Dieting

I'm at it again. The scale said 68.2kg one morning last week. Which means it's dieting time again.

I try not to eat too much during the day; I allow myself a decent supper and then nothing after supper.

I was down to 66.2 this morning. Usually I take a break in my diet over the weekend but we'll see this time. I am pretty motivated to lose weight right now.

The running is good. I have found a good route for running in the dark, where I will do intervals twoce a week. The intervals will become shorter as the key races begin but right now it's 6x1400m. No injuries at all.

My job is crazy. The work hours are great compared to the US. But I am just so damn unprepared. Doing rounds isn't too bad. I know a lot of stuff they don't. Sometimes, people think it's fun to hear me talk about how I am used to doing stuff; sometimes, it gets in the way of their routines. Like today, a guy with a lung cancer that has spread into his ribs. It's the only place he hurts, so putting a topical pain patch on would make sense. Instead, he is getting so much morphine he is sleepy and confused. It turns out they don't have pain patches (like Lidoderm in the US) so it wasn't an option. Everyone uses them in the US and they seemed like they had never heard of them here. We finally found some EMLA patches, the kind you use on kids before drawing blood, but they weren't nearly big enough.

The clinic is where I flounder. People come in with all their cancers. And, being a hematology fellow, I would see only hematologic cancers. But, no, I see breast, colon and lung, too. Which is fine; I don't mind learning. But everything is so hard on me. I am not familiar with the chemo regimens; I don't know when to worry about symptoms, when to get more scans, when to take a break from the chemo.

As strange as it sounds, my life got 50% better last weekend. We bought a webcam here and I had bought one for the kids in Wisconsin. Suddenly, they were right there on the screen. It was hard not to cry a little. Just seeing them smile and move around. I hadn't spoken with Son in over a month, because he just doesn't like talking on the phone. Now, he wants to talk.

Daughter is coming in four weeks. Wow, do I look forward to it. It's what I think about before I go to sleep every night. Then I get to see both of them in March. It's strong stuff. I wonder why so much fiction is devoted to describing the love between men and women. Not that I don't get it; it's definitely strong stuff. But I can't remember ever seeing a movie about someone missing his kids or reading a poem about it.