was the last day in the job as I’ve known it for a decade. I quit my day job to devote the bulk of my time to my writing.
This decision comes after many months of self-reflection. I’ve been asking myself questions like: What do I really want to do? What does success look like to me? These questions as opposed to: What do I feel obligated to do? Or, am I meeting academia’s definition of success?
It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here. I’ve been struggling to find time to write, even though it’s the only thing I’m really sure I want to do. But writing is hard, so I tend to forget the joy it brings when I get the words so right it brings tears to my eyes and can only remember the times when the words won’t come.
Since my last post about the primary care doctor who sent me a note telling me how to prescribe dialysis someone asked, “So what ever happened with that?”
A few weeks ago, a primary care physician colleague (white man)—who I’ve known for over a decade—sent me the note below by way of our mutual patient’s caregiver (white man) open, not in a secured envelope. In the past nearly 4 years the patient has been under my care, the colleague has not once reached out to me by email, phone, text, tweet, telegraph, or carrier pigeon regarding our patient.
He did, however, reach out to my boss (white man) and a hospital executive (white man) a few months ago when the caregiver (reminder, white man) first complained no one in the dialysis unit was listening to him (though the caregiver has never spoken to me directly about his concerns because, I just learned, he found me “intimidating”).
A couple of weeks ago, I was the attending nephrologist for our hospital consultation service when I met Mr. Jones. He had suffered a severe heart attack. His heart was stunned into stillness and couldn’t effectively pump oxygen-filled blood to his kidneys or any of his other parts for the however many minutes it took for the ambulance to get to him and start resuscitation. Once he was transferred to the hospital, the cardiologists successfully reopened the major coronary artery responsible for the attack, but his kidneys weren’t working as well as they had been before. But his kidneys were the least of his troubles. My interaction with his family reminded me of an experience in my own life from about twenty years prior.
