Bad News

I can't think of a more insidious, evil than cancer.  Rarely, is it's presence not tragic and unexpected.  It creeps in during the dark of the night and steals your loved ones away.  Is it me or does it always feel like the jack-asses of this world could smoke 50 packs a day of cigarettes from the age of 2 and get away with a clean chest x-ray at 90, while those rare kind souls who the world is blessed with to a much lesser degree are taken from us in car wrecks, cancer, and all kinds of random tragic events that Edgar Allen Poe couldn't even think up.  One of my good friends in residency was just diagnosed with a rare form of breast cancer...if you spend long in medicine you'll learn that the words "rare" and "interesting" are not words that you want associated with your disease.  Yet again it couldn't have happened to a more undeserving person.  Why can't the child abusers of this world be struck by these things instead of good people, like my friend Mindy?

I haven't read the whole bible, probably not close to half and it's probably a huge hypocrisy that I'm speaking of it, but there's one book that I've read and obsessed over since I was a little kid, The book of Job. Why would God put someone through such horrible things?  In the end, I finally realized the message of the book (the message to me anyway) isn't that God has a plan (which I believe he does), the message is that God is too complex for you to understand and trying to see or figure out the plan is like an ant trying to read advanced calculus, it's too ridiculous to even attempt.  That book's message to me is to quit looking for the plan and to try and walk the road he lays down directly in front of you, that in itself is hard enough.  In a way, it's relieving to give up control and let him steer...in the back of my mind I ask myself, "Even if he steers you off a cliff?"...and somehow I'm still comforted...I guess, at the very least, I'm not driving off the cliff by myself. (which could happen easy enough if you've ever seen me drive)

Newbie Doc

Uproot

It's crazy to say that you can develop close and good friends within a years time or that you can get attached to a place in the span of 12 months, but as I was walking through my hospital being faced with a new job opportunity and simultaneously the idea of leaving this place in another year and a half, I was suddenly hit with a twinge of sadness deep in my chest.  I think that whether it's the 18 years of living at home, the four years of college, or even 1 year of residency, when you're put through the stress of personal growth your soul puts down some roots and you take up a little bit of everything around you in your heart.  It's not home to me, but to the doctor in me it's where one day I'll say I grew up.

Newbie Doc