My journey to balance family, work, and water polo.
The pace and path to mindfulness
Fast I eat. Fast. Often, I consume the food I place on my plate before I even make it to the kitchen table. It’s as if I grew up during times of famine, desperate for each and every morsel. On the rare night my family has dinner together, I am usually finishing just...
Death, Dissonance and the Doctrine of Double Effect.
This post was first published on Doximity's Op-(M)ed "First Stab" Collection on 5/2/18 under the title: Should I Heal or Comfort? Chicago, in February, was dark and cold. Even more so at 5:00 AM, when scraping ice and snow from my windshield before heading to the...
How Do You Know When Someone Is Broken?
How do you know when someone is broken? When their spirit is fractured? When their sense of self no longer aligns with what once was. When you feel as if you have woken up in a foreign land, but that sense of displacement is coming from you, not your surroundings. In...
Crater Lake and the Weight of Snow
Minutes into my early morning run, the howl of a lone coyote broke the silence in the basin. A second one responded, and then two quickly became three. Other coyotes joined in, their howling echoing all around. On previous trips to Oregon, I’d found comfort and hope...
Two Doctors, One Patient, the Chicago Cubs and a Common Goal
This piece was written together with a friend and colleague Chadi Nabhan, an oncologist and current Chief Medical Officer at Cardinal Health. This was originally published here in The Oncologist. The crowd erupts with joy, champagne bottles pop open, and everyone...
Snow Day
I woke up to a blanket of white covering the ground. Unlike in childhood, this was not met with excited anticipation. Forced to skip my morning coffee, I layered up in my thermal gear and put on my boots, the blister on my heel reminding me to buy a pair that fits...
Defending the Lob, Managing the ICU and Emotional Intelligence
The lob shot. As a goalie, it’s my nemesis. It was my major weakness in college and even more so today. Standing (or more appropriately treading) 6'3" tall, with an even longer wingspan, I have always been eager and ready to explode up and out of the water, my arms...
Hiatus
Time passed. One day became two. Weeks became months. What began as a temporary absence evolved into a void. No writing. No journaling. No attempt at an opening paragraph. On occasion, I hastily blurted a random thought or two into a voice memo on my phone. But the...
Seventeen-years-old and into the Great Wide Open..
“Into the great wide open.. Under a sky of blue” -Tom Petty In the absence of moonlight, the summer lake house had been pitch dark when we arrived. The five of us had made a spontaneous late-night decision to drive from the northern suburbs of...
A Family Reunion in Seattle and Newton’s Law of Attraction
“Doc, I don’t see why I need all these meds. Can’t I stop them? Any of them?” I hear this often from my patients. Sometimes they are right. They are on too many meds and don’t need them all. But sometimes it takes removing a medication for a period of time in order to...
My wife miscarried while I was on call. What this medical resident chose to do.
The day began the same as yesterday. As well as every day prior to that for the last few months. I was tired. Exhausted. The type of fatigue that envelops your brain in a dense fog, altering the way you see and hear the world around you. The type that impairs your...
Running into the Light
The hotel bed was warm and soft. Outside, it was cold and dark. My plan was to get up early and run. When on the road, I feel the need to start my day at dawn and put in some miles. I had prepared for cooler weather here in Southern Oregon, but not this cold, with the...