Finding your writing voice

I was delighted to host a teaching session recently with 25 UC San Diego internal medicine residents, “Finding your writing voice.” I planned the hour as an interactive discussion of all types of creative writing, including fiction, narrative medicine, blogging, letters to the editor, and op-Eds. I talked about the work of Drs Abraham Verghese, Mark Vonnegut, and Paul Farmer, and ways to overcome writer’s block. I read my published essay “Health and Healing,” as well as an op-Ed draft I have been working on regarding the abolition of nuclear weapons.

The UCSD residents talked about the “imposter syndrome” they sometimes feel with their writing. They also discussed the idea of “the patient that haunts me,” a teaching conference started by Dr Joe Abdelmalek, a UCSD nephrologist. How do difficult patient interactions affect our mental health? We also talked about suicidality and how to maintain our mental health in medicine.

How can we support each other through writing and the arts and keep up our happiness? I will repeat the teaching session for another group of UCSD internal medicine in April. I’d be happy to give the talk to other groups – just contact me please.

Otherwise, things are going well in Boston. We have more snow, but that’s par for the course in Massachusetts in March. I ran a good 5K yesterday at the JP park run, 24:36. Today I am going to jog-walk the Malden 1/2 marathon, just as a training run. My plan is to take it slow, with two goals – not to get injured, and to finish the race if I can, before it is completed by the timers.

My next half-marathon after Malden is in Toledo on April 24, and I want to have as many good long runs as I can before then, to feel prepared. Today’s race is a 1/2 mile start, then five laps of a 2.5 mile course. My goal is to do each of those laps in 34 minutes, on average, which will bring me to the finish line in just under 3 hours. So my splits will be 40, 74, 108, 142, 176 minutes.

My last half-marathon was in 2017, and I ran it in about 2:05, but I was pushing hard. Since today is just a training race, I don’t plan to run hard. Here we go!

Finally- check out Dr James Hamblin’s recent piece in the New York Times about how trust in the CDC could be rebuilt. Although he didn’t really address what I consider to be the elephant in the living room (America’s wasteful, profit-driven $3 trillion health care system), it was one of the better essays I’ve read recently about why public health is failing. Single payer / Medicare for all, now!

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