What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
Happy September 14th! A newsletter
When I’ve slept well, I can tell: my mind flurries with all the things we could do, the places we could go, the things I could write. When I haven’t slept well, it’s all I can do to drink water, survive, and keep our daughter alive. Fortunately, this past week, we have had more of the former than the latter, eight months being a turning point for our little pterodactyl. Though it may be short-lived, I’m taking advantage of it to plow forward in writing my book chapters, getting ahead in my op-eds, and, yes, catching up on this newsletter, which is two weeks late.
These days we traverse the hallway like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, stretching our legs to avoid the creaky floorboards in the middle and gripping the doorframes with our fingertips, all to avoid waking the baby, because we have a rule- whoever wakes the baby has to rock her back to sleep. The problem is, the cats don’t care about our rules, the neighbor dog doesn’t care about our rules, and the family having a backyard birthday party two doors down doesn’t care about our rules. She’ll sleep through a thunderstorm but a door creaking will wake her.
A few years ago I realized–decided– that if we don’t keep expanding our world, then it keeps getting smaller. You may have heard me say this before. Because the tendency of things is towards shrinkage–closing–protection– and it is much harder, and takes more power, energy, and courage, to open. You must think that I am completely fearless because I say this. Quite the opposite. Our child is completely fearless, doesn’t yet know the limits of her existence, doesn’t comprehend her own mortality, hurtling head first over the side of the couch, pulling on footstools to stand up, crawling into the darkest corners to see what there is to see. No, I am entirely, and constantly, fearful. But maybe it’s a result of my conditioning, over a decade of practicing surgery, and fear, to me, is a familiar companion, an emotion that I acknowledge rides in the backseat and I may glance at her from time to time, but it doesn’t stop me from driving forward. It can’t. I point back to the days of medical school when we were in new situations with new people every few weeks, looking for lockers, bathrooms, and places to put our stuff or read for a few minutes. We could have stopped there– done nothing, ceased exploring– but we couldn’t, right? We had to learn, grow, and adapt. And eventually, it seemed, the message the universe gave me was that most new things AREN’T bad. In fact, most new things could be great. Change has brought me my wife, our child, our cats, our careers, and our adventures.
There is something to be said for the constants, of course. Family, lifelong friends, favorite places. When I met my wife, I was a dizzying tornado, a Tasmanian Devil in big black boots. She taught me to be still, to watch, to wait, to calm. It’s a great source of comfort to see, in our child, now, too, that she will take moments to sit with us and snuggle and think. These moments are rare because she is basically a teenager on the move, but the fact that she does it at all means that there’s a little of both of us in her, the result of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
My latest in Doximity about Surgery and Superstition. Those not on Doximity can read it here. Subscribe to IMMO!
If you listen to podcasts, here is my interview on KevinMD’s ‘The Podcast’ this month. Listen, share, subscribe!
I’ll keep it short this month because I have a lot of other people’s writing to share. My amazing wife is the first author of this paper in MMWR and has papers more up her sleeve.
A lot of the other stuff I’ve been reading is about parenting, and motherhood, with the occasional short fiction or humor essay here and there. Here’s an article on why it’s important to be silly with kids.
Here is one about the new parent workload, as tracked over the first year by a data scientist.
An article in The Guardian that has been haunting me for months: A funeral for fish and chips
“Are you okay?” in Time magazine
An article in The Juggernaut about Seema Patel in ‘And Just Like That’
Two articles about why women are leaving medicine
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9174775/
https://www.kumc.edu/about/news/news-archive/nejm-women.html
Fractured Lit short story “Raising Rabbits”
A review of “Dear Scarlet” in The Polyphony
Check out my Instagram/TikTok post about doing the #BluePoopChallenge!
I’ve also been reading some of my friends’ wonderful Substack newsletters!
If there’s anything you’d like me to read, share, repost, send it my way!
I’m still looking for PR/marketing help for my book, Constipation Nation. The entire manuscript is due in less than 3 months! OMG!
Until next time, always go black tie.